Read Summer's Song: Pine Point, Book 1 for Free Online Page A

doorway. “For you.” She held out the receiver. “It’s Catfish.”
    “Hey, Cat. What’s up?”
    Damian’s best friend belched loudly into the phone. “We going out tonight?”
    “I don’t care. Sure. Where?”
    “Murphy’s?”
    Joyce Hadley flashed into Damian’s mind, pink and sky-blue and smiling with eyes that wanted much more than to coach his kid sister. We’ll be at Murphy’s tonight…
    “No. No way.”
    Cat belched again. “Well, where else?”
    “How ’bout Jimmy’s?”
    Damian nodded in the dim light. “Yeah, all right. I’ll meet you there around nine.”
    “Sounds good.”
    “I’m going out with Cat for a little while,” Damian told his mother a few minutes later.
    “Good.” Hannah smiled over the dishes she washed, though her expression seemed weary. “There’s no reason for you to sit home with us every night.”
    But I would. He didn’t need to say the words; they hung in the kitchen above them all, understood.
    “We’ll be fine,” Hannah said, and the set of her mouth confirmed her words. “Go.”
    Out of habit, Damian checked the deadbolts on the front and back doors before he left and made his mother promise not to open the door for anyone except the police. She nodded, slipping into her quiet nighttime mood, and Dinah waved goodbye from her beanbag chair by the television.
    With the day behind him and food in his stomach, Damian felt rested and more relaxed than usual. He tapped the steering wheel as the music poured from his speakers. He headed down Main Street toward the highway until he reached a side street just beyond the overpass. Cat stood outside Jimmy’s Watering Hole, waiting. A corner bar away from the center of town, the place attracted the local thirty-somethings more than the drunken college kids home on summer break. Much better than Murphy’s.
    Damian had never really been into the bar scene, though he’d done it enough when he first started college. But one too many nights of wandering home near dawn and puking into a cracked dormitory toilet bowl had turned his stomach. Now he only went out occasionally, usually to quieter bars or the ones with a good band playing. Tonight the place was more crowded than usual, though, and he wondered if even Jimmy’s had been a mistake.
    “Thanks.” He took the beer Cat bought him and shoved his way through the narrow room until he reached the back wall. Before him, a sea of faces blended together. He finished his beer in a few long swallows and propped the empty bottle on the table beside him. A collection of other bottles sat there next to a wrinkled cocktail napkin with a smeared phone number scrawled across it.
    Damian worked his hands into his pockets. He was getting too old for this sort of thing.
    The door to Jimmy’s flung open and three—no, four—women pushed their way inside. Clad in too-tight T-shirts and miniskirts, they strutted across the room and winked at the bartender. Damian’s chest tightened. The Hadley sisters—Tara, Joyce, Eva and Marie. All blonde, all beautiful. According to Cat, they’d grown up in Pine Point, two years apart in age, and never left. Damian wondered if they ever would. What the hell were they doing here?
    He glanced over his shoulder and wondered if Jimmy’s had a back exit. Nothing but bodies stuck too close together. Damn. He shrank into the wall and looked at his feet.
    “Damian!” She’d spotted him.
    His stomach did a slow flop, over and back, and he raised his chin. No use avoiding her. “Hi, Joyce.”
    The tallest and blondest of the four wound her way through the crowd, and heads turned as she passed. When she reached him, Joyce looked up through mascara-drenched lashes and shook her head with a teasing smile.
    Damian cleared his throat. “Thought you were going to Murphy’s.”
    Joyce moved closer and bumped him with one hip. “Changed our minds. Besides, I thought you might show up here.” She tucked a strand of hair behind one pierced ear.