“Bad place to stop,” a guy said, lifting his tray of full glasses over my head as he went by.
“I just need . . . fresh air.”
“The front—”
“And privacy.”
The server nodded once, her no-nonsense ponytail swishing over her dark vest. “Follow me,” she said.
Maybe I could get a job as a server with this catering company. She probably made good money. I didn’t have any experience serving appetizers on trays, and probably way too much experience eating them. But I could learn. Probably.
We were through the kitchen and down another hall, and finally she pushed open a door to a small brick patio with a few chairs around what looked like a fire pit. I could see the swimming pool beyond. The pool house where I’d been staying since Christmas like some very unwanted guest. The gazebo. Tennis courts. The manicured lawns slipped down over the hills to the shadowed tree line. Fresh air abounded. The sounds of the party were muffled.
I could almost pretend I was far away from it all.
“You should be okay out here,” the server said in her neat vest and bow tie. I loved bow ties. Honestly, I was made to be a catering server.
“Thank you so much!” I said, showing way too much enthusiasm for the kindness she’d shown me, but there’d been a real lack of kindness – big or small, in my life in the last year so I always got a little messy around it.
“It’s just where the servers smoke, nothing to get excited about,” she said with lots of side eye.
The server vanished through the open doorway, and I walked out into the grass, past the edge of the light thrown from the lantern fixture over the door. In the distance was the thick tree line that separated the Constantine land from my parent’s old house. When Zilla found out what Dad had done, she burned the house down. That’s when we knew the medication wasn’t enough. That’s when Belhaven happened. When everything changed. What was left of the house after the fire and the willow tree had been bulldozed, the pond filled, the land sold to the Constantine’s.
I could run around to the front of the house and get a key from the valet. Any key. Any car. And I could drive away.
Except, you idiot, you don’t know how to drive.
I could run. Just . . . run. Even as I thought it, I was slipping out of my shoes. The grass cold and damp and real beneath my feet. That was how bad I wanted to escape – my body was committed to action before I’d fully finished the thought. God. I wanted to RUN.
Run and do what? Go where? What about Zilla?
The thoughts were chains erupting out of the grass and wrapping around my feet.
Hands in fists, tears in my eyes, I opened my mouth ready to scream. Ready to let all the poison out, no matter who heard me. Let all of them hear me – Important Woman with the earrings, the Constantine children, the server who in another life might be my best friend – I’d go back in there in a minute and smile and thank them. Show them the stupid rock on my finger and blush and laugh, but now, let them stand in those rooms and know they were robbing me. Killing me. Let them—
“Jesus Christ, you okay?” a thick Irish accent asked from the darkness in the corner of the patio, and instead of screaming I kind of squeaked.
Which, honestly, was about right.
2
I couldn’t see the man in the shadows. It was nothing but dark out here, and then there was the red flare of a cigarette to my left, and I stepped back. Embarrassed and shaking, I tripped over my shoes. “I didn’t think anyone was here. I’ll go—”
“Don’t,” he said.
“Don’t . . . what?”
“Don’t leave.” Just that. And I was getting bossed around plenty in the house behind me, but no one managed to do it so plainly. It was all dressed up in manners. I was wrapped in chains of politeness. I didn’t know what it said about my mental health, but I liked the fact that he didn’t ask. And he wasn’t polite.
This whole situation was fucking me up.
He didn’t step forward to introduce himself, and I stepped away from him keeping my name to myself, too.
“You were just about to do the fifty-yard dash in a ball gown,” he said.
“Not . . . really.”
“Then you weren’t about to scream, neither.”
“No.” The lie came easy. So quick. Second nature now.
“Bullshit.”
“You know, you could leave. Give me some privacy.”
His low laugh rippled out from the shadows, putting goosebumps up and down my arms. “Could I?”
“It would be polite.”
“I’m not much for polite,” he said and took another drag of his cigarette. “I like screaming better than running, though. Gets the blood up.”
“The blood up?” That sounded very Braveheart. Truthfully, I liked it.
“For fightin’ and the like.”
“I’m not much for fighting,” I said, and it was so true, so funny and true and awful all at the same time I had to put a hand over my mouth so a weird laugh/scream thing wouldn’t come tearing out of me. And my chance to run was years behind me.
He made some speculative sound in his throat. Which could be agreement or disagreement or some kind of mix of the two, and it hardly mattered. He hardly mattered. This moment on the patio hardly mattered.
It was why I was still standing there.
Everything inside, every word I said, every drink I had, every person who looked twice at me – all that mattered. It got rung up someplace and added to the price I had to pay.
And I just needed a minute.
“You all right?” he asked.
Terrified.
“You working the party?” I asked, changing the subject. It was always easier to talk about other people.
“You making small talk with the help?” His brogue was so thick it took me a second to make sure I got the words right.
“If that’s what you are, then yes.”
“Well, I’m not sure what I am, to be honest with you.”
“Yeah, me neither.”
“In that dress, sweetheart, you are not the help.”
I pressed my hands to the skirt of my ball gown, gold embroidery and sequins over blush gossamer netting. I felt naked under all the layers, if I was being honest.
“You look beautiful,” he said, like he could see my doubts.
“Thank you.” The compliment bounced off me. When people called my sister beautiful, she cut off all her hair and painted her face. Me? I said thank you and did what they asked of me.
“It came in a box,” I said, stupidly. “Like in the movies. A box with a big red bow.”
“Proof that you shouldn’t be out here with me, Princess,” he said.
He was right. One hundred percent. There were people inside who, if they found out what I was doing, would be pissed. But the rest of my life was going to be spent trying to not piss those people off, this might be the very last second I had for myself.
“Are you a Morelli?” I asked.
“A who?”
“A member of the Morelli family.”
The worst thing he could be was a Morelli. He could be a murdering son of a bitch, and being a Morelli would still be worse. Elaine, Caroline’s daughter, got caught up with Lucian Morelli at Tinsley’s birthday, and it was as if she’d fucked the devil himself.