Prologue: Danielle

CHEAP TRICK

Book Four in the Dawson Family Series

Copyright 2019

Emily Goodwin

Prologue

One year ago…

Danielle

Someday, I’ll stop lying to myself. When I say I’m going to get my life together, I’m going to actually do it.

Someday…just not today.

I pull PJs out of my suitcase and sit on the bed, looking around the room. It’s been over ten years since I’ve been here, and everything is exactly the same, from the pale yellow wallpaper to the faint smell of lavender that fills the house. Gathering up my PJs and toothbrush, I silently move through the hall and into the bathroom, changing and getting ready for bed.

It’s been one hell of a day, and I’m exhausted. But of course, as soon as I lie down, I’m wide the fuck awake. After tossing and turning for an hour, I get up and go into the kitchen, finding a bottle of wine in the back of the pantry. I uncork the wine and take it onto the back porch, taking solace in the quiet chorus of crickets.

The screen door slowly creaks open, startling me. “Can’t sleep?” Grandpa asks, stepping onto the porch.

I shake my head. “It’s probably the jet lag.”

Grandpa laughs. “I didn’t know you’d get jet lag traveling from Connecticut to Indiana.”

I nod. “There’s like an hour time difference. It might take me weeks to get used to this.”

Grandpa’s eyes go to the bottle of wine in my hand. “Are you sure you’re okay, kiddo?”

I force a smile, trying hard to hold up the front that I’m A-okay. It’s what I always do, but right now, I’m just tired. “Yeah, I am.” My fake smile grows wider.

Leaving’s always been an option, and it’s what I’ve done over the last few years. When Roger and I broke up, I applied to grad school two states away. When grad school got hard, I took time off to work and build my resume. And when I got let go from my job, I spent three months volunteering in Costa Rica.

And here I am in Indiana.

“Really?” Grandpa’s knee cracks as he crosses the porch, sitting on a rocking chair next to me. “Because those who are fine don’t sit alone in the dark drinking cheap wine out of a bottle.”

I let my eyes fall closed for a few seconds before taking a breath and turning to my grandpa. “I wanted to warn Diana and keep her from being disappointed later in life, but I get the blame for Peter being a Grade-A douchebag and it cost me my job…it feels like I failed. And then when I look back at my life, I see there’s been a lot of failure in there.”

“How lucky you are that you get to fail. You can only fail if you’re living, and that’s not something you should ever take for granted.”

Tears burn at the corners of my eyes, and I bring the bottle of wine to my lips, taking another drink.

“And you know what else is good about failure?” Grandpa asks. “After each failure, each fall, you get up and you try again. And you might fail again, but you get back up. Each and every time, you get back up.”

Throat tight, I nod and look out at the farmland. There’s a barn not far from the house, and two of the three horses have their heads hanging out the open Dutch doors. I’ve always considered myself more or less scrappy and have been able to climb and crawl out of some shitty situations. But once I’m standing on my own two feet again, I’m lost. “I don’t know where to go after I get back up.”

Grandpa smiles. “Let’s start with getting you a decent drink.”

“There’s a place open around here?”

“Eastwood is a small town, and every small town has at least one good bar. And I mean one. Getaway is open until three of or four AM some nights,” he says, waving me back into the house.

“Grandpa!” I exclaim, faking shock. “You stay out until three AM? I thought I was going to be the crazy partier rocking the ship here. You’re gonna have me beat.”

“I could drink you under the table, kid.” He gives me a wink. “Go change and meet me in the truck in five minutes.”

“Deal,” I say with a laugh. Normally, I’d do my hair and makeup to go to a bar, but tonight I don’t give a damn. I throw on jeans, a black top, and red heels. I cave and put on mascara and lip gloss, but I’m still ready in just about five minutes. I comb my hair with my fingers as I walk through the old farmhouse and outside, getting in the passenger side of my grandpa’s old pickup truck.

“Lucky for us, the bar isn’t far from here,” he says and pulls down the driveway.

“Isn’t everything ten minutes from anything? The town is small, right?”

“Small in the sense of population, but we have a lot of farmland.”

“Yeah. I forgot how peaceful it is out here.”

“I still don’t understand how your mother could leave all this behind,” Grandpa says ruefully. He turns on the radio right after that, flipping through stations. Only country music comes in.

The bar is crowded for a Thursday night. I feel like I’m walking through a movie set or something with all the pickup trucks parked in a gravel parking lot. Music drifts from the bar, and people sit on tailgates, talking and laughing. I hate that I love it so much.

Grandpa goes right up to the bar, and the bartender knows his name.

“Hey, Fred,” he says. “What are you doing here so late?”

“I’m taking my granddaughter out for a night on the town. She just got in from the east coast,” Grandpa tells him.

I turn around, taking it all in. This place is pretty damn neat, actually, and is filled with a lot of people my age and not the rednecks and truckers I thought would be here. I’m stereotyping, I know, and I feel bad about it.

“Ellie,” Grandpa says, and I don’t have the heart to tell him I don’t go by that anymore. “This is Logan. He owns the joint.”

“Co-owns,” someone else says, coming up behind me. I turn, and dammit, my heart skips a beat. Because this man is all sorts of gorgeous. Tall and muscular. Deep hazel eyes. The perfect amount of stubble covers his chiseled jaw. “Right?” He looks at the guy Grandpa is talking to. I take a step to the side so I can see him and do a double-take.

Because that man looks just like the hottie who’s behind me. I look back. Holy shit. They’re identical twins.

“Hey,” the one my grandpa introduced as Logan says. His eyes meet mine and I recognize something in them. A distance, maybe? A longing for the thing that will finally make his empty heart feel full? I only know because I feel the same way. It’s a strange moment, one I can’t fully explain, and one I’m blaming on the old bottle of cheap wine. But I see something in him, something that differs him from his twin, and I know from that moment on, I’ll always be able to tell the two apart. “Welcome to Eastwood. First drink’s on the house.”

“Thanks,” I tell him, feeling a bit of color rush to my cheeks. Grandpa gets two guys at the bar to give up their stools. We sit and he orders me a bourbon on the rocks. I’ve been a cheap wine drinker my whole adult life. I’m a lightweight when it comes to the hard stuff.

I sip my whiskey faster than I intended and am drunk by the time I finish my drink. Grandpa gets up to throw darts with someone he knows, and I tell him I’m going to stay at the bar, happy to just people watch.

Logan sets another bourbon on the bar top, switching it out for my empty glass. “Second one’s on the house too. You look like you’ve had a night.”

I cock an eyebrow, not sure if I should take it as an insult or not. “What gave that away? It couldn’t possibly be the fact that I came to a bar at one AM on a Thursday with my grandpa.”

Logan laughs and my God that man is gorgeous. I slide the whiskey over and take a sip, trying to look seductive but end up clipping the glass against my teeth and sloshing it down my face.

“Are you going to be in town long?” Logan asks, grabbing empty glasses from the bar.

“I don’t know,” I reply after I take another drink. Really, I have nowhere else to go. Eastwood was a last resort, and I’m tired of running from my problems. They tend to find me no matter where I go. But I have no reason to stay. Logan gets busy and I turn around, drink in hand, and notice a now hiring sign hanging in the window by the door.

I bite the inside of my cheek, mind going a million miles an hour. Before I have a chance to actually think this through, I spin back around in my barstool and set my drink down.

“Hey,” I say, getting Logan’s attention. “You’re hiring?”

He nods. “You interested?”

I smile. “Yeah. I am.”