I take a breath, try to focus. “What happened to your parents?”
Again, that fleeting smirk. “The safe question. Or maybe you’re going to sneak up on the truth, little by little.”
“If you don’t want to answer—”
“Car accident. No big story there. No mystery. I was at my grandmother’s. They were on vacation. Without me.” He pauses, takes a swig from his water bottle. “Good thing I wasn’t with them. They went off the side of a road, down an embankment. Crash. Boom.”
I flash back to my dad’s death. The insistent knocking on the door, the grim-faced cops, my mother’s agonized scream.
Imagine losing both your parents in the blink of an eye.
“I’m sorry,” I say quietly. “That must have been horrible for you.” I tear a strip from my napkin. “My dad … well, he died when I was young, too. Why didn’t you go live with your grandmother?”
“She’s eighty-seven. She thinks Roosevelt is president.”
“Why my mother, though? Because she’s so warm and nurturing?”
He laughs. And he has a nice laugh. Damn. I wish he didn’t have such a nice laugh. He’s a temporary blip in my life. He’s not my type. Except for the laugh. Maybe the eyes. Not the smirk, or the hair which needs cutting so badly my fingers are itching to grab the knife and do it myself.
“Your mother and my parents were business partners.”
“So … you own part of Spiker?”
Solo shakes his head. “No. My parents were screwed out of the business by your mother.”
This does not entirely surprise me. Still, for some reason, I feel vaguely guilty. Sins of the mother and all that.
“I guess your dad—he was still alive then—tried to make peace. But it wasn’t happening. Up until then they had all been best friends. My folks died before they could change the will that left me to your mother’s tender mercies.”
“You hate her,” I say.
Solo doesn’t react right away. He thinks. He cups his chin in his hand and carefully considers.
Finally he says, “I don’t do hate.” He grins ruefully. “However, I do resentment pretty well.”
I want to ask Solo more, much more, but my phone chimes. A text.
Need u now. Bad.
When I dial Aislin, the call doesn’t connect. I check my phone: one bar. Figures. Just enough for a text to get through.
“Damn,” I murmur. Aislin in trouble? Not a surprise. Aislin texting me for help? That is unusual. Generally, she just stumbles through her escapades, then regales me with the details later.
“Aislin?” Solo inquires.
Another text. Where r u? Guys after M at GGP. Going there 2 help.
“Damn,” I murmur. “Aislin’s idiot boyfriend’s in trouble. He’s at Golden Gate Park, and she thinks she’s going to save his butt.”
“What kind of trouble?”
“You mean felony or misdemeanor?” I rub my eyes. “You never know with Maddox.”
I text her back. WAIT. I’ll think of something.
“I don’t know what to do,” I tell Solo. “I can’t leave this place, not with … The Leg. Dr. Anderson told me not to put any pressure on it.”
“Dr. Anderson is a tool.”