Page 1 of Once Bitten
Chapter One
Jordyn stareddown at the glass in her hand. The whiskey was nothing fancy, but it was getting the job done—the job being getting her tipsy enough to actually loosen up and enjoy tonight. She frowned and took another sip of her drink, the burn of it warming her throat and pushing back against the ball of anxiety she could feel pressing down on her chest.
How the hell was she going to enjoy tonight? That seemed...seemed impossible after the day from hell she’d had, but even so, she’d never been raised to be a quitter. Jordyn raised her glass, downing the last of it in a quick toss, and couldn’t help the wince on her face.
She had never been a drinker. Well, at least, not until tonight. Her fingers tightened on the empty glass in her hand. No, she never drank, swore, or wore clothes that were edgy or that made her stand out. She’d always been the good girl, the dependable one, the one that did her best to people-please.
She scowled, looked at the mirror behind the bar, and raised an eyebrow. She was in a dark leather jacket, white tank, and her hair was down from the usual ponytail she normally wore it in. She looked...different with her hair tumbling down around her shoulders. The faint flush of her cheeks and too bright-eyed look of her eyes from the alcohol was also different. Wilder. She liked it.
So what if she had been the sensible-rule-following-innocent-type all wrapped in a khaki pencil skirt and pastel cardigan? That didn’t mean she had to stay that way when she didn’t want to.
She raised her hand, signaling for a second drink, and even dared to wink at the bartender when she slid her money forward, a hefty tip tucked on top. He winked back, and she blushed, eyes darting away from him before she could stop herself.
“Baby steps,” she murmured to herself. Okay, so what if she couldn’t look a man in the eye that winked at her? She was working on it. Badasses weren’t born in a day, right? She turned away from the bar, sipped at her drink, and forced her back straight. She could do this—be a new version of herself, even if her flirting skills were abysmal right this second.
She scanned the space of the bar she was doing her best not to stick out in. It was her first time in a bar like this. She’d been in bars before, of course. But not like this one. And that was saying something because, for all of her twenty-three years, Jordyn Summers had spent each and every one of them in this town. Her hometown was small and quaint with the kind of neighbors that knew your name and waved at you when they saw you in the town square or walking to the grocery store because yes, her town was that small.
Golden, Virginia. It was a good place to live and grow, a spot that made you feel welcome, and for years it had been the only place to live in her mind. But saying all that, Golden wasn’t the kind of place that a bar like this existed. And, technically this bar wasn’t in Golden, but right outside the city limits.
The Velvet Throne had welcomed her with a toothy grin from the bouncer while a fight broke out in the parking lot behind her. A fight the bouncer had no intention of stopping. She’d hurried inside at the first punch and never looked back. Despite its name, there was nothing soft or gentle about this bar.
The Velvet Throne was rough and dirty, its clientele not the kind of people that would wave at you when you walked down the street, but might be the kind you met in a back alley. For what, she didn’t know, but she didn’t imagine it was good. Where the hell the bar got its name? She didn’t have a clue. It had to be a weird joke by the owner.
She cleared her throat and sipped at her drink, slower this time because even if she was all about living dangerously, that didn’t mean her alcohol tolerance had quite gotten the memo. Jordyn didn’t much feel like finding out if she was a happy drunk or emotional drunk just quite yet.
She bit her lip. She bet she was an emotional one.
“Baby steps,” she reminded herself. Her eyes moved over the dance floor where there was a band playing loud and fast rock and roll, stuff she didn’t normally listen to, but tonight the beat of it felt right. The thumping bass shook the floor so much she could feel the dull vibration of it through her boots. The lighting was low, dim except for the lights on the stage, and she squinted trying to make out the people in front of her, but it was hard without getting close.
Turning her head, she saw that off to the side of that was a length of bar floor devoted to four or five pool tables, all of them busy with men and women mingling, shooting pool, and drinking. She could see a few dartboards to the side of that and a red painted arrow on the wall that proclaimed the bathrooms were down the hallway she saw disappearing to the right. She really hoped she didn’t have to use the bathroom while she was here.
A man in a too-tight tee and more tattoos on his arms than Jordyn knew were possible to fit on someone’s arms squeezed in beside her and bumped her, making her drink slosh over the sides of her glass.
“Sorry,” she breathed when he turned her way with a glare. “Sorry.” She moved away from the bar and became painfully aware, for what felt like the sixtieth time that night since she cleared the doorway of the bar, that she had zero clue of what to do with her hands or feet or her anything for that matter.
When she had hatched the plan to come here, to step out of the meek and mild shell of a woman she had existed in most of her adult life, she hadn’t realized that it would be so...daunting. Though the thought that she had been living and breathing to please anyone other than herself made her take a deep breath and chance another step further away from the bar that had been serving as a sort of home base for her since she’d arrived at the bar. It was easier to drown herself in liquid courage and people watch than it was to make the tough choices of where to stand or if she wanted to join the crowd on the dance floor. She might have thought of playing a round of pool but she didn’t know how to play, so that left dancing. Dancing she could do, even as rule-following as she had always been, she had loved to dance.
But she just wasn’t interested yet. Not without the right partner to tempt her. She'd come here for a reason—a reason beyond having a drink or two in a new and slightly dangerous location outside of town. She turned, taking in the meaningful looks she was receiving from some of the men around her. Even the man that had made her spill her drink was now giving her a slow once over but that wasn’t what she had come here for. They were small fish to her, and Jordyn wasn’t interested in a single one of them.
Tonight she was after something a little different than the men giving her fake saccharine smiles. She wanted someone singular. Someone that was going to encourage the flame of change that had come to life in her that very day. The flame that hadn’t existed until the act of one man. The man that was responsible for her decision to come to The Velvet Throne in the first place.
Alex.
How she hated that man.
Just the thought of him sent a pain through her sharp enough to steal her breath and make her feel unsteady in a way the whiskey in her glass couldn’t touch. In that painful instant, she was transported back to the too-small office she had always insisted needed a mirror to make the space look larger. But Alex hadn’t cared because people didn’t come there for aesthetics, but for the accounting services he provided. Still, she’d done her best to bring touches of color and a sense of home to the office he worked out of. Not that any of it had done one thing to stop Alex from betraying her trust. Why had she ever bothered to care so much about a man that cared so little for her heart and did nothing to keep her trust?
She squeezed her eyes shut and took a stutter step towards a pillar in front of her. She leaned against it, hoping to catch her breath, but it was useless. The memories were coming faster and her little trip down memory lane was in full swing despite the raging bar all around her.
They had been engaged. Had been for nearly two years since Alex popped the question and made her feel like a fairytale princess her junior year of college. He’d planned a scavenger hunt and arranged for her friends and family to join them at the big surprise ending. When she’d found the last clue, the very spot they had gone on their first date, a nice little gazebo in the city square park that had been beyond romantic for a first date of two high school seniors on the Fourth of July, everyone had cheered while Alex had gotten down on one knee in front of her.
God that proposal was perfect. Just like she’d thought they were but that had all been a lie. In the end, it hadn’t mattered how much she’d don—and she had done everything Alex asked of her. She helped him teach Sunday school and run the youth program at the church he worked at as the youth director. She chose sensible friends and clothes, worried about what people would say, and erred on the conservative side of life though she had longed for something else—something freer.
Something real. She just hadn’t known it then.
Jordyn always had an adventurous spirit, a writer who wanted to do nothing but live out of a suitcase and spend her days putting pen to paper. She had dreamed of traveling the world but everything changed when she met Alex. It happened her senior year, he’d transferred in that year from the town over and she fell in love with his warm smile and caring eyes. He was stable and good. He made her think of the steadfast manner she admired in her parents who had always only had eyes for each other. That promise of what she might have by Alex’s side had been enough to capture her heart as a teen and somehow, Jordyn had traded her wild spirit, her dreams of writing and roaming, for the love of a single boy.
How foolish she had been then. Her fingers rubbed absently at the space where her engagement ring had been. The unadorned finger felt alien to her and she raised her hand in the dim light of the bar, lifting it close to inspect it. Gone was the gleaming diamond, solitaire with its delicate band of gold.
