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“Right—I’m done. I’ll ring you when I’m back from Florida—”
“Oh, belt up and sit down, Sinc. You aren’t so delicate as all that. You came barking up the wrong tree if it was sympathy you wanted. But you already knew that.”
She did know that.
Sam Huntley had once been one of the greatest footballers to ever play the sport. A world-class striker, one of the most prolific goal scorers of the century. She’d been at the top of her game—in the prime of her career—when a lorry slammed into her on her motorbike at a traffic light. She’d broken nineteen bones, collapsed both lungs, been on life support for three weeks, and by the time it was all over had lost her right leg above the knee. The accident had robbed her of everything she’d ever known, including a tragic end to her career.
She was not the mate you came to for sympathy over trivial matters.
Like a girl who’d stood you up on a non-date in Hawaii.
Dillon begrudgingly kept her seat.
“Good.” Sam steepled her fingers. “Now that we have that settled, what’s her name?”
“You know damned well I’ll never tell you. Besides,” Dillon picked at a lime seed that had dried on the table, “I don’t even know her last name.”
“But she left you her mobile number, yeah?”
She had. A detail she now regretted telling Sam.
“Let’s give her a bell—”
“No!”
“C’mon, marra—a text at the very least. Or, even better! Let me send her a selfie. Let’s face it, you just may not have been her cup of tea—perhaps she’d prefer someone with a little more flavor than your white, skinny arse.” She made a grab for Dillon’s phone, but Dillon was faster.
“You’ve lost your edge, Hunt. Too slow.” She slipped her phone in her back pocket.
“We’ll see about that. Kyle knows her name, yeah? How long do you really think it will take me to track her down—tell her how deep under your skin you let her?”
Dillon looked up too quickly. “Not a word to Kyle. I’m serious.”
Sam’s wicked grin only grew. “He doesn’t know anything about this?” She drilled her fingers against the peeling laminate of the table. “Oh, this gets richer and richer.”
“I mean it, Sam.”
“I can see that. You don’t want him thinking you’re as daft as I do?” Her eyes were glowing with her impending victory. They both knew she’d found her edge—and won. And as much as Dillon loved her longtime friend, she really wanted to get up and throttle her.
“Here’s how this is going to go,” Sam crossed her brawny arms. “You take out your mobile. You punch in her number. You shoot her a text. Doesn’t matter what you say—it was nice to meet her, you made it back to London, you had a bloody grand time snogging and wish you’d taken it further—whatever you want. End of story. I leave you alone about the whole situation.”
“And if I don’t?”
“Oh, you know the deal. I tell Kyle. The two of us hound you relentlessly. We track down Mystery Reckless Motorist and broadcast your pining obsession. The whole shebang.”
“Sometimes I hate you, Hunt.”
Sam smiled, but this time the loftiness was gone. “No, you don’t. You flew eight thousand miles just for this. To sit here and have me tell you exactly what you knew I was already going to tell you to do. Now quit being a proper doylem and text the girl.”
Scene 7
“It was good of you to stop in, Miss Kingsbury. We look forward to working with you next month.”
The door clicked resolutely shut behind me.
It was a twenty-minute walk back to where I’d parked my car on Cahuenga. Which was nothing, compared to the eleven hours of flights, five hours of off-the-beaten path layovers, and two hours I’d spent in rush hour traffic to get from LAX to the studio. Never mind the forty-five minutes I’d sat in the waiting room before being summoned to the corner office.
All for a three-minute meeting.
