By the time I was putting together a cheeseburger casserole and tossed salad for Thursday’s dinner—it wasn’t the French cuisine I was learning about in school, but my dinner guests weren’t exactly the French cuisine types—I still hadn’t reached a decision. I’d wait to see how the evening went. I’d have to leave by nine if I was going to get there in time for Nancy’s ten o’clock shift, and even that would be cutting it close.
And that was even if I still had a job after my no-show on Friday night. Being dragged into the back room had kind of killed my interest in dancing afterward.
“Slater’s not coming, but Jenna is.”
I nodded and kept chopping veggies. Good. I could just leave with her if necessary.
“Liam and Abby have plans, but they said they’d come next time.”
I glanced up at Mia’s dejected voice. She was still dressed in her Vinnie’s T-shirt and jeans. Why she still worked at the bar when she had all those zeroes in her bank account, I didn’t know.
She didn’t yet have all the money our Aunt Patty had gained in a secret settlement deal put together when Mia was a teenager. Mia’s dead kidnapper’s family had paid up, and handsomely. Supposedly, the suit had been brought for Mia’s benefit, though Aunt Patty had kept the money a secret all these years. And now she was taking forever to turn over the bulk of it to my sister, claiming there was red tape and she had to “liquidate holdings”.
Even so, Mia was fucking rich. She didn’t need to sling beers anymore. Fox still worked there too and he wasn’t hurting for cash, so maybe they were both masochists.
Considering their penchant for beating up on each other—in and out of bed—I figured that was a decent assessment.
“What’s wrong?” I pushed a tomato toward Mia on the cutting board. Though my sister’s broken arm was still in a cast, she was just about to get it off. Mia being Mia, she’d been pushing the limits of what she could do with that arm for weeks.
Besides, there were no idle hands in my kitchen.
Thinking better of it, I pulled back the tomato and gave her a carrot. She didn’t quite have the dexterity to slice it thin, and I didn’t trust her with my tomatoes. I also didn’t trust just any low grade slicer. When I had the funds for commercial grade stuff, that’d be a different story.
“What? I can’t do a tomato?” she asked, indignant. She’d been my veggie prep cook since I’d first started preparing meals. At least during the years we’d lived under the same roof.
“You can do a carrot.”
“Pfft.” One-handed, she started washing the carrot in the small sink in the island with all the care of a bear slapping a salmon to death on a rock. “I can do tomatoes,” she muttered. “I have this one-armed shiz down. Mostly. And besides, I’m practically healed.”
“Uh-huh.”
“I am,” she insisted. “It’s almost time to get the cast off. Thank God, because it freaking itches.”
All at once, I realized why she was so testy. It wasn’t because she was tired of her cast either. Well, not entirely. “Slater still won’t talk to you?”
“Talk? Ha.” She scrubbed with my veggie brush and nearly peeled off the outer layer of skin. “We’re dead to him. He won’t even get on the damn phone. Every message gets passed through Jenna or Liam.”
“He just needs time—”
“Time to what? He’s dating the daughter of the man who raped me. She stalked me and who knows what else while she was working with Gio’s crew—”
“They aren’t Gio’s crew,” I said too quickly, dumping thin slices of cucumber into the salad. Every one of them was the same size, as good as any slicer. Catching Mia staring out of the corner of my eye, I shrugged and set the tomato in the center of my cutting board. “Just saying.”
“Oh, yeah? What do you know about it?”
“I know he’s become a friend to you and Fox, or else you wouldn’t be hanging out with him all the time. Or else your judgement is seriously whacked, because those guys aren’t the kind you should take lightly.”
“No kidding. And he still associates with them. Fox keeps telling me it’s Gio’s business, that he trusts him, but something’s off there.”
“Off enough you didn’t invite him to dinner?” There was no hiding the note of hope in my voice. I couldn’t figure out if I wanted to see him or not.
So that wasn’t exactly true. I knew I did. I just didn’t want to pretend around him, and it seemed to be the only way we could operate around each other. The chances he’d come in and wrap his arms around me and kiss me on the mouth were exactly none.
“Fuck.” I cursed as the knife slipped and bounced off the pinkie I’d cut open in class while preparing julienned potatoes. It had bled enough that I’d gone to the emergency room. I’d just finished the antibiotics last week, dammit.
The buzzer rang and Mia gave me a worried look. “You okay?”
“I’m fine. Go ahead.” I wrapped a dishtowel ar