Read Online Whisky State of Mind by Karlene Blakemore-Mowle - Free Book Online

and a stage had been added at the far end of the room. 
    Sixties memorabilia made up the décor and more potted desert plants added an authentic touch. It should not, by any stretch of the imagination work, and yet, somehow it just did. This was a really cool bar, she thought with more than a little surprise and whole lot of impressed.
    It was unbelievable. The entire place had a makeover…a major makeover. It looked like a real business premises. It looked…nothing like the Black Mustangs club house!
    Even at this late hour of the afternoon more than a third of the tables were occupied. A low murmur filled the place, intersprinkled with the clatter of cutlery and dinnerware mixed with the clink of wine glasses and laughter.
    “Looks like you’re busy,” she said, turning her gaze upon Sawyer as he stood, hands on his hips and looking just a tiny bit smug as he watched her surveying the premises. “This is a quiet afternoon. You wait until you see the lunch hour rush.” He hitched his head toward a side door, standing back to let her walk past him and down a long corridor. Doors lined the hallway they walked down, some marked as restrooms others not marked at all, until finally they came to one marked private.
    They walked inside and Sky discovered a reception desk, complete with a middle -aged receptionist wearing a bright pink dress and sporting a beehive hairdo. Sawyer greeted the woman with a nod, murmuring for her ears only a brief, ‘Don’t ask,’ before heading toward a door off to the right. It was like a damn rabbit warren, she thought shaking her head. She barely even recognized the place.
    Sawyer rapped his knuckles briefly against a closed door, until a muffled voice called out to enter and once again he stood back to allow her to pass by him.
    Sky hesitated, battling a flutter of nerves as she realized she was about to come face to face with a man she hadn’t seen in a decade. She lifted her eyes to Sawyer and realized the apprehension must have been visible in her expression when he gave her a very un-Sawyer like smile of encouragement.
    “I’ll wait out here,” he murmured.
    Straightening her shoulders, she stepped into the office and forced a confidence she was far from feeling.
    “Hello , Whisky,” her father said after a few moments of terse silence. His voice was still the same. It instantly sparked a deluge of memories and emotions and she had to blink hard to keep them all at bay. Gone was the faded bandanna he’d always worn around his forehead, holding back his hair. The hair was still longish, but was now liberally scattered with more grey than brown and had been given some kind of style cut so that at least he now looked moderately tidy. He was still as large as she remembered. A big, solid man who looked every bit as intimidating as his reputation suggested. Despite the office he now sat in—he wasn’t dressed in a suit. As he stood, very slowly, she saw he wore an old pair of jeans and a faded shirt. Apparently, there were limits to how far he was willing to go to reinvent himself.
    “It’s Sky,” she forced herself to speak past the large lump in her throat. “I go by Sky now.”
    He nodded faintly as his gaze roamed across her face. “You look so much like your mother.”
    She got that a lot. There were photos of her mother all over her grandparent s’ house. The photos of her as a toddler could have, in fact been a twin to the photos of her mother at the same age. However, the photos only went as far as seventeen. After that there were no more photos of her mother in her grandparents’ house. That was when they’d lost her. That had been when she’d ran away from home and started down the path of destruction, as her grandmother had said on more than one occasion. To them it was as though she’d died at that age, instead of five years later at twenty two.
    She’d always thought it was sad and had shown her grandparents the photo she had of her mother, taken when Sky