Fool Me Forever (The Confidence Game 2)

“Like I said, you don’t have to worry about me.” She took in the closed lid of her laptop. “You said you’d forgotten something.” She popped a heart-shaped chocolate in her mouth.

“I lied.”

She looked at the water-stained ceiling and then back to the tray of chocolates. She chose a dark one with pink and yellow Xs and Os on top, licked the pattern, popped it in her mouth, and spoke around it. “Pwese ’ust go.”

“I have a concern.” It was a line in her spreadsheet and an embossed logo on the envelope in his pocket.

“This is my private business, and you’re interfering in it.” No sugar coating it, like the chocolate now in her hand. She put the sugared ball in her mouth, crystals stuck to her lip, and he wet his own reflectively because the desire to lick hers came on him sharp and sudden.

He coughed, pushing that thought down. “I think you’re so accustomed to being quietly terrorized by Easton you don’t notice the effect anymore. That makes you his perfect victim. You’re his frog in a pot of slowly boiling water. You don’t feel it heating so you never jump out.”

Lenny reached to put the chocolate box on the desk and fumbled it. He righted the box before it spilled, and when he looked at her again, she turned her face away. Her family terror was very different from glitter in his bed and blue eyebrows.

“In case you need me to express myself forcefully again, I’ve got this, and I can’t imagine why you care.”

He tugged at the cuffs of his shirt, aligning them more precisely with his jacket sleeve. She deserved better from her brother, from the Heroes League, and from him. “Do I need a reason?”

She pointed at the door.

Apparently, he did.

Chapter Four

Jacques Torres chocolates weren’t Lenny’s favorites. They were, however, more than adequate for stress-eating purposes caused by the combination of various men trying her patience.

She had years of practice handling Easton’s games, but Halsey Sherwood had to go stirring things up and inspiring forceful expressions with his intrusive spy action and his amateur diagnosis.

Easton was a shitty brother. Still, for Halsey to call him a psychopath was unconscionable. Made her feel less awful about the glass throwing. She didn’t need his help dealing with family matters. She didn’t need his help for anything.

Except maybe the odd sexual fantasy in the desert that was her romantic life, because Halsey had Hollywood good looks. No matter that just like his movie star doppelganger, Paul Newman, he was all gloss and no substance.

Newman was Mom’s favorite actor. He played pool sharks and con men and gangsters. He played shady businessmen, convicts, fraudsters, and outlaws. In Cat on a Hot Tin Roof

he was a hard-drinking womanizer. In Where the Money Is he was an old guy who faked a stroke to get out of prison. And that’s before you got to the fact he played the ultimate grifter in the ultimate grifter move, The Sting.

Halsey Sherwood was her personal Paul Newman, looking like he’d walked out of Sweet Bird of Youth or The Young Philadelphians and straight into her daydreams, and it would only reward him for being a crook if she let those fantasies influence her.

Why would she even consider listening to him, anyway? If he claimed to know Easton, it was because it was like recognizing like, and he was a psychopath, too.

Well, of course he was. He’d even admitted he’d lied to her, wouldn’t leave when she asked him to, and hung around to eavesdrop. What good, honest, caring, insanely handsome, unflappably calm man did that?

Good thing she had chocolates, because she needed the sugar buzz. She looked at the box. Five left. She’d almost eaten the lot. No wonder she felt queasy. Breaking a few cheap glasses was probably healthier for you.

Like always, she’d take none of Easton’s nonsense. Her worrying time was better spent on Mallory who was falling behind in her classes, secretive, impulsive, angry, and unstable.

Mallory outright lied, told fantabulous stories, laughed when she was called out, was almost intolerably cruel to Mom, and showed no remorse. She was unreliable and suspicious and temperamental.

There was one chocolate left. She might puke for more reasons than interfering Halsey Sherwood making her paranoid.

She ate it anyway, stuck the roses in the sink with water, and went home where Mom greeted her with the words, “I thought we’d eat out.”

Lenny put her purse down. She’d eaten eighty dollars’ worth of chocolate, about eighty billion calories, and she was still hungry. “You were going to get groceries today, and so maybe another time.”

“I didn’t get them.”

“You didn’t go to the market?”

Mom laid her House and Garden over her crossed knee. “You know I hate the market.”