God, I should never have invited him to call me Amy.
“Why don’t you call me?” I suggested, wishing, in all my boasting about being grown up, I was grown up enough to let a man I did not like down for any repeat dates face to face.
He pulled slightly away but not far enough for me. “I will, if you give me your number.”
Shit.
Now I was giving him my number!
Well, I’d successfully avoided my mother, who had my number. My best friend, who was alarmingly no longer using my number. And my father, who was rich enough to find commandos to track me down, kidnap me and bring me back to La Jolla to tie me to a chair and interrogate me about why I didn’t phone my mother.
I could avoid Boston Stone.
“Do you have your phone?” I asked.
This was a good move.
He shifted away, saying, “Certainly.”
He took it out.
I gave him my number.
He punched it in then bent and gave me another brief champagne, minty kiss before he leaned away and said, “Goodnight, Amy.”
“’Night, Boston,” I mumbled.
Then he stood there as I let myself in my front door.
I gave him a small smile as I closed the door and I did not wait a polite time so he wouldn’t hear me lock it against him.
I should have told Josie about my lunacy so I could call her and pick over that tediously boring date.
Or I should have shared with Alyssa.
Or I should have found a more mature way to deal with Robin so I could pick over everything with her.
Most especially the fact that, no matter how tedious, I had moved on so far that I was to the point of dating, something else which I wished I could pat myself on the back for.
On this thought, I wandered to my kitchen counter, dropped my sleek new clutch to it and pulled out my phone.
I went to Robin’s text string and typed in, Haven’t heard from you in a while. All okay? And hit send.
It was a puny attempt at communication but at least it was something.
I was staring at my phone, like Robin was hanging around waiting for me to text so she could reply immediately (when she was possibly making voodoo dolls of her selfish, thoughtless, gutless ex-friend who didn’t have the courage to lay it out about the way it needed to be, and sticking pins in it, something I knew she did because I’d done it with her—repeatedly) when it rang in my hand.
I stared at the display giving me a local number I didn’t recognize.
It wasn’t late. Not early, after nine so really too late to call and do it politely (according to my mother, who had a cutoff of nine o’clock for some Felicia Hathaway reason).
That was, unless you were in California, got a new phone with a new number that you hadn’t shared, and wanted to call your wayward daughter or friend and blast it to them.
It was hours earlier in California.
Shit.
Even on this thought, I took the call, putting the phone to my ear. “Hello?”
“You went out with that dick.”
I stared at my counter.
It was Mickey.
“Mickey?” I asked to confirm.
He didn’t confirm but he didn’t need to.
What he did was ask, “You talk to Josie about that guy?”
“I’m not really sure how this is any of your business,” I replied.
“You didn’t,” he stated. “You did, Josie woulda told you that that asshole tried to steal her home from her. Lavender House.”
I blinked at my counter.
Lavender House, Josie’s house, was beautiful. Stunning. And it was pure Josie, imposing and welcoming at the same time.
Further, she’d told me it had been in her family for generations.
She loved it. She loved the family in it. In all that was Josie, who was her brand of kind and sweet but still kind of a hard nut to crack, those two facts were plain to see.
“What?” I breathed to Mickey.
“Yeah. And not up front. He did it nasty. Freaked her out. Scared her shitless. Brought back family, the bad kind Josie hadn’t seen in years, who not only got up in her face publicly, but also tried to break in to steal shit in the middle of the night.”
“Oh my God,” I whispered.
“Good people, Boston Stone,” he said sarcastically and my spine snapped to.
“You could have said this to me yesterday, Mickey.”
“You weren’t big on listenin’ to me yesterday, Amy.”
“That’s because you were being kind of a jerk yesterday, Mickey,” I retorted.
“Kind of a jerk lookin’ out for you, Amy,” he shot back.
He was kind of right about that so I changed tactics.
“I’ll have you know,” I began, “that my daughter was standing on the sidewalk and she heard what you said about her father.”
“I’m sure that’s supposed to make me feel bad,” he returned instantly. “But it doesn’t. See, I’ve been tryin’ to puzzle out why a woman who makes unbe-fucking-lievable cupcakes, who plays Frisbee in my backyard, who’s got so much money she doesn’t have to work but she doesn’t spend her time at the spa and instead spends it at a goddamned nursing home, who looks about ready to rope my kid to the chair at the fuckin’ possibility he might do something dangerous for a living, that happening in a fucking decade…why that woman has only got her kids for two days of the month.”