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“What if I agreed to work for you? For free?” He starts shaking his head before I’m even done speaking. “I could clean up. I could organize. I know all about invoices and billing.” I help run the charity my mother founded for children overseas. Coincidentally, that’s how no one knows I’mhereright now.
“Not happening,” he grits, voice rough as he slams a drawer on the tool cart shut. Finally, he turns back to me and I realize, with some panic, that he’s entirely too close. Like a foot away.
My head spins at the proximity. Strange for me, but then again, everything hasalwaysbeen strange where Mason and I are concerned.
“Tell me,” he murmurs, voice dark and his eyes like a Category 5 hurricane. “Where is your dear mother? She know you’re here?”
Hewouldask about her.
“No,” I say, squaring my shoulders. “And she doesn’t need to. I’m not a child.” He chuckles, shaking his head in disgust. “And I live in LA now. I don’t need permission from her to visit an old friend.”
Okay, friend may have been a poor choice of words. I don’t know what I’d call Mason, but even before, he was the furthest thing from a friend you could get. Sexy acquaintance? Object of every dirty fantasy I’ve ever had?
Still . . . my mother isnota topic we need to discuss right now. Or ever.
“I’m not asking for anything else. I just . . . I can’t do it on my own. I’ve tried. I’m failing miserably. No one will speak to me because of who my mother is.”
And because my twin is wanted for murder and human trafficking, but I digress.
“Then give up.”
If I were a violent person, which I’m not, I would kick him in the shin.
—Then run away as fast as I can because I’ve seen Mason’s dark side. We’ll just say a grizzly looks tame.
“What if it were your sister?”
It grows so silent, you could hear a mouse queef in the back of the garage.
His gaze hardens, his jaw ticking in that way I used to think was endearing. Now that I know it seals my fate, it’s more like a stab to the chest.
“No. It’s final.”
Without even a word, he nods over my head to the door, and with bitter embarrassment, I realize I’ve lost.
Defeat crushes through me, but . . . it’s not like I haven’t been here before. It was a long shot, anyway.
“Goodbye, Mason.”
He doesn’t seem to like that response because his eyes narrow dangerously, but he doesn’t say a word as he watches me leave. As soon as the door shuts behind me with a metallic finality, I suck in a shaky breath and head toward my old, beat-up bumblebee yellow VW Bug—It was cheap, okay?
That was . . .
Rough.
Mason looked at me like I was sin incarnate. As if everything that happened was my fault. God knows, sometimes I feel like it.
I fall into the front seat of my car, forcing the tears burning in my eyes back. I refuse to cry. Not here.
My gaze catches on the picture in the dash. Missy wouldn’t cry. She’d take the rejection with class. She’d wait until she was home and completely alone before a single tear fell.
She smiles back at me as if reminding me of who she was. That was nearly six years ago. What may as well be a lifetime. I was seventeen and everything made sense. I knew my next move. I knew what life would be like when I reached the age I am now. I was going to marry that boy in high school who told meI was pretty because of course, he didn’t just want to get in my pants. He wasn’t like other guys.
Boy, was I wrong?
I lean forward, laying my head against the steering wheel and toss my hat on the passenger seat, hair be damned.
“Where in the world are you, Missy?” I whisper to the picture, ashamed when a tear manages to break free and fall to the old Polaroid, sun-faded and covered in dust.
