Foolish Games(26)
“Well, obviously my dad was gonna find out, but it would have been worth the punishment if I could get Julianne Marchione to use my necklaces or earrings in one of her photo shoots. I didn’t even know my dad knew her until my mom was blabbing to all her friends that one of the players on the Blaze had knocked up a famous fashion designer.” She looked up at Annabeth sheepishly. “Sorry. I mean, well, about the knocked-up part.”
“Nothing to be sorry about. That’s exactly what happened.” Annabeth reached up to finger one of the earrings dangling from Sophie’s ear. “Did you make this? It’s stunning.”
The earring, a cascade of wire-wrapped clusters of purple amethyst briolettes topped with moss aquamarine stones, shimmered in the room’s low light. As the owner of an antiques shop, Annabeth had developed an eye for distinctive and original jewelry, and Sophie’s creation was unique and very fashionable. Not to mention marketable.
The girl reached up and withdrew the earring from her ear and handed it to Annabeth for a closer look. “Yeah, I have a matching necklace for them, too.”
“Soph is a whiz at making jewelry,” Walker chimed in, admiration in his voice. “You should see what she can do with a soldering iron. And those thingies she makes with the leather, they’re—”
“Walker, I don’t think Annabeth cares about my jewelry.” Sophie snatched back the earring and began putting it back in.
“Actually, I do.” Annabeth looked over at the girl’s stunned face, her hand poised with the earring halfway in her earlobe.
“You do?”
“I own a small antiques store in a very trendy summer resort town. My customers love one-of-a-kind jewelry like yours. I’m sure it would sell quite easily.”
Sophie’s face lit up, nearly matching the soft pink of her hair. “Really, Annabeth? Oh my gosh, that’s so mad!”
“But”—Annabeth held up a finger as Walker and Sophie were fist-pumping one another—“only if you tell me why you need the money. If you’re using it to buy drugs, the deal is off.”
“Hey!” Walker cried.
“Drugs? No way,” Sophie protested. “I’m so not into that!”
“Yet you’d risk getting grounded to sell some jewelry. Why?” Annabeth had worked with enough teenagers to know things weren’t always what they seemed. Her gut was telling her Sophie was sincere. She hoped her gut was right.
“I’m perpetually grounded. I have a D in physics, so I’ll likely spend my summer trapped at home watching the twins while my mom plays tennis at the club and weekends at the shore with her book club.” Sophie leaned back against the sofa cushions and crossed her arms in disgust. “My friend Lizzie moved to L.A. last year and I want to go visit her. My dad keeps saying he’ll take me, but since there’s no professional football team in Los Angeles, that isn’t likely to happen. So I wanna buy my own ticket. Lizzie says I’d like California. I wouldn’t stand out so much there. I just want to meet people like me, you know?”
“The kids at our school are all rich, WASPy tight-asses,” Walker added. “They don’t appreciate Sophie’s artistic genius.”
Annabeth’s heart squeezed tightly in her chest at Walker’s words. She could easily relate. At fifteen, she’d been thrust into a small-town school in the heart of the Bible Belt weeks after her free-spirited hippie parents had been killed in a car accident. Her parents didn’t believe in the institution of marriage or school or anything else, instead roaming the country wherever the wind blew them. Needless to say, the transition to normal life was a bumpy one for Annabeth, and acceptance was difficult to achieve. Of course, showing up to school pregnant at sixteen hadn’t helped.
“Here.” She pulled a business card out of her clutch and handed it to Sophie. “I’ll be in the store tomorrow afternoon. Why don’t you call me then and we can chat about what you have and work out the details of getting your product to the shop.”
Sophie hurled herself into Annabeth’s arms. “Oh, Annabeth, I love you!”
“Sophie Claire!”
The three of them jumped to their feet at the sound of Hank’s voice.
“Dad!” Sophie squeaked.
“What are you doing here?” Hank demanded.
Sophie clenched her fingers in her skirt. “Um . . .”
Hank ignored his daughter. “And more importantly, how did you get here?”
“Yo.” Clearly, Walker didn’t possess innate self-preservation skills, or he’d have kept quiet.
Fisting his hands at his hips beneath his unbuttoned suit jacket, Hank glared at Walker behind his wire-framed glasses. Not quite as tall as Will, Hank still wasn’t a small man. She could see well-defined pectoral muscles beneath his crisp dress shirt. A small abrasion, likely from his razor, marred his rugged jaw, but it didn’t detract from his handsomeness. His nostrils flared briefly when his steely blue eyes came to rest on her. Annabeth had to lock her knees at the fierceness of his gaze.