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legal document, had given him many sleepless nights. No one on the Jones side of the family had ever made a successful run at marriage.
    He and Miranda called it the Jones curse.
    His grandmother had outlived her husband by more than a decade and had never—at least in her grandson’s hearing—had a good word to say about the man she’d lived with for thirty-odd years.
    It was hard to blame her, as the late and unlamented Andrew Jones had been infamous for his affection for young blondes and Jack Daniel’s Black.

    His namesake was well aware that the old man had been a bastard, clever and successful, but a bastard nonetheless.
    Andrew’s father preferred digs to home fires, and had spent most of his son’s childhood away from home, brushing ancient dirt from ancient bones. When he was in residence, he’d agreed with everything his wife said, blinked owlishly at his children as if he’d forgotten how they came to be in his line of sight, and locked himself for hours at a time in his office.
    It hadn’t been women and whiskey for Charles Jones. He’d committed his adultery and neglect with science.
    Not that the great Dr. Elizabeth Standford-Jones had given a shit, Andrew thought as he brooded over what he’d intended to be one friendly drink at Annie’s Place. She’d left the child-rearing to servants, run the household like a Nazi general, and ignored her husband as sublimely as he had ignored her.
    It always made Andrew shudder to imagine that at least twice, these cold-blooded, self-absorbed people had tangled in bed long enough to conceive a couple of children.
    When he was a boy, Andrew had often fantasized that Charles and Elizabeth had purchased him and his sister from some poor couple who’d wept copiously when they traded their children for rent money.
    When he was older, he’d enjoyed imagining that he and Miranda had been created in a lab, experiments conceived out of science rather than sex.
    But the sad fact was that there was too much Jones in him for it not to have come down naturally.
    Yeah, he thought, and lifted his glass, old Charles and Elizabeth had tangoed one night thirty-three years ago and conceived the next generation of assholes.
    But he’d tried, Andrew told himself, letting the whiskey slide down his throat in a hot caress. He’d done his best to make his marriage work, to make Elise happy, to be the kind of husband she wanted and break the Jones curse.
    And had failed all around.
    “I’ll take another, Annie.”
    “No, you won’t.”

    Andrew shifted on his stool, sighed gustily. He’d known Annie McLean most of his life, and knew how to get around her.
    In the sweet summer when they were seventeen, they’d tumbled together onto a rough blanket over rougher sand and had made love by the crashing waves of the Atlantic.
    He supposed the stumbling sex—which had turned out to be a first for both of them—had as much to do with the beer they’d consumed, the night itself, and the foolishness of youth as the licks of heat they’d sparked off each other.
    And neither of them could have known what that one night, those few hot hours by the sea, would do to both of them.
    “Come on, Annie, let me have another drink.”
    “You’ve already had two.”
    “So one more won’t hurt.”
    Annie finished drawing a beer, slid the mug gracefully down the length of the cherry wood bar toward the waiting customer. Briskly, she wiped her narrow hands on her bar apron.
    At five-six and a hundred thirty well-toned pounds, Annie McLean gave the impression of no-nonsense competence.
    A select few—including a two-timing cheat of an ex-husband—knew there was a delicate-winged blue butterfly on her butt.
    Her wheat-colored hair was worn short and spiky to frame a face more interesting than pretty. Her chin was pointed, her nose listed slightly to the left and was splattered with freckles. Her voice was pure Down East and tended to flatten vowels.
    She could, and had, tossed grown men out of her bar with her own work-roughened hands.
    Annie’s Place was hers because she’d made it hers. She’d sunk every penny of her savings from her days of cocktail waitressing into the bar—every penny her slick-talking ex hadn’t run off with—and had begged and borrowed the rest. She’d worked day and night transforming what had been little more than a cellar into a comfortable neighborhood bar.
    She ran a clean place, knew her regulars, their families, their troubles. She knew when to