Page 34 of A Favor Owed

I burst out laughing as soon as the music starts. “TheDirty Dancingsoundtrack? You’re too funny, Brady.”

“Hey. Nobody puts Brady in a corner.”

“You’re ridiculous.” He’s totally cracking me up. A guy hasn’t made me laugh like this since a kid I had a deep but unrequited crush on my entire freshman year of high school. Now, here I am, relaxing in Brady’s car, laughing my ass off, my anxiety blowing out the open window as I listen to The Ronettes sing “Be My Baby.”

A little over an hour later, we’re in Cataluña Hills, a beach town that’s like Dos Torres 2.0—artsy and eclectic but more upscale and cooled off by an ocean breeze. Brady pulls up to the valet station of a beachfront hotel with a hipster-chic vibe.

“A hotel…” I muse, shooting him a quirked eyebrow. “I like the confidence, Brady.”

“Just for dinner,” he says, “so don’t get your panties in a bunch, Pines.” He puts the car in park. “Leave that to me.”

I meet his sideways smirky glance with one of my own and allow a valet to help me out of the car.

Well, here we are. On a date. A nice date, in a nice town, at a nice hotel. I can pull this off.

The hotel is built along a cliff, so we have to take an elevator down a couple of levels to the beachfront restaurant. Brady steals a glance at me and cocks an eyebrow as we crowd in with a very well-coiffed family of four who look like they produce and perform cheesy pop songs together. I almost giggle but manage not to. When they step off on the floor before ours, he pulls me against him and gives me a quick kiss on the lips.

“You look amazing,” he says, running his fingers through the chin-length strands of hair that frame my face. Then his hands are cupping my face and he’s giving me another, deeper kiss.

Electricity travels through my body like lightning. I inhale him as we kiss, throw myself against him so that he hits the wall, stifle a groan when he wraps my hair around his hand. I pull away abruptly, startled by the effect that kiss had on me.

He loosens his grip on my hair and lets me pull away, but he holds my eyes with his. Being locked in a stare with him gives me the same panicked feeling as my recurring dream. I try to remind myself that this is what I wanted: a new identity, a normal life. Normal girls have casual affairs with no strings attached. But now that it’s happening, it feels totally wrong. This isn’t real. It’s a dream, and when I wake up the dream is going to come crashing down around both of us.

The elevator stops with a slight jolt. I blink and move away from him.

“This is us, I guess,” I mumble and step out of the elevator.

Chapter Fourteen

Brady

Showtime. A date with Angela Pines. This is probably my one chance to get Lou off my back and the district attorney’s office off my dad’s. But that will only happen if I get some real information about Angela’s involvement with her family’s human trafficking business. I have one minuscule lead—the Legal Aid job she mentioned.

The restaurant is an open-air, fancy kind of place with heat lamps and plexiglass windows to shield people from the ocean spray. The hostess leads us toward the back of the restaurant, close to the beach. I notice people, especially guys, stealing glances at Angie as we walk by. She’s looking radically, mind-blowingly hot, rocking the farmer’s daughter vibe again in a tiny, flowered dress that hit her legs mid-thigh. Her hair is down, flowing around her in all of its silver and purple glory. The last time I’d seen it like that, I unbraided it with my own hands. My heart rate ticks up a little just thinking about it.

“This is beautiful,” says Angie, looking out at the ocean once we’re seated at a quiet table overlooking the narrow stretch of beach. An orange glow from the setting sun lights up her face.

“So beautiful,” I say, looking at her. She meets my eyes briefly and then glances down at the menu, probably thinking I’m a total cornball. I’ll be the first to admit I’m a big flirt, and I don’t shy away from telling girls what I’m thinking. But I never lie, and I’m not lying now. Angela Pines is every bit as gorgeous as the sunset she’s watching.

She’s also nervous. She was relaxed in the car because we were listening to music and I wasn’t committing the cardinal sin of asking her questions about herself. Now that we’re alone together at a restaurant, sitting across from each other at a small table, I can see her tensing up—tightening her arms around her body like she’s cold (she’s directly under a heat lamp), looking at anything other than me, biting her bottom lip. Yep, Angela is headed toward panic. I need her to relax.

“Hey, Ange,” I say, nudging her foot with mine.

She jumps like I gave her an electric shock. “Huh? What?”

“Easy there, princess,” I say, smiling at her. “You want a bottle of wine?”

“Oh!” She laughs nervously and wraps her arms more tightly around her body. “No, thanks. I, um, I’ll just get a glass. One glass.”

I eye her speculatively. “Okay. Whatever you want.”

Angela clearly doesn’t want loose lips tonight. I’m going to have to work harder at this whole trust thing. Too bad I’ve never had a relationship in my entire life, much to my mom’s concern and frustration. I’ll just have to wing it.

Fortunately, I do have an unparalleled ability to converse about absolutely nothing important. “The gift of gab,” one of the Sunday school nuns called it when I was a kid. “Diarrhea of the mouth,” a less-forgiving one had said. Once I get going, it’s game on. I’m not stopping for anything.

And so I proceed to talk Angie’s ear off, nursing my Guinness while she sips a Riesling. Obviously I let her get a word in every now and then, but she seems perfectly content to listen to me hold forth on school, sports, the weirdness of California, the supremacy of New York, and any other noncontroversial, non-personal, non-anxiety-inducing topic that flits across my brain.

“You want another glass?” I ask when she picks up her empty glass for the third time. We’re still eating dinner, mostly because I can’t shut up long enough to finish.

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