Dirty Little Secrets(15)
“You wouldn’t have—” I began, before cutting myself off. Dad wouldn’t have approved, and while I thought he and Layla were wrong in it, I wasn’t angry enough or invested enough in the issue to say anything. “Alix, despite having blonde hair, you’ve got a decent head on your shoulders. But we’re getting away from the question. What the hell do you want to do today?”
“You buying?” Alix asked with a little grin, and I shook my head, returning it.
“Hell no. I’m an attorney, you’re the world famous model. You should be buying me stuff.”
Alix paused for a second, and I could see the wheels in her head turning. She’s not dumb; in fact, if she had applied herself, she probably could have been just as good in college as I was. Like I said before, though, I can tell pretty easily when someone is trying to pull a fast one on me, and even before she opened her mouth I knew that Alix was trying to sell me a line of crap.
“Actually, that’s kind of the problem I’ve gotten into,” she said, giving me a shy look that I knew was part manufactured, but still, I had to admit it was effective. “Uhm, I’m really short on funds right now.”
“What are you talking about?” I asked. “I mean, how short are you?”
“Well, I kinda went hog wild after a recent deal,” she told me, “and went out, buying a bunch of stuff for my friends. I mean, it was an out of the blue deal, and they promised me a huge contract, face of the company, all the stuff I could have wished for. They even cut me a check for seventy-five thousand dollars as an up-front as their cover girl. I figured it was the biggest break I’d ever had, so I went shopping, putting it on my credit cards and signing a few loans on jewelry, some swag for a guy who had helped me out, all that sort of stuff.”
The story was decent, but I could already see cracks in it. I mean, who the hell cuts a check anymore? I decided to feed her some more rope, see how long it would take for her to get to the point and hang herself. “What happened?”
“The company went belly up. I mean, even before they’d sent me the actual contract, the owner flew off to Fiji or Peru or someplace like that, and the whole place just disappeared. The check bounced, and now I’m facing a call on a lot of stuff I bought for a lot of people that I can’t exactly go around asking for it back in order to return it or even try and get store credit.”
“How much are we talking here?” I asked. “I mean, what could the damage be, five, six thousand?”
“Sixty thousand,” Alix replied, blushing in shame. “I know, I know, what the hell was I thinking, running up a sixty thousand dollar shopping bill, but I mean, if you’d heard the offer they promised me, sixty thousand was small potatoes.”
I wanted to yell at her. Sixty thousand? But then I remembered that her story was a total lie. Well, not a total lie. I could see in her face that she needed the money, and quickly. There was no other reason she’d be asking me for it. “When do you need it?”
She half winked to herself and pulled her mouth to the side, a common expression she made when she was thinking, and I had to resist the urge to want to kiss her, she looked so damn cute when she did it. “The store said they need it by Friday. Kade, I know it’s a lot to ask for, but if I went to Mom and Derek, they’d both freak out. I just need it for a month, maybe two. I’ve got some shoots lined up, and the UFC might bring me back for their next Las Vegas pay-per-view, they said the fighters really liked me. I can pay you back, I just can’t do it right away. A lot of my savings are tied up right now and I can’t get to them.”
I nodded. In my mind, I knew I should tell her no. I’d had people try to feed me lines like this before. Usually they were people who were caught up in something that they’d done to themselves and had come back to bite them in the ass. Gambling, drugs, stuff like that. Yet for some reason, maybe it was the black eye, maybe it was who she was, I don’t know, but I knew that Alix needed the money for something that wasn’t her fault. Besides, I didn’t need the money. I had a trust fund that I’d never touched, just sitting around gathering interest. “Okay,” I said with fake casualness. “I can get you the cash. In fact, when we get back to the house, I’ll go online and do the transfer. My bank will do it tomorrow morning, you should have it by Tuesday at the latest.”
“Really?” Alix asked, the final nail in the coffin of her lies. It wasn’t the sort of reply that someone makes when they get an unexpected gift, or when a long shot comes through. It was the sort of reply an untrained liar makes when they think they’ve gotten away with it. Basically, Alix was saying, I really got away with this?