I was expecting some sort of big twenty-questions scene where I had to account for having nothing to do with a guy who had bought me an absurdly extravagant gift only weeks before, but Amanda just nodded. “A man like that is hard to keep, isn’t that right?”
Usually, I was nervously respectful of Amanda while we were working together, because I still felt pretty much like a messy schoolgirl playing offsider to an experienced woman half the time. But the vibe was a little different when it was just us two there, with no customers in sight.
“Do you know anything about that?” I asked. “I mean, personally.”
Amanda turned her back to me and started going through a case I was pretty sure we’d taken care of first, because we always did all the cases in the same order every closing. “I do, yes. Got tangled up with a man who broke me to pieces, then insisted on putting the pieces back together in an order of his own choosing.”
I wished there was somewhere in the area to sit down that wouldn’t get me told off. I felt like I couldn’t listen to what Amanda had to say as carefully as I needed to and do absolutely anything else, not even standing on my own two feet. “And what happened, in the end?”
Amanda shrugged. “I married him.”
My eyes did a shocked little dart over to her hand, her completely empty fingers.
“Oh, he’s not the sort of man who has money to throw around on jewels.” She smiled, as if she was instead telling me about her boyfriend who gave her every jewel there was to be had in the world. “At least, not any more.”
Amanda had a story of her own, and realising that seemed to make everything different. “Was it hard?” I asked her.
“To manage a man as strong-willed and destructive as a bull?” Amanda’s smile was soft. I wondered if people had seen me look like that when I was talking about Lucas, if it was why nobody ever believed me when I insisted nothing was going on, that nothing ever had been going on. “Ther
e are some of us who are very good at that particular work, Callie. Isn’t that right?”
I didn’t feel quite confident enough to suggest I fitted in a category alongside Amanda, even if that was what she was suggesting. I turned to another detail, something that would probably seem small to her but was everything to me. “Well I suppose if you have a husband, then Lucas was wrong about you trying to call him after.”
I surprised a laugh out of her. “Is that what he claimed happened?”
“Well, he predicted it,” I said. “The whole thing, he thought was you trying to set up to have him ready to proposition you later.”
“I wouldn’t do that,” Amanda said. “All he got was a really cracking discount because he reminded me of someone I have a soft spot for.” I had wondered about that. “It’s not that I respect boundaries either, but when you’re someone like me, you learn very quickly that you don’t get in the path of a boy like that if you don’t absolutely have to. Whether or not there’s another girl involved.”
One advantage of my new job was being able to skip Mum’s questionable microwave dinners—the socialising more than the dinner, even. I didn’t think Mum was ever going to forgive me for failing with Lucas, but she didn’t feel like she could be honest about her reasons so it was this relentless indirect nonsense. And Dad just sent more of the same in her direction to show his displeasure, the result being one big exhausting mess. Honestly, those two wasted so much energy not really getting along that could have been better spent doing almost anything else with their lives.
The only downside to the new order of things wasn’t a downside at all yet. Mum hated me heating up my own meals outside of dinnertime, so I’d taken to trying out a new fast food outlet each night—or an older favourite.
Amanda and I walked out to our cars together, parting only at the last minute with quick glances back in one another’s directions. You couldn’t be too careful around a place like that.
I was feeling pretty good as I got myself safely locked inside my car and started the engine. I’d sold a few phones that day, and I hadn’t needed to glance over at Amanda for a quick rescue once. I was slowly feeling less and less like that little girl who’d put on my mother’s clothing—assuming a sleeker, more evolved edition of my mother, at least.
Amanda usually ended up keeping us half an hour late tidying up the store before the next day, but once she was satisfied with the state of things she was always out of there faster than I really believed was physically possible. She managed to slip past the first set of traffic lights out of our mall carpark without stopping; I didn’t.
I was sitting there, humming a little to myself and debating Chinese or Indian, when the shifting of a shadow across my back seat made me tense.
It wasn’t a shadow. I saw it clearly now I was paying attention to it: that was a black blanket, and it had not been there when I’d first headed into work.
I opened my mouth to scream, even though it made no sense to cry out when the only person near enough to hear wouldn’t care, and his arm shot out and wrapped around one side of my seat, covering my mouth and pressing me against the headrest. Another hand moved around the other side to fall on my shoulder, and then slid forwards and down, his fingers skimming the side of my breast the same way he’d done the first time we were properly alone together.
Memories flooded my head; arousal flooded the rest of my body.
“Now,” whispered Lucas, whose face I couldn’t see, “you’d better save the energy you were about to put into yelling for help into actually driving, because the roads around here are dangerous after dark, and you’ve got a bit of a track record for attracting trouble.”
Chapter Eighteen
“You broke into my car,” was all I could think to say once he actually let go of my mouth.
“Is it really breaking in if you had a key the whole time, I wonder?” Lucas mused.
“You—since you gave it to me?”
“How else am I supposed to get in without damaging the damn thing?”