“Oh, Vinnie…”
“Come on. You know I don’t drink that much. I’m just a friendly guy, and I like to buy drinks for people. I’ll pay you back. I get paid tomorrow. But I need a hamburger or something.”
“You’re kidding me,” she said, staring at him.
“No, I’m not.”
She walked back to the kitchen and opened her bag, found her wallet and gave him forty dollars. “You are going to pay me back, because you’re no kid and you’ve got to learn how to budget.”
“Okay, okay.” He gave her a wink. “So guess what I did today? I helped your boyfriend on his latest case.”
“My boyfriend?”
He grinned at her, leaning on the counter and helping himself to a banana from the fruit bowl.
“Aidan Flynn. I hear you two are getting along.”
“I like the guy. So what? It doesn’t make him my boyfriend.” Not that she would mind if he were, she thought.
Vinnie shrugged. “He suspected me of being a psychotic murderer, but I set him straight.”
“Walking around town looking like Dracula doesn’t exactly help create a boy-next-door image,” she told him, reaching into the refrigerator for a bottle of water. She tossed him one, too. He caught it deftly.
“Hey, haven’t you heard? It’s always the boy next door who turns out to be the bad guy.”
“You’d better get back. Your break must be over soon.”
“I have a few more minutes. Jeremy is sitting in again tonight. He’s talking up his thing on Saturday night. I wish I hadn’t blown all my cash so I could buy a ticket. Actually, what I really wish is that we’d auditioned to play that night. There’s bound to be a ton of publicity.”
“Well, if you didn’t have to work, you could go.”
“I’m in. But how? Is my fairy godmother going to turn me into a prince?”
“Aidan has a bunch of tickets, and he asked me to come and bring my friends. But how can you get off work? It’s a Saturday night.”
“This town is full of guitar players. I can find someone to fill in for me.”
“Cool. You’d better get going, though, since you are working tonight.”
He grinned. “You bet.” He came around the counter and gave her a kiss on the cheek. “Thanks for the money. I’ll pay you back.”
She nodded. “Don’t worry about it. You fill in at the store on short notice often enough. I guess I kind of owe you.”
“Yeah, you do, don’t you? Just kidding, I’m going to repay you.”
She walked him back down the hall and locked the door behind him. As soon as he was gone, the quiet seemed to envelop her. She hurried into her bedroom, and turned on the lights and the television.
She had time. What a great night to read. The diary was still in her bag.
First, though, she walked around the apartment and turned on all the lights, then turned on the television in the family room for good measure. She wanted noise, lots of it. And not music, either. Tonight she wanted to hear talking. Sitcoms. People laughing.
Even if they were only on a laugh track.
At last she slipped into a long cotton sleep tee, washed her face, brushed her teeth and crawled into bed.
Had it only been last night that she hadn’t been alone in this same bed? It had been amazing, making love, sleeping as if she didn’t have a care in the world. But that had been last night. Tonight her struggle was not to unnerve herself so badly that she couldn’t sleep.
But opening the diary she had been longing to finish didn’t help. It should have been fascinating. Fiona was writing about her love for Sloan Flynn and how he had never wanted to see a war between the states. Before it had started, he and his cousin Brendan had often talked about the possibility that, with their opposing views, they would end up on opposite sides. But they hadn’t fought about their differences, only prayed war would never come. But it had come, and they had indeed ended up as enemies.
One entry was filled with excitement. Sloan had written to tell her that he was coming home, and that they could be married, but it would have to be secretly. With the Union forces encroaching, he didn’t want to put her in a dangerous position. She could claim Brendan’s protection, if it became necessary, as long as their marriage was secret.
In another entry she wrote about her wedding night, delicately, in terms that might be used by a proper young woman of the time who was madly in love with her husband.
Kendall found it all so sad, because she knew how it had ended. The war had come between the family in a way they had never expected. The cousins had killed one another, and Fiona had leapt to her death.
But to learn of the earlier events through Fiona’s own words…