“Nope. I like what I like.”
“That’s so boring, though.”
“I call it safe.”
“Oh no.” A serious expression dawned on her face. “Do you think there is a female fisherman hiding in this pie, Brendan?”
His bark of laughter made her jump. Hell, it made him jump. Had anyone ever caught him off guard like that? No, he didn’t think so. He turned slightly to find the employees of the Red Buoy and a half-dozen customers staring at him. When he turned back, Piper was holding out the fork. “Try the pie. I dare you.”
“I won’t like it.”
“So?”
So? “I don’t try things. If I make the decision to eat the pie, I’ll have to eat the whole thing. I don’t just go around sampling shit and moving on. That’s indecisive.”
“If Hannah was here, she’d tell you your problem is psychological.”
Brendan sighed up at the ceiling. “Well, I didn’t seem to have any damn problems until you two showed up and started pointing them out.”
A beat passed. “Brendan.”
He dropped his chin. “What?”
She held out the fork. “Try the pie. It’s not going to kill you.”
“Christ. If it’s that important to you.” Brendan snatched the fork out of her hand, careful not to graze her with the tines. As he held the fork above the pastry shell, she pressed her knuckles to her mouth and squealed a little. He shook his head, but some part of him was relieved she didn’t seem to be having a terrible time. Even if her entertainment came at his expense. He reckoned he kind of owed her after the scene in the street, though, didn’t he?
Yeah.
He stabbed the fork into the pie, pulled it out with some chicken, vegetables, and gravy attached. Put it in his mouth and chewed. “I hate it.” Someone behind the counter gasped. “No offense,” he called without turning around. “It’s just not fish and chips.”
Piper’s hands dropped away from her face. “Well, that was disappointing.”
He kept eating, even though the runniness of the gravy curled his upper lip.
“You’re really going to eat the whole thing,” she murmured, “aren’t you?”
Another large bite went in. “Said I would.”
They ate in silence for a couple of minutes until he noticed her attention drifting to the window, and he could see she was thinking about the frying pan incident. Another stab of guilt caught him in his middle for yelling at her. “You planning on trying to cook again?”
She considered her plate of food, which she’d hardly made a dent in. “I don’t know. The goal was to make it through one night and go from there.” She squinted an eye at him. “Maybe I’ll have better luck if I give our stove a woman’s name.”
Brendan thought for a second. “Eris.” She gave him an inquisitive head tilt. “The goddess of chaos.”
“Ha-ha.”
Piper laid her fork down, signaling she’d finished eating, and Brendan felt a kick of urgency. They’d been sitting there a good ten minutes, and he still didn’t know anything about her. Nothing important, anyway. And he wouldn’t mind making sense of her, this girl who came across pampered one minute and vulnerable the next. Hell, there was something fascinating about how she glimmered in one direction, then the other, delivering hints of something deeper, before dancing away. Had he really talked about fishing for most of dinner?
He wanted to ask what Hannah had meant when she said men treat Piper like garbage. That statement had been stuck in his craw since he’d heard it. “You never answered me this morning. Why exactly are you in Westport?” was what he asked instead. She’d been running fingers through her hair, but paused when she heard his question. “You said three months,” he continued. “That’s a pretty specific amount of time.”
Beneath the table, her leg started to jiggle. “It’s kind of an awkward story.”
“Do you need a beer before telling it?”
Her lips twitched. “No.” She closed her eyes and shivered. “It’s more than awkward, actually. It’s humiliating. I don’t know if I should give you that ammunition.”
Man, he’d really been a bastard. “I won’t use it against you, Piper.”
She speared him with those baby blues and seemed satisfied with whatever she saw. “Okay. Just keep an open mind.” She blew out a breath. “I had a bad breakup. A public one. And I didn’t want to be labeled social media pathetic, right? So I mass texted hundreds of people and broke us into the rooftop pool at the Mondrian. It got out of control. Like, police helicopters and fireworks and nudity out of control. So I got arrested and almost cost my stepfather the production money for his next film. He sent me here with barely any money to teach me a lesson . . . and force me into being self-sufficient. Hannah wouldn’t let me come alone.”
Brendan’s fork had been suspended in the air for a good minute. He tried to piece it all together, but everything about this world she’d described was so far from his, it almost sounded like make-believe. “When was this?”