The Brave and the Fearless

Chapter One

Adriana

If this middle-aged man kept talking to me, I could not be held accountable for my actions. Not to be dramatic, but I was contemplating escaping this conversation by jumping into the oak barrel between us, holding the lid shut from the inside and throwing my weight against the sides until I rolled off into the sunset. I knew it was most likely an oak barrel because the gentleman—a word used generously—with the tan line of a wedding band on his finger and a cowboy hat atop his dyed-black hair was on minute seven or eight of explaining the whiskey aging process to me. Apparently, whiskey was only legally whiskey if it was aged in oak. Unless you were in Ireland. Because oak was the least porous wood. So. Utterly. Fascinating. I’d even brave rolling down the street inside the wooden barrel—which probably wasn’t even oak, because it wasn’t used for whiskey aging but as a table outside the saloon—just to get away from him.

Unfortunately, customer service was my new middle name. So I smiled and nodded.

And I pretended that I didn’t notice Mr. Sleaze-Barrel’s eyes dropping to my chest every other sentence.

This was what I got for volunteering to restock napkin holders.

Note to self: Stop volunteering for crap.

I tilted my head, and I fluttered my lashes, and I laced my voice with every drop of sweetness in my whiskey-indifferent bones. “So as a true whiskey connoisseur, would you like to order the twelve-year-old Weller or the fifteen-year-old Pappy? I believe those are our two best top-shelf bottles.”

The man spluttered in the middle of his sentence.

Yeah. Big words. Not so much a big wallet once you were asked to order a 150-dollar pour from the girl who was banking on a twenty percent tip.

He stammered incoherent syllables while his face took on the same shade of pinky orange as the evening sky behind him. I pulled the menu from behind the restocked napkins and put it down in front of him. “Why don’t you think about it for a minute? I’ll be here all night, cowboy.”

“Mm-hmm, yeah, mm-hmm.” He cleared his throat and his face disappeared behind the menu.

Thought so.

Never waste time on a man who dyed his gray hair. Or hid his wedding ring. Mostly the hair dye though. If a guy wasn’t ready to embrace his silver fox era, it was a “no” from me.

I bet his family was either inside the saloon, kids throwing sheriff-star-shaped chicken nuggets at each other, or at the Bravetown hotel a few minutes down the road, while he tried to impress a twentysomething blond with facts about literal wood.

Men were idiots.

A couple dressed like the cowboy and the porcelain doll from Toy Story tried to wave me down from the next barrel-table over, but I just told them that I’d be sending out my colleague while waving two packs of napkins through the air. I actually wanted to tell them that they were in the wrong f***ing theme park. Bravetown had nothing to do with animated movies or princesses. It was an Old West park inspired by vintage pulp Westerns. It wasn’t exactly historically accurate, but it had its own characters and its own stories. Everyone from Wild Fields, me included, knew the lore like the back of their hands. But the information was also online, and in every Bravetown flyer, and on the huge Welcome sign outside the ticket office—literally, a few steps from the saloon. Hell, there’d even been a short-running TV show based on this park. The least you could do was dress up in the correct costume.

I should get a gold star for not being rude to customers when they totally deserved it.

Terry, built like a fridge and one of the only staff members not in costume for safety reasons, held the swinging saloon door open for me, even though I could have easily pushed through. “Ten bucks on that guy getting drunk on cheap beer,” he muttered, nodding toward Mr. Sleaze-Barrel out on the patio.

“No deal. You gotta make the bet more interesting than that,” I laughed. “I could have told you that before even speaking to him.”

“It’s busy tonight. You should probably get out before anyone sees you.”

“Yep, let me just get those back to Jordan.” I waved the napkins through the air again and sidled along the wall toward the bar.

The Rattlesnake Saloon was just outside the theme park’s gates, so people from Wild Fields could come and drink, dine and dance here without having to pay for a ticket, but it was also a dinner favorite among park guests. Shaped like an oval, there was a stage at one end of the saloon, booths lined the walls, and the central dance floor was currently filled with chairs and tables and chattering families. Above us, two crescent balconies ran along the sides of the room. One of them was roped off and home to another bar, reserved for Bravetown’s staff members.

“Napkins restocked. Never say I don’t do you any favors.” I leaned over the downstairs bar to put the napkins back in their place.

“Wow. Very big favor, Adriana.” Jordan rolled her eyes at me. She was in the same uniform white blouse and ankle-length skirt combo as me, but on her square frame it looked more matronly. Or maybe it was her sour expression that gave her deep wrinkles down the corners of her mouth. “Thank you ever so much for doing your job.”

I contemplated responding to that hefty dose of sarcasm instead of swallowing it like I usually did, but the young woman studying the chalkboard above the bar had perked up and looked at me with big round eyes. Nope. There was a reason why restocking napkin holders in the downstairs area was actually not part of my job description. And that look of recognition in the girl’s eyes was it. Time to get out.

I turned on my heels without a word and booked it up the stairs to the staff section.

My bar was quiet. My bar was free from weird married men trying to impress me. My bar was filled with people who had mostly lived and worked in Wild Fields their whole lives and had known me since I was a little kid. At least any disdain coming my way from fellow staff members was payback for me being an asshole for years, and not just about something they read in a tweet or saw on TikTok years ago.

The rest of the night was fairly quiet but by the end of it, I was pretty sure that Shania Twain would be the death of me. I bit the inside of my cheek as I wiped down the bar, trying to keep my eyes on the rag in my hand and my face neutral.

I loved Shania as much as the next country girl who’d learned how to combine four chords into “You’re Still the One” before even riding a bike. Yet every weekend there were a minimum of two bachelorette parties in pink glittering cowboy hats hogging the saloon’s jukebox and screaming “Man! I feel like a woman!” at the top of their lungs at least twice a night.

It had been fun the first couple of weeks after I started working here.

Then, as I started to get annoyed with it, I tried bargaining with myself. I didn’t want to be bitter. It was amazing how that one song brought so many women together. The joy of music. Even if you had to hear drunk people butcher the same song multiple times a week. It was still great art by a great musician. All that.

But now, by the end of July, with the thick air sweltering outside, and summer tourists streaming to the theme park while I was trying to keep a low profile, even Brad Pitt belting out that song wouldn’t impress me much. I was ready to take a sledgehammer to the jukebox.

Not that I could tell anyone here that.

Most people in Wild Fields hated me enough without me destroying saloon property.

“God, this is like the third time they’ve played that song,” Lucas groaned as he climbed onto a barstool and slid his empty beer bottle across the counter.

“Fourth,” I replied and took the bottle. “What are you still doing here?”

Besides Lucas, who played Bravetown’s sheriff, Kit Holliday, only two middle-aged women from the office were still on the staff balcony, nursing their white wine in the corner. Even though the saloon was open later than the rest of Bravetown, it was only thirty minutes from closing. Lucas usually would have disappeared with a stranger hours ago. Instead, he ran his hand through his messy dark hair and grimaced toward the edge of the balcony—or the women dancing beneath.

“It’s not a bachelorette party,” Lucas grumbled.

“So?”

“No cute bridesmaids. Not even a birthday girl’s single best friend. They’re having a full-on, man-hating divorce party.”

“Good for them.” I actually meant it. I’d survive another round of Shania Twain for that. And I really, truly wasn’t that jaded that I preferred breakups over weddings. You just had to respect a woman for throwing herself a divorce party. “You’ll excuse me if I don’t feel sorry for you being unable to pull a divorcée. I think you’ll survive a weekend without getting laid.”

“Will I, Adriana? I might die. It’s unprecedented times.” He crossed his arms on the counter and dropped his head.