At Any Price(50)

If things had gone according to plan, this would have been over with a week ago and by now, we’d be strangers once more. And before, I’d felt like that was absolutely the right thing to do, but now…It was weirdly illogical. I wanted to know all about him before we never saw each other again.

Alex showed up just as we were descending the stairs to leave less than an hour later. When she looked up and saw Adam, her jaw dropped and her gaze shot to me, eyes rounding. Subtle she was not. I wondered how she’d managed to get over here so fast from her apartment in Fullerton once her mom had called to tell her he was here.

I sighed and made introductions. “Good to meet you,” Alex smiled, leaning to shake his hand and bat her big eyes at him. “Mia’s told me so much about you!”

My lips pursed. What a little liar. Adam smiled and shot a sidelong glance at me. I shrugged, throwing my hands up. “We gotta get going.”

Alex watched us go and when I looked back, she waved her hand in front of her face to fan herself—a clear indication that she found him hot. Then she put her hand to her ear, mimicking holding a phone and mouthed an exaggerated Call me.

We hit the road and I breathed a sigh of relief. That had been a close call. The more I kept Adam separated from my friends, the fewer awkward questions I’d have to answer later. When I glanced over at him, he had a grin on his face.

“What?” I asked.

“You’ve told her all about me, huh?”

I looked away, cheeks heating. “She’s a hopeless liar,” I muttered.

The day was truly beautiful. I was convinced there was no more gorgeous weather on this planet than what we enjoyed in Southern California in May. The smells of the white jasmine bushes that were planted everywhere combined with the blossoms on the orange trees and imbued the air with a honey scent. It was too early for the June Gloom, where mornings were overcast until they burned off into hot afternoons. In May, every day was fresh, crystal clear and sunny.

And in his convertible—a dark blue vintage 1950s Porsche—we zoomed down the freeway in the carpool lane, bypassing Saturday beach traffic.

I’d bundled my long hair as best I could into a ponytail band, making a messy bun. Still errant strands of hair whipped around my face and into my eyes as I squinted through my cheapo drugstore sunglasses, tapping my foot in time with Depeche Mode’s “Pleasure Little Treasure” on the stereo. So he liked his music like he liked his cars—classics. I was beginning to realize that Adam was the rock star of computer geeks. And apparently a lot of the tech magazines agreed with me.

Adam parked at a small underground garage a few blocks away from the bridge and we walked the rest of the way—he insisting on carrying my bag, which wasn’t heavy at all. I resisted at first, but he practically yanked it out of my hands.

“Your mama raised a very nice boy,” I said and then immediately regretted my words when I saw his jaw tighten. How could I have forgotten? I stopped, placing a hand on his rock-hard bicep. “I’m so sorry.”

He shook his head. “No worries, Emilia.” But those dark brows creased over his sunglass-veiled eyes.

I cleared my throat, still feeling terrible. Taking a deep breath, I started walking again. I decided to ease the awkwardness by talking about a subject I hated as well. “No, I know how it feels whenever someone brings up my dad or asks me about him. I never had a dad. I don’t even know his name so I call him the Biological Sperm Donor because that’s all he is to me.”

He glanced at me sidelong. “You were never curious to meet him?”

I shrugged. “He didn’t want me so why would I want him?” And we kept walking, past the park gardens of Bay Island, alive with bright pinks, vivid yellows—all of spring in a flowerbed. “He was married with a family and he never bothered to reveal that little detail to my mom before he got her pregnant. When she told him she was going to have a baby, he paid her a big sum of money to shut up and ‘go take care of it.’”

“Ah. A right bastard, then.”

“Yep. So I don’t give a shit who he is.”

He glanced at me again. “But he’s well off. You could have, you know, tried to get the money you need from him.”

Now it was my turn to tighten my jaw. “Why ask from him what I can do for myself?”

And I could tell he wanted to say more but cut himself off with a slight shake of his head, his grip tightening on my bag. Was he actually angry?

I paused, watching him carefully. This wasn’t the first time I’d gotten the impression he had torn feelings about the auction—this entire arrangement. I remembered the insults he was slinging around when we first met—and some of the other offhand comments he had made during our brief time in the Netherlands, always questioning my judgment and reasons for entering the auction in the first place.