Page 75 of A Favor Owed

“I played varsity volleyball all four years of high school.”

“I had a driver.”

That one makes him snort with laughter. “Wow, Pines. You were one of those girls driving around Manhattan with a chauffeur?”

I’m typing my Legal Writing memo at the dining room table while he reads for class on the sofa. I look up from my computer and smile. “No. My dad always has some of his younger…um…associates working around the house. They run errands, do grunt work like drive my mom and me places.” One of them was a kid named Paul. I always had the feeling that he wouldn’t have leered at me even if I wasn’t the boss’s daughter. He was young, maybe twenty, and he was in The Business only because he was born into it. I never got the impression he had big ambitions. Somehow, he’d gotten himself involved with one of the strip club girls. I overheard him on a call in the car once, and it sounded intense before he remembered who was in the backseat. That poor guy drove me all over three boroughs for a year, up until I took off.

“That’s some life, princess,” says Brady.

“It’s a shitty life. I’m never going back to that life.”

I’m always careful not to disclose facts that could prompt dead-end questions. I never tell him, for example, that I went to college in the Bronx, at Fordham, not Columbia. I never tell him that my father is Angelo Pini, the head of one of the most powerful crime families on the East Coast. He probably knows all of that, anyway, now that he knows my name. What he doesn’t know, what I can never tell anyone, is how I betrayed my father.

Where I’m closed off and wary, Brady is an open book about everything except his big, dark secret. I rarely think about it, it’s so implausible that he has anything on him that could top my shit. He’s my sunshine and light, my freckle-faced boy next door who talks all the time about his parents, his trouble-making younger brother, his firecracker younger sister, his buddies at the firehouse, his buddies from high school and college, his buddies at the law school, his buddies all over campus, from students to staff and even a few professors.

My social life takes off like a rocket with Brady around. He’s protective of me and my privacy, but he still has his guy friends over to watch football. If I’m up for going out on my nights off, there’s always a party or a group of friends at a bar. For the first time in my life, I feel like I belong somewhere. I’m not a pariah.

The truth is, I never want to leave—not this life, not him, not his (our?) apartment, not our relationship. But I am who I am, for better or worse, and that means I prepare for the worse rather than the better. I stay in touch with Lizette and let her know I might need a place. She tells me her insurance is covering the repairs and she might have the garage ready in a few weeks. But I don’t tell Brady, and I hope I’ll never have to move back to Lizette’s.

I’m at work on a Thursday night in late October, standing at the bar waiting for my order, when a voice close to my ear says, “Can I get a sambuca with three beans?”

I smile. “You think a place called Finnegan’s has sambuca and espresso beans? The hipster bar is around the corner, chief.” I feel warm arms wrap around my waist.

“I have it on good authority that there’s a secret stash of sambuca in this joint.”

“You look more like a Guinness guy to me,” I say, turning in his arms and looking him up and down.

“Has anyone ever told you that you look like one of those hot mutant chicks from theX-Menmovies?”

I laugh. “This goofball Irish guy from the Bronx told me that once.”

Cliff puts the last of the beers on my tray and exchanges a handshake with Brady.

“Right now I’m going to use my mutant superpowers to drop off these beers,” I say. “Where’s your table?”

He points across the bar to the booth where his study group—three pretty, single, fawning females—sit waiting for him. They wave at me.

“I’ll bring over a Guinness and three Shirley Temples,” I say as I smile and wave back.

“You are wicked, woman,” he says, giving my ass a discreet squeeze. The kiss he gives me is less discreet.

“That boylooovesyou,” says Kelsey after Brady strolls back to his table. She says it lightly, but I feel like I got whiplash through my entire body. Images and sound clips of Brady flash through my mind like old animation, faster and faster until I see the full truth of what she just said.

His smile when he catches me looking at him.

His hands unbraiding my hair.

His lips on a seek-and-destroy mission all over my body.

His expression when he saw my eyes for the first time.

This is the color they are when I dream about you.

There is nothing you can tell me about yourself that would make me run from you.

I wish you were here with me.

It’s true. Brady McDaniels loves me. I almost drop my tray when the next realization hits me.

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