6.
Anders sent over the restaurant and time without being asked, so I didn’t have to wonder if my linen pants and sleeveless top were appropriate attire for the dimly lit bistro stuffed between high-rise buildings downtown.
He sits at a table in a far corner, overlooking the other diners clinking glasses and laughing while a slightly too loud indie-folk playlist surrounds us.
I walk over and plant myself in front of him with a polite smile.
“Anders.”
“Lucinda,” he greets warmly, and heat spreads at the tips of my ears.
“You can call me Lucy,” I offer as I hang my tote on the chair.
“I like Lucinda.”
I tilt my head and gaze at him. His hair is perfectly tousled, his light- brown button-up somehow makes the flecks of gold in his eyes glow a little brighter at the center of their pools of green, and he’s missing the slight five o’clock shadow that was present when we first met.
When I don’t say anything, he adds, “You look beautiful. Your hair is nice too. Different.”
“Ah.” I twirl one of the bouncy curls reflectively. I didn’t have enough time after my shower to straighten it. “I usually wear it flat.”
“Both styles look good on you.”
Wow. Three compliments back-to-back in the span of thirty seconds. Is he making good on his future endeavor promise? Or is he sweet-talking me into whatever favor he needs? I have no idea what I could possibly do for him.
The waitress arrives for our drink order, and Anders asks for a flight of their best wines for us to try.
“Okay,” I say when she leaves, “I am so incredibly confused by you reaching out that I’m not sure what I’m supposed to say right now. If you can get straight to the point so I don’t have to keep scrambling to try and figure that out, I’d appreciate it.”
His dimples appear. When he opens his mouth, I hold up my finger.
“Actually, if this is going to be a stressful and/or confrontational conversation, do I still get dinner out of this? I’m starving.”
His small smile becomes a full-blown one. “I guarantee you can have dinner, no matter where the conversation leads. Dessert included.”
“Phenomenal.”
The waitress leaves two flights of mini wineglasses and asks for our order. Anders asks for a steak and then points to the menu laid out in front of me. “The vegan burger is supposedly very good.”
My eyebrows quirk. “Did I tell you I was vegetarian?”
“Do you not remember?”
I sigh and order the burger. When the waitress leaves, I grab one of the glasses and down the dry wine like a shot. “I don’t remember much of that night,” I confess, grabbing the next glass over. “I’m not sure of everything I rambled about to you. I only remember the beginning of the evening, not the end.”
“I see. Well, you didn’t say or do anything embarrassing, if that helps.”
I snort. “Sweet of you to lie, but I know myself, and that is absolutely
what happened.”
“Not to me.”
I narrow my eyes at his sincere expression and bring the glass to my lips. His gaze briefly flickers to where my mouth presses against the glass before reaching my eyes again, and my cheeks flush.
“Did we sleep together?” I blurt out. I’m sure we didn’t. I’m sure I would remember that—my body would, anyway—but I need confirmation.
Just in case. To be sure. “I woke up with a shirt that wasn’t mine.”
“I walked you to your room, and we ended the night.” He tilts his head in debate about whether to add the next part. Then, “You said you wanted it because I smelled nice, so I gave it to you before leaving.”
The way he frames it lets me know he’s politely omitting a more dramatic scene, one where I said something a lot more sexual, or, worse, yanked it off him before he gently turned me down.
He doesn’t sound like he’s lying about nothing happening, but drunk me is a little more adventurous—and shameless—than sober me. “Be honest, did I make a move on you?”
“If you did, it would have been more than welcome.”
Which is a polite way of saying yes. I groan and rub my hand over my face, freezing when I remember I layered on mascara. I already acted insane around him; I don’t need to look the part too.
“Why are you sitting here with me and not running away? You have at least five reasons to.”
“I don’t want to.” He grabs a napkin. He then reaches over and cups my cheek in one hand, wiping the cloth over my skin with the other. I blink as he pulls away, spotting the black mascara staining the cloth as he places it on the table and continues, “And I need a favor.”
I frown at him. “I bet you get yourself into constant misunderstandings.”
His brows bunch together, pulling down a scar at the side of his right eyebrow. “What do you mean?”
I gesture to the napkin. “You’re very affectionate,” I point out, but affectionate doesn’t seem like the right word. Charming, maybe, but it doesn’t encompass what I mean to say, either. “I can tell you don’t mean to be, that you’re just doing things in the moment, but it only makes you more endearing. You probably think you pass as friendly, but other people might believe you’re looking for more than that.”
His gaze latches onto me. I can’t quite read the emotion in it. It’s a little darker than the easy warmth that seems to fill it most of the time. “I know exactly what I’m doing.”
I’m not entirely sure what he means by that, but for some reason, tiny circles of heat sear through my skin as he looks at me. I shift in my seat and take a fortifying sip of wine. “Anyway, what favor could I possibly do for you?”
“When you wrecked my friend’s wedding,” he begins casually, as if we’re talking about the weather, “I tried to find you but you left pretty soon after.”
I want to shrink inside myself for a moment, to become so small he forgets I ever walked into the restaurant, but his words don’t have any judgment in them. It’s enough to let me push aside the pulse of embarrassment vibrating under my skin and actually listen to his words.
“For a blissful moment,” I say, “I forgot I told you what I do.”
“Nothing wrong with trying to make a living.”
I hold up a hand. My pitch is a little too high not to hint at some mortification. “This is not to make a living but for a living. It’s not my life’s goal or anything. I stumbled into it, and one day, I’ll stumble out of it.”
Hopefully.
“Right, because you want to buy Save a Paw.”
What didn’t I tell him?
The bar is so low for men that Anders remembering this one detail sends a fluttering to the pit of my stomach. “Yeah, among other things.”
“I’d like to hire you.”
My hand stills on the glass pressed against my lips. Nothing about this conversation is going in any direction I predicted it to. “You’re engaged?”
Being hung up on his first love marrying his best friend didn’t make it seem so.
“No, I’m not. It’d be for my sister’s wedding.”
My eyes widen. “Your sister?”
“You think less of me for it?”
“No.” I cross my arms against my chest. “It’s just, you didn’t seem the meddling type. You sat back and didn’t object to your first love and best friend getting married, but you’re inserting yourself into your sister’s relationship?”
He flinches, and guilt slices into me. I quickly add, “I’m sorry. That came out harsh. I’m just trying to better understand.” And, since the floor is open. “Did they set a new date? Your friend and ex?”
“It’s okay,” he says, sitting back, but there’s still a bit of tension in his shoulders. “They got married the next day. They’d reserved one of the halls for another night of celebration, so it didn’t stop them. Only made for some interesting speeches from the guests.”
Knowing I starred in those speeches isn’t too embarrassing. Aside from Anders, none of them know me, and it doesn’t seem like Anders told them anything. One day I’ll just be some deranged, faceless woman they tell stories about.
I down the final wineglass. “This is unexpected.”
The waitress comes over and drops our plates, pausing our conversation a moment before I ask her for another flight of wine, which earns me a chuckle from Anders.
“I’ll let you eat before I overwhelm you with information,” he says as I stare at the plate of burger and truffle fries.
“I can multitask.” I pop a salty fry in my mouth. “But before you waste your time—no offense, really—you should know that I am very
expensive.”
He raises a brow. “And?”
I shuffle through the hazy and blacked-out files in my brain and pull out the folder of our first hour together when we participated in the official Get to Know You Handbook of asking: What do you do? Where are you from? Do you have siblings? Do you think the moon landing was fake?
Want to get so drunk we forget our names? “You’re a graphic designer, aren’t you? I’m sure you make a decent living, but my clientele is usually the annoyingly rich who couldn’t tell you the price of milk if you asked.”
He looks at the ceiling and chews on his bottom lip like he is shuffling through our night’s files together. When he finds what he’s looking for, Anders brings his gaze back down and catches me staring at his bottom lip.
“You need twenty thousand to buy your share of the shelter. I can pay you
that.”
My eyes widen. “Excuse me?”
“Do you want more? Tell me a price.”
I drop my next fry onto the plate and hold up my hands. “Wait, wait, wait. You’re telling me you have twenty thousand dollars to spare? Are you a thief in the night? What exactly is it that you do?” I’ll have Taina vet his funds first thing, though he doesn’t seem like a liar.
“I’m not sure if I should take your shock about my wealth as an insult or not.” He leans back. “You must have been more drunk that I thought, seeing as we had this conversation before. But I own a share of Lightshop
—”
“The search engine?”
“Yes.” He nods, casually, like having stock in the second most used search engine in America behind good old Google is no big deal. “Through pure luck of knowing Lucas, meeting him in college. His family created it.
He gave me a share one Christmas, before it became as big as it did.”
“That explains affording a stay at the most expensive venue on the planet,” I say, mostly to myself in awe.
“That makes me more than enough, but I still do design on the side— mostly book covers.”
“A joy to be able to work for fun and not for survival.” I blow out a breath. “I didn’t mean that bitterly,” I get out quickly. “I mean, not at you, specifically. Just in general. I am bitter. But bitter toward, say, the universe itself. Does that make sense? I’m rambling, let’s move on.”
His chuckle is low and light as it reaches me. “So, will you consider my offer?”
“I have to,” I say. Maybe I should be embarrassed about how easily I agree, but the truth is I need the money desperately. That, and ever since I failed at wrecking Eliza’s wedding, I’ve had this wedge of guilt lodged in my throat. I know exactly the heartache she’s inevitably going to suffer through. This could be a chance to redeem myself and clear my conscience of the failure.
“Okay.” I take a glass from his wine flight. “Tell me your reason.”
“Long story short, she and her fiancé will never work out.”
“And short story long?”
He chuckles, then sighs. “There’s so much wrong with the pairing. My sister is just twenty-three, way too young to get married. She’s only just legally been allowed to drink. Now she’s choosing who she wants to be with forever?”
He shakes his head. “My sister is flighty. I love her, but she’s never fully grounded. She loves someone, something, for batches of time, and then moves on to new things, to new people. They’ve only been engaged for a few weeks and wanted to have a shotgun wedding, but my aunt threatened to disown her if she didn’t plan an event the family could celebrate, so now we have some time. This is her fourth engagement, but it’s the only one that’s made it to actual wedding-planning stage, and I need it to end there.”
I cock my head. “Do you think it’s possible this wedding is developing further because they are a better pairing than her past lovers?”
I muffle my laugh when the word lovers makes him shudder. “No, not at all. I know the guy, John. I used to be his roommate in college, and we were really close. He’s quiet, nerdy, introverted. He never knew how to stand up for himself and was constantly taken advantage of by anyone who asked him for things. He was constantly broke, and if he did manage to save anything from his part-time jobs, he’d get scammed out of it all over again.”
I feel my brows pull together. “Your best friend married your first love, and your sister is going to marry your college roommate.” I blow out a whistle. “That seems difficult.”
He rubs the back of his neck. “You’re not wrong. And maybe that’s part of it; maybe I’m scared that if this doesn’t work out, I’ll lose another friend. I don’t have too many to spare.”
“It almost sounds like you want to ruin the wedding for him.”
“It’s for both of them, really. My sister will break his heart, and he won’t recover. But that doesn’t matter if she’s the one doing the breaking.
Whenever my sister dumps someone, she falls into this deep depression.
She’s devastated that she didn’t find the one. She spends months in the dark; she doesn’t eat or sleep. When you meet her, she seems so bright, and she is, but when she isn’t, it’s dark. If she makes it to marriage and has to get divorced instead of a simple breakup, I don’t think she’ll recover. No matter how much I talk to her about it, she just pushes me away.”
I place my hands on my lap and let out a sigh. “I know all too well about the mistake of marriage at a young age.” I close my eyes, trying to smother the emotion clogging my throat. I was younger than his sister, but being young hadn’t made it easier to jump back into dating. If anything, it
felt even harder to get back out there.
“So you accept?”
I chew on my bottom lip. Of course, I have to accept. I have nothing lined up, Save a Paw is at risk, Mathew is threatening to divorce my sister, and I have no place to live. I should say yes and move on, but something within me tugs to gamble for more. (This kind of behavior is precisely why I can’t go within a hundred feet of a casino.) “I’m going to take advantage of you by asking this, but how much more can you spend?”
He cocks his head to the side and a single wave of hair lands on his brow as he smirks. “Why? You want to empty out my bank account?”
“What you’re offering will help me with the shelter, but if I got more, I could hurry and get my own place again.”
His smirk slowly turns over. “That’s right, you got evicted, didn’t you?”
Some of the pity-party kinship from our first meeting spreads through my chest, and I’m surprised to realize him knowing this about me isn’t as embarrassing as it should be.
When I nod, he crosses his arms against his chest. “You’ve had it rough.”
I purse my lips. “Yes, which is why you should upgrade the flight to a full-blown bottle of wine for me.”
Just in time, the waitress comes over to check on us. Anders cancels my second flight and orders a bottle, and I help myself to a handful of fries.
Anders lets me get in a few bites of my burger—as good as promised— before speaking again.
“You tell me how much you need, and I’ll give it to you.”
His voice is so confident and final and warm, and I have to swallow the sudden moisture in my throat. “Then I’ll accept. I’ll do it. I’ll need a lot more information and a cover. We’ll talk more details as it gets closer. Do you think anyone will recognize me from the wedding?”
He shakes his head. “The only thing anyone remembers is the pastor falling over and the almost fire.”
With perfect timing, the waitress drops off the bottle of wine and fills my glass. “You recognized me,” I point out, something I meant to do earlier.
“I did,” he answers, “and as for cover, be my girlfriend. You can stay at my place—I have an extra room—so it’ll be easier to bring you around, and you can be my plus-one for any events.” He lets out a long breath.
“And my aunt will stop worrying I’m spiraling after the wedding.”
It’s an easy cover and will give me plenty of access to insider information. But my focus catches on the tail end of his words. I would think worrying about a grown man being lonely would be the mother’s responsibility.
I bring the wineglass to my lips. “Have you been having it rough since I last saw you?”
“Not anymore,” he says, his hot gaze pinning me in place.
Not frozen, as I am, the wine slides down the glass to my mouth. I nearly spill it over myself as I drop the glass back on the table and lick the remnants from my lips.
Anders, no napkin in hand, reaches over the table and swipes his thumb beneath my bottom lip, catching stray beads of wine I missed. My stomach fizzes, like a bottle of champagne popped open within it.
“Some ground rules.” I jerk back, forcing my hands flat on the table as
my cheeks burn. “You can’t do that.”
“Do what?”
“Anything remotely kind: holding the door open for me, a hand on my back leading me somewhere, looking at me for more than five seconds at a time, pulling my hair behind my ears, wiping crumbs from my mouth, physical touch.” It’s a warning I’ve never had to give a client before, but sirens go off in my head now, telling me lines have to be drawn. Anders feels dangerously charming.
He leans over the table, breaching the little space I gave myself, as if he is showing metaphorically and physically that the sloppy lines I’ve drawn don’t matter too much to him. “Why not?”
“I’ll fall in love with you,” I say, surprised when humor, not horror, fills Anders’s eyes. “I’m in a delicate phase in my life where the smallest acts of kindness feel like declarations of love. And my bar is so low you’d have to scrape it off the floor. I’m pretty sure I’m already halfway in love with you, and I barely know you.”
It’s better to lay it all out like this, be honest, to avoid any mishaps and broken hearts—mine, of course. With all that’s happening in my life, I’m not sure I can trust that my emotions are sane and not overreactions as I deal with turmoil.
“I’ll keep that in mind.” He smiles, and the shadows of his dimples, combined with the heat and sparkle of humor in his gaze, make my heart stutter.
Uh-oh. I press my hand against my chest. Might be too late.
