“How much are we talking here?” I asked. “I mean, what could the damage be, five, six thousand?”
“Sixty thousand,” Alix replied, blushing in shame. “I know, I know, what the hell was I thinking, running up a sixty thousand dollar shopping bill, but I mean, if you’d heard the offer they promised me, sixty thousand was small potatoes.”
I wanted to yell at her. Sixty thousand? But then I remembered that her story was a total lie. Well, not a total lie. I could see in her face that she needed the money, and quickly. There was no other reason she’d be asking me for it. “When do you need it?”
She half winked to herself and pulled her mouth to the side, a common expression she made when she was thinking, and I had to resist the urge to want to kiss her, she looked so damn cute when she did it. “The store said they need it by Friday. Kade, I know it’s a lot to ask for, but if I went to Mom and Derek, they’d both freak out. I just need it for a month, maybe two. I’ve got some shoots lined up, and the UFC might bring me back for their next Las Vegas pay-per-view, they said the fighters really liked me. I can pay you back, I just can’t do it right away. A lot of my savings are tied up right now and I can’t get to them.”
I nodded. In my mind, I knew I should tell her no. I’d had people try to feed me lines like this before. Usually they were people who were caught up in something that they’d done to themselves and had come back to bite them in the ass. Gambling, drugs, stuff like that. Yet for some reason, maybe it was the black eye, maybe it was who she was, I don’t know, but I knew that Alix needed the money for something that wasn’t her fault. Besides, I didn’t need the money. I had a trust fund that I’d never touched, just sitting around gathering interest. “Okay,” I said with fake casualness. “I can get you the cash. In fact, when we get back to the house, I’ll go online and do the transfer. My bank will do it tomorrow morning, you should have it by Tuesday at the latest.”
“Really?” Alix asked, the final nail in the coffin of her lies. It wasn’t the sort of reply that someone makes when they get an unexpected gift, or when a long shot comes through. It was the sort of reply an untrained liar makes when they think they’ve gotten away with it. Basically, Alix was saying, I really got away with this?
Still, I kept it up. “Alix, you should see some of the crap I’ve had to bail some of my clients out of to prevent them from getting into the papers. One guy I had to forward nearly a hundred thousand dollars at one point after he’d gone nuts in Las Vegas at the poker tables. He ended up forking over his entire signing bonus to me because of it, but he stayed out of the tabloids and off the league’s trouble list. Trust me, pro sports leagues are not too keen on their athletes losing a ton of money in Vegas. Not since Pete Rose, at least.”
Alix broke out in a huge, relieved smile, and my suspicions were confirmed even more. Before I could process that, however, she threw her arms around my neck and hugged me, her body pressed against mine in a way that had me thinking less about what trouble she might be in and more about what sort of trouble she could cause for me.
“Oh, Kade, thank you so much!” she said, laying her head on my shoulder. I returned the hug semi-awkwardly, my body aware of how beautiful the woman pressed up against it was while my mind kept reminding me that Alix was my stepsister. “Seriously, I so owe you for this one, and more than just the cash.”
“We’ll talk about that later,” I replied, carefully extracting myself from her limbs. “But if I’m going to get you the cash, I’d prefer to use the internet at a place I can trust.”
“Or my place would be good too,” Alix said. “If you don’t mind, I mean. Besides, there’s a little Indian place near there that I’d love to take you to if you don’t mind.”
I thought about it. Facing the drive back from Orange County to Los Angeles, we’d get back somewhere around lunch time, and we’d had a pretty light breakfast. Still, the ocean was calling to me, and I wanted to enjoy the Southern California beaches again. Oregon has some beautiful coastline, but it wasn’t the same. “Where’s your place located?”
“I live in Hermosa Beach,” Alix said. “It’s not ocean-side, but you can cut through to the ocean in about a mile, or we could go down to the Hermosa Pier. Are you still into surfing like you used to be?”
I laughed, thinking back to my high school days. “It’s been a long time since I’ve done that, Alix. Besides, I doubt I’d find a place that would have a board for rent right now anyway. But I wouldn’t mind going over to the Hermosa Pier.”