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.
She sighs. “Yeah, okay,” she says reluctantly.
“I’m not trying to get you drunk, Pines,” I say, feeling mildly offended.
I mean, I actually am, but not for the reason most guys who resort to that shit do it.
I don’t need a drop of liquor to get her in bed with me, of that I’m fairly confident.
But to get her to talk? There isn’t much I wouldn’t stoop to.
“I don’t think you’re trying to get me drunk,” she says, her eyes wide and her cheeks getting pink.
“I mean, come on. You’re going to need all your faculties about you if you’re going to resist me,” I say. “I already have an unfair advantage.”
“And what would that be?” she says. Now the wide eyes and pink cheeks are the result of amused outrage.
I sit back and look at her with a cocked eyebrow. “Hello? My Irish charm, Pines,” I say, stating the obvious.
She covers her mouth to stifle a burst of laughter. Okay, I have to admit, it’s definitely fun to make this girl laugh. Maybe because she’s such a hard nut to crack, all serious and intense. I’ve always appreciated a challenge.
I keep up the inane chatter as we have dessert. When she’s halfway through with her second glass of Riesling, I decide to venture into the dangerous territory known as personal questions.
“What do you want to do when you graduate?” I ask.
I’m genuinely curious. What does a girl like Angela Pines do with a law degree?
I imagine her law firm profile: Angela Pines, a specialist in money laundering, loan sharking, and racketeering, enjoys polishing her collection of brass knuckles and playing the occasional round of Russian roulette in her spare time.
She’s been staring at the crème br?lée she ordered and finally takes a bite. “Oh my God, this is so good,” she practically moans. I swallow. “I don’t usually eat stuff like this.”
“Why not?” I practically choke out. As far as I’m concerned, she should be eating crème br?lée, licking ice cream cones, and sucking on popsicles every single day.
“I was vegan for the last few years,” she volunteers, apparently distracted enough by the decadence of her dessert to disclose a personal fact.
“Why aren’t you still?” I manage to ask, forcing my mind to stay on the task at hand and not wishing I was that spoon.
She shrugs. “It’s expensive,” she says. “Hopefully I’ll go back to it someday. It’s the healthiest and most humane way to eat. And it had the added bonus of pissing off my parents.” She takes another bite. “My foster parents, I mean.”
“Right…” I snap out of my spoon-licking-induced haze. Back to business. “So, you were about to tell me what you want to do when you graduate…”
She pauses to sip her Riesling before answering me. “Anything that helps people who’ve been screwed over,” she says.
“Yeah?” Not the answer I was expecting. I thought she’d go with something generic, like corporate law, tax law, defending oil companies that killed baby seals. “Like your Legal Aid job? You’d do that for a career?”
She nods. “Yes, preferably helping victims of human trafficking.”
I almost choke on my beer. This is it. This is gold. “Human trafficking,” I say, nodding like I’m mildly intrigued. “Pretty intense. What made you want to do that kind of work?”
She shrugs. “You know, the whole bleeding-heart thing.”
Not so fast, Pines. I’m onto something here, and you’re not going to bullshit your way out of it. “I gotta be honest, princess. I don’t get a bleeding-heart vibe from you. You seem like a pretty pragmatic kind of girl to me. Come on, I told you all kinds of things about me. Your turn.”
“You talked a lot, but you didn’t really tell me anything about yourself,” she says. An accurate observation.
“Fair enough. What do you want to know?”
“What were you doing before law school?”
“I was a firefighter.”
Her spoon pauses on its way to her mouth, and she looks at me with wide eyes. “A firefighter? Really?”
“No joke,” I say.
“Wow.” She puts down her spoon and is staring at me like I just cured cancer and drug addiction. “A firefighter. That’s so…brave…and, like, heroic and stuff.”
Okay, embarrassing. Time to downplay. “It’s mostly hanging out in the firehouse talking shit and responding to false alarms.”
She shakes her head. “No, it’s amazing.”
“It’s really not.”
She still has that look on her face, and I swear to God her eyes look like they’re tearing up. We’re apparently having some big moment. Unfortunately, I don’t have a clue what it’s all about.
“Your mom must have worried about you a lot,” she says, making an effort to get herself under control.
You have no idea. “Yeah. That’s a big part of the reason I’m in law school.
” I took the LSAT just to show my mom what a bad idea law school was, but I ended up scoring high enough to get into some of the best schools in the country.
Who knew? In any event, there was no talking her down after that. Law school it was.
“I always wished my dad was a cop or a firefighter or a high school teacher,” she says softly. “Someone who did something good.”
For the first time since I got involved in this whole mess, I stop to think what it’s like for her. Maybe the whole foster care story isn’t meant to make people feel sorry for her. Maybe it’s to avoid acknowledging who her parents are. Maybe it’s to forget where she comes from.
“My biological dad, I mean,” she adds quickly, her eyes sharpening as she realizes she slipped up.
“Is that why you want to work for Legal Aid? Because of your dad?”
“My dad, um, my biological dad, hurt a lot of people. I guess I kind of want to make up for that.”
That statement throws me for a loop. It’s starting to seem possible that the foundation of my feelings toward Angela is built on a little bit of knowledge and a whole lot of assumptions. And it’s turning out that a few of those assumptions are maybe…slightly off the mark.
Easy there, Brady. Look where she comes from. Lying is in her DNA.
But I can tell when Angie’s lying. She studies her nails or her phone and her voice gets bored and offhand, like, who cares that I grew up in foster care and have no family?
Who cares that I got through college on a scholarship?
But she was passionate and straightforward when she was talking about rejecting her dad’s business and doing work that helped people.
That doesn’t fit in with anything I know about her. I need to keep my eye on the ball.
Check, please.
“Thanks, Brady,” she says after I hand the server the signed receipt. “That was really sweet of you.”
“No problem. I promised you a real first date, right?”
“And you delivered.”
“I always deliver.”
We walk out to the rocky beach. The air is cool and makes Angie shiver in her thin, barely-there dress, providing the perfect excuse for me to wrap my arm around her. Her arm comes around my waist, and she leans in to me, her head resting against my shoulder. I can smell her coconut shampoo.
“Don’t you ever have a sweater?” I ask, trying to keep myself in check. The truth is, I’m seriously turned on. The more messed up my head is about her, the less confused my body is.
“Sorry, Mom.” She smirks up at me, all traces of nervousness gone. She knows what we’re doing out here, and it’s not exchanging biographies. “Besides, what do I need with a sweater when you’re around?”
The look in her eyes—sexy, flirtatious, bold—makes my face heat up. That’s something else that Angie can’t hide. She’s into me.
“I think I could do a better job of warming you up than I’m doing right now.”
We come to a dead stop. She presses her body against me, wraps her arms around my waist, and angles her face up toward mine.
“I think you could, too,” she says, and before I know it, she’s standing on her toes and her mouth is on mine.
There’s nothing romantic about this kiss on the beach.
It’s wild and hungry like the breeze that’s kicking up and the waves that are crashing near us.
The wind is blowing her hair and making goose bumps rise on her arms, but I can’t let her go.
My hands grip her hair, pulling it away from her face a little harder than I probably need to.
I feel more than hear her groan as her hands grasp the back of my shirt.
I could kiss her forever. Pressed up against me like this, she’s not a problem or a mystery, and she doesn’t owe me shit.
She’s the most beautiful girl I’ve ever seen, with a mouth that doesn’t quit and a body that I want to explore every inch of.
Tall and smart and quirky, she’s my dream girl wrapped up in a total nightmare.
“I’ve got to get you out of here, Pines,” I say, my hands on either side of her head as I look down into those eyes that I desperately want to see without their disguise. “Or we’re going to end up with sand in very awkward places.”
“It’s your show, Brady,” she says.
The hotel is starting to seem like a really good idea, but I don’t want to come on too strong.
When we head up the stairs to the street level, I lead us straight to the valet stand.
I stand behind Angela with my arms wrapped around her waist, in part to keep her warm while we wait for the car, but mostly to breathe in the scent of her hair and her neck.
I feel a shiver run through her that I know has nothing to do with the breeze.
“For the record, Brady,” she says once we’re in the car and pulling away from the hotel, “I would have risked the sand.”