“You should try Cindy’s cupcakes,” Eve said. “They’re sin in a small package. So good.”
“As soon as I’m done dieting for this wedding. Fucking mermaid dress,” she said conversationally.
Startled into laughter, Eve asked for one more for the Eye Candy Facebook page. iPhone in hand, she backed up to get a little more of the bar in the shot and bumped into a warm male body. She turned around to apologize.
Lyle stood right behind her.
“Oh my God!” she gasped. Her hand flew to her chest and she dropped her phone. The hard shell case cracked open and it and the phone itself skittered in different directions. One of the bridesmaids nearly put a stiletto heel through the phone.
“You okay?” Lyle asked.
She swallowed the hysterical laughter. “No. You scared me half to death!”
Miranda, the only remotely sober woman in the party, gave Lyle an appraising look, one he returned, with interest. Eve took advantage of Lyle’s distraction to look for Travis. He seemed to be alone.
Helpful patrons found the shattered shell and handed it and the phone to Eve. The phone had a couple of new scratches but appeared functional. The case was a total loss.
“I need to talk to you.”
It was the peak of a Saturday night. “I’m a little busy at the moment,” she said. It took everything she had not to look in Matt’s direction to see if he’d noticed Lyle. She was sure he would have. All she needed to do was act natural. “I’m a little busy … but I’ve always got time for you. Let me just take one more picture,” she said to the party, and held up her phone. “Great. Thanks so much! I’ll check in with you later. The next round’s on me.” Then she turned to Lyle. “What’s up? I haven’t seen you in a while.”
“Let’s talk upstairs.”
She looked at him and saw a man who wasn’t her friend, who wanted her dead, the reason why she was living with a cop and going out of her mind. “Fine. Give me a second,” she said, and hurried toward Matt. She strolled around the end of the bar, stepped into his warm body.
“Get them whatever they want, sweetheart,” she said as she laid her hand on Matt’s hip, making sure to look over her shoulder as she spoke. Lyle’s face tightened. Then she turned back to Matt. “He wants to talk in private,” she murmured.
“He doesn’t get what he wants,” Matt said, and he didn’t need volume to convey utter authority. The absorbed, attentive lover was gone, replaced by a cop. Had the lover ever really existed?
She slid her hand under the hem of his shirt and looked up into his face. “I’m checking in with you so he thinks you’re a domineering asshole. Now I’m going upstairs.”
“Goddammit, Eve!”
She slipped from his grip and hurried around the end of the bar, deep into the crowd. Lyle followed her up the staircase, into her office. Eve closed the door and pulled out her cell phone.
“You don’t need your new boyfriend?”
“Who? Chad? Why would I? Just a second,” she said, not giving him a chance to respond. “I need to post those pictures to Instagram.” She swiped to the app she wanted, tapped it, then set the phone down and went on the offensive. “We’ve got a problem. Someone shot out my windows last week. Talk to whoever you have to and make that stop. It’s bad for business.”
Lyle settled into one end of her sofa and smiled that dark-eyed smile. Eve smiled back, studying his face. To her, he didn’t look any different, but Matt had been closer, able to see Lyle over the roof of the Jeep. Or maybe her new “boyfriend” landed a little farther down the paranoid spectrum. “I didn’t hear anything about it.”
“Then I’m telling you now. Someone shot out the windows to my apartment last week. I wasn’t hurt, thank God, and neither was Chad. It sure as hell killed the mood.”
That got her a smile, the small one she remembered best. “I’m surprised, Eve. He’s not your type.”
“He’ll do for now,” she said, giving him her best sexy cocktail waitress glance to cover her pounding heart, her stomach’s roller-coaster ride from her throat to her knees.
Lyle threw back his head and laughed, the sound unforced but with an edge she’d never heard before. It made the hair stand up on the back of her neck as some primitive part of her brain recognized the kind of threat that made animals everywhere go wide-eyed as they hunched in fear. “You haven’t changed a bit, Evie.”
She gave a nonchalant shrug. It was a struggle to confide in him as she would have when they were teenagers, to act like she hadn’t caught on. “I needed something different from Caleb’s lawyer friends.”
He glanced out the floor-to-ceiling windows. “Your parents can’t be happy about that.”
She had to assume he knew she’d taken “Chad” to Monday dinner. “I didn’t exactly ask for their permission,” she said wryly. “They’ll just have to get used to him.”