Original Sin Read online

  “Spend the money on something that makes you happy, Annalise.”

  School loans, rent, the broken taillight on the Steaming Turd—none of that stuff made her happy but they could all use a little money thrown their way. “I can’t.”

  He lifted her hand and pressed the folded bill into her palm. “The money’s yours, ainsicht. I gave it to you.”

  She blinked, her gaze lowering to where he held her hand. “Okay.”

  “Put it in your pocket.”

  Her brow tightened as she moved to tuck the hundred dollars away. It disappeared within the fold of her apron.

  “Good girl.”

  Her body was yoga class relaxed as if she’d just chased a one-hour massage with a bottle of muscle relaxers. She smelled fresh-cut grass and could almost feel the sunshine pressing into her skin, but she was inside a smoky bar and it was nighttime outside.

  “I would enjoy a beverage.”

  “Hmm?” Her lashes lowered and she smiled. That voice.

  His soft chuckle made her want to do the same. “Are you finished work?”

  “Work?” She frowned and shook her head. Jesus. Work. She jerked her gaze to the floor. What the hell was she doing? Did someone slip something in her drink? “Um, yeah. I’ll, uh, be right back with a beer.”

  “Take your time.”

  Spinning away from his table, the music of the jukebox mingling with the chatter of the crowd reintroduced itself to her ears with a deafening awareness that seemed to blot out whatever just happened.

  Her mind fell into simple, achievable objectives. Get beer. Check on other customers. Serve drinks. Announce when the kitchen is closing. Wait until last call. Housekeeping. Home. She didn’t want to think beyond those simple tasks, because she was afraid of what she might find in her thoughts. Specifically, the idea that it might be okay to go home with a total stranger.

  That’s never true, by the way.

  Chapter Thirteen

  After the dinner rush passed, Annalise tidied the waitress station. Sarah, the weekend backup, arrived just in time for the lull.

  “Hey, Anna. Who’s the hot guy at table one?”

  Sarah was a friend, a nice girl, and a few years older than Anna. She was also a hell of a lot more experienced. “He’s no one. Just a customer.” A sharp, territorial pang knifed through her and she frowned, unsure where such unwarranted possessiveness stemmed from. That guy was just another customer.

  “Oh, well, if you want, I can go check on him.”

  CCR’s Have You Ever Seen the Rain pumped from the jukebox. Annalise’s gaze locked on the Heinz 57 label of the ketchup bottle as she slowly wiped it down. “Sure.” Her jaw locked as she grabbed the next bottle.

  Last year Sarah took a few weeks off and came back with new boobs. She was the sort of girl who chose vanity over practicality. Her hair always flowed in perfect waves and her nails were the fake kind they put on at salons. The men loved her.

  “Great.” She giggled and grabbed her tray.

  Annalise watched through the mirrored Michelob sign on the wall across from her as Sarah approached Adam’s table. Not like she had any claim to him. He wouldn’t care who brought him beer. He’d probably like Sarah more anyway.

  Annalise’s focus returned to cleaning off the ketchup bottles and refilling the empties. The song changed as she tightened the lid of the last bottle, and she stilled.

  Shivers ran over her skin leaving a tingle of recognition in their wake. The Beatles’ In My Life played from The Red Album. It was her favorite song. A smile crested her lips and her gaze lifted.

  Adam stood between her and the jukebox. It was the first time she got a good look at him outside of the booth. Tall, broad, and, God help her, gorgeous. Where was Sarah?

  She gave up her mirror watch and turned to see him better. The second her gaze collided with his, the side of his mouth hooked into a half grin.

  This man was not Amish. Today he wore plain, possibly Amish clothing, but that was it. Where was his bowl cut and beard? Okay, he had a little scruff on the jaw, but that was more along the lines of don’t I look sexy in the morning, than ye shall not covet thy neighbor’s horse and buggy and other biblical phrases.

  And now he was walking toward her. Shit! She tried to look busy, but her gaze returned to him as if under some sort of spell. He was just so ... masculine. It was as if his raw magnetism sucked her into some sort of primal vortex. Looking him in the eye felt like one of the dirtiest things she’d ever done with her body. And she wanted more.

  Guitar notes threaded through the air and time stood still. He moved closer, his languid strides gliding over the distance with fluid ease as her mind and body quivered into some delicate, feminine mush.

  Everyone disappeared. Her peripheral vision funneled until she was alone with the most beautiful man alive.

  His unique scent filled her lungs, and a shock of electricity jogged through her veins. Nerve endings laced tight at her spine, and she straightened, everything inside of her drawn to his scent. It was ... familiar.

  A twinge of hesitation settled into her bones. The strangeness of the moment tried to register, but her instincts wanted no part of logic. She only wanted to ... what?

  Her brow pinched. She was on her feet, unsure when she stood. What did she want to do?

  Dear God, she wanted to rub up against him, drag her face along his jaw, lick every inch of his flesh. There was no precedent for this behavior, and she was embarrassed for even wanting such things.

  She tried to look away, but a frisson of familiarity grabbed hold and she stilled. This song. This moment. This strange but beautiful man...

  This wasn’t new.

  They’d been here before. Details were so familiar she could taste the air of a different place and time on her lips. Visions of lazing in the sun skipped through her mind. Laughing and lounging. Touching. She remembered the weight of his hair threading through her fingertips and the scent of his skin.

  She remembered singing to him. But how? She’d just met him. Was this another dream?

  Her lungs worked to keep up with her hammering heart. The longer she stared and the closer he came the more certain she was. She knew him from her dreams.

  Freaked out, she wanted to turn and run, but he was there—right in front of her, so she whimpered. He wasn’t just some weird guy who overtipped. He was literally the man she’d been fantasizing about for weeks.

  “Your heart’s racing,” he said, voice as smooth as Kit Harington’s.

  “Why do I know you?”

  He gave the slightest smile as if her confusion pleased him. “Would you like to dance?” His hand reached for hers and she didn’t flinch away.

  What was wrong with her? What happened to stranger danger? What was this primitive side of her that insisted he would be a good provider, and she should immediately take his seed into her womb to make lots and lots of babies with him?

  She frowned as he lifted her hand, drawing her body closer to his. Flawless fingers, untouched by labor. Not the hands of a farmer.

  “Who are you?” Her stomach bottomed out in a rush as her breasts brushed the hard wall of his chest.

  “I’m Adam.”

  The lyric, there are places I remember... It lingered in the air as she looked up at him. In that moment, he held her to the earth more than gravity.

  Instinct told her she could trust him, but logic argued this was how women disappeared. Good or bad, her gut warned he’d change everything—and if she didn’t start thinking with her head nothing was going to stop him.

  Jimbo’s wasn’t a bar for dancing, but when he led her in a slow glide, she felt more anchored than ever before. Her gaze was sewn to his as his fingers laced with hers, palm warm and a perfect fit.

  There is no one who compares with you... The simple lyric seemed written just for them. As he pulled her close, he seemed to latch onto her soul.

  “The Red Album,” he said, turning her with the beat. “You like it.”

&
nbsp; It wasn’t a question. Her head tilted back to fully see him, as he was at least a foot taller. “It’s my favorite.”

  His lips curved as if he were pleased with himself. He looked over her shoulder, pulling her hand closer as they turned. His other hand drifted over her hip and glided to the base of her spine as if he’d held her there a thousand times.

  A hint of possession seeped from his touch. A man had never held her so intimately before, with such... authority. He held her as if he had every right to.

  Her existence and focus belonged to him in that moment. A spell she couldn’t break and didn’t want to. Every worry and weight on her shoulders slipped away. There was no darkness, no fear, no emptiness, and no gravity, only Adam.

  His heart beat in synch with hers. A million questions raced through her head, but she seemed only capable of asking the most inconsequential ones. “Why did you pick this song?”

  His voice rumbled from his chest. “You told me about it.”

  Her brow furrowed despite her scattered memories of recent dreams. “When?”

  “When we met.”

  She drew back and looked him in the eye. This wasn’t real. This was a joke. So what if she dreamt of him? Dreams were personal, private, between a person and their conscience—sometimes not even that.

  The idea that they somehow knew each other from some dream sharing mumbo jumbo was just too bizarre. She pulled her hand out of his and finally found the nerve to take a step back. “I just met you yesterday.”

  His head shook. “You’ve known me longer than a day, Annalise. We met when the sky touched the earth, and stars were born. You were the air I breathed. And I was the first sound you heard. We were pulled apart to come to this moment in time, but it has always been our destiny to find each other again.”

  Wonderful. The first guy to give her butterflies and he was a hippy-talking-lunatic. “Right. Well, I gotta get back to work—”

  “I know you remember meeting me.”

  She paused, only because she sort of did. But that wasn’t real. “Do you?”

  “Do I what?”

  “Remember meeting me somewhere else?”

  “Yes.” He nodded with absolute certainty.

  She propped a fist on her hip. “Where?”

  “When night was day and day was night.”

  Her skeptical poise faltered to shock. It was her dream. Her lips parted. “In a field...”

  He gave another nod. “We were there, and you sang this song—”

  He reached for her and she took another step back. The song ended and she sensed others staring. “What is this? Who are you? How do you know about that?”

  “I told you. I’m Adam. And I know, because I was there with you.”

  They stood in the center of Jimbo’s and people gawked at her. The sense of rightness disappeared as confusion and burning humiliation cleaved into her. She was making an ass of herself.

  The bar seemed abnormally quiet. The click-clack of balls traveling over the felt of the pool table and sinking into places, the sound of the restroom door swishing open, and the sizzle of the grill in the back. But no one talked.

  The disorienting sense of tears spiked behind her eyes left her blinking at Kyle. He frowned from behind the bar, his eyes asking what the hell she was doing and hers answering back with a dumb I don’t know.

  Gus and Bruce stared as well. They were all looking at her. Her and Adam. Oh God. Was this the psychological break she’d been dreading? She could almost hear reality breaking away from fantasy like the plates of the earth shifting. The fallout was coming—

  “Excuse me.” She turned and kept her head down as she rushed through the bar to the back and closed herself in the restroom.

  Her breathing kept tempo with her racing heart as she replayed the last two minutes. Two minutes that felt like a thousand years.

  She went to the mirror. Her face looked pale. She’d been off all day. Wetting her hands, she blotted her face and shut off the faucet. She focused on the steady, calming drip, drip, drip of tap leaking.

  Nothing made sense yet something did make sense. His comment only freaked her out because it sounded ... true. She knew the field, remembered dreaming that moment.

  “Annalise?” A knock sounded at the door.

  Kyle. How would she explain her crazy behavior to him? “Be right out.”

  She had some sort of thing going with Kyle yet, she just had eye sex with an Amish customer in front of everyone, on the dance floor that wasn’t a dance floor, at Jimbo’s. “Oh God...”

  “What?”

  “Nothing!” She covered her mouth. “I’ll be out in a minute.”

  “I’m coming in.”

  “You don’t—” Her words cut off as he pushed through the main door and frowned. “I was just coming out.”

  “What was that about?” He appeared angry, not at all concerned that she was approaching a psychotic break.

  “I ... I don’t know. I just heard the song and the next thing I knew I was dancing with him.”

  “Do you guys know each other?”

  Only from my dreams. “No. He’s a customer. I waited on him yesterday.”

  Deep creases remained in his brow as he studied her face. “Are you sure?”

  “Yes.”

  “Then why are you dancing with him?”

  “I...” Her heart dipped in her chest as she recalled how right his hands felt in hers. A whoosh of tickles teased her insides and her skin heated. She told herself it was shame, but it was the exact opposite of shame. “I don’t know. I need to go home. I don’t feel right.”

  “Are you drunk?”

  “No, I’m not drunk!” It was illegal to drink on the job.

  “Sick?” He stepped closer, pressing the backs of his fingers to her brow to test her temperature. His nose twitched.

  “Do I have a fever?” Maybe she should go to the ER. Too many weird things were going on with her. It might be a severe case of dehydration or maybe a spider did bite her.

  He cleared his throat and stepped back, closer to the wall than he’d been before. “Did you reapply perfume?”

  She frowned. “I told you, I don’t wear perfume.”

  He gave her a disbelieving look. “That smell...”

  She threw up her hands. That’s it! “I’m leaving.”

  “Wait.” He grabbed her arm and quickly released her, covering his mouth and nose. “Oh, wow. It’s making my eyes water.”

  “Well, that’s just great! I’m leaving. Sarah can handle the rest of the tables for the night.” She pushed past him and made a beeline to her purse.

  “Hey, Anna, can I get another beer?”

  “Talk to Sarah. I’m off the clock.” Head down, she cut through the kitchen, mumbled a quick goodbye to Karen, and shoved through the back door.

  Were she and Kyle over? They were just starting. But after the spectacle she had put on and her new eau de dumpster perfume...

  She dug out her keys and unlocked the Steaming Turd. She didn’t bother to lower the windows as she jammed the key into the ignition—click, click, click, click.

  “Oh, come on.” She tried again only to get the same lifeless click.

  Rage boiled up inside of her and she silently counted to ten. She turned the key again and—click, click, click.

  “Motherfucker! Cock sucking, shit bag, piece of crap car!” Her palms beat at the steering wheel as she battered the sweltering air with a slew of profanities.

  Sweating, she brushed the hair away from her eyes and panted. She could call an Uber. And there was always the bus. Or she could just shut her eyes and suffocate in the heat. Maybe that’s what the universe wanted. After all, it seemed like some cosmic power was hell bent on fucking up her life lately.

  God, she was exhausted. And thirsty. And crying didn’t seem like such a horrible solution at the moment.

  Dropping her head back, she shut her eyes and blew out a hot breath. Gah, I can’t breathe. Her fingers blindly felt around
and lowered the window.

  “Is there something wrong with your vehicle?”

  “Jesus fucking Christ!” She jumped high enough her head hit the ceiling. “How long have you been standing there?”

  Adam cocked his head to the side. “You’re upset.”

  She couldn’t deal with any more weirdness. Grabbing her bag and keys, she got out of the car. “Thank you, Captain Obvious.”

  “Who is Captain Obvious?”

  “I know. You’re Adam. Just Adam. Amish Adam who shows up out of nowhere and acts like he knows me but couldn’t possibly know me.” She marched in the general direction of the bus stop. “And I—because of sleep deprivation and what’s probably some radioactive spider bite—let you derail my relationship, with a man who actually might want to date me, in two minutes flat. Oh, and I smell like shit.”

  He fell into step beside her. “You shouldn’t swear. And I like the way you smell.”

  She jerked to a stop and faced him. “Look, I don’t know who you are, Adam, or what Amish farm you came from, but you need to find someone else to follow. I’m having a really bad week and dancing with you in the middle of my place of work is the topper on a list of behaviors that aren’t in my usual wheelhouse. And now my car’s dead—possibly forever. I’m sorry if my cursing offends you, but I’m about to fucking lose my mind. So you can either suck it up or get back on your fucking buggy and leave me the hell alone!”

  “The car is unfixable?”

  Out of all that, the only thing he took away was the state of her car? “Yes, Adam, the car’s probably shot.”

  “Shot?”

  “Dead.”

  “You hold great affection for the car? How does a non-living thing die?”

  Was this a joke? Did the guys set this up? Someone had to be messing with her. “Are you kidding me? What are you doing here? Why are you following me?”

  “I wanted to speak to you.”

  “About what? Did someone send you here?” Who would do that? She didn’t know any—

  Her breath hitched. “Did my father...”

  He frowned. “I’m not associated with your family.”

  Right. She was really reaching. Her jaw trembled because she didn’t like feeling this out of sorts. “I have to go.”