15. Wren

CHAPTER 15

Wren

L ola’s “special coffee” turned out to be hot chocolate. While I got to grips with the coffee machine, Blane dumped two spoonfuls of instant powder into a mug, added hot water and plenty of milk, and then frothed it with one of those little electric whisks. This was a side of him I hadn’t seen before today—the man who cared enough about a young visitor that he kept a pink Hello Kitty mug in his cupboard.

Who cared enough about an unexpected guest to provide her with fancy toiletries and new clothes. I’d stuffed a few things into a bag before I ran out the door, and I figured I could wash my underwear in the bathroom sink, but when I left my room this morning, I’d found a row of carrier bags outside the door with a note. We can exchange anything that doesn’t fit. But it did fit, all of it, and whoever he’d sent out shopping had picked the type of clothes I liked—leggings, slouchy sweaters, a pair of fluffy slippers. Shorts for outside, although I couldn’t imagine when I’d be able to leave. It was exactly the stuff I’d buy for myself, if my credit card wasn’t dangerously close to the limit and I could afford to visit designer stores rather than Target.

The only designer clothing I’d owned in the past had been gifted to me by Dominic. Dresses I had no occasion to wear and shoes I’d twist an ankle in. I say “gifted,” but really I’d ended up buying it myself because he still owed me nearly four thousand bucks that I’d loaned him to pay his law school tuition. He’d repay me as soon as he got a job, he’d promised, but what he’d actually done was squander his paycheck on things I didn’t want and then fuck an eighteen-year-old named Rebecca. Call me Becky , she’d said when he introduced us at the company picnic three weeks before I found her naked beneath my fiancé. I wanted to scratch her pretty green eyes out.

But they were in Wyoming and I was in Vegas, so I forced myself to think of something other than Dominic and Becky and the fact that she was pregnant.

“Does Lola come over often?” I asked Blane quietly as Beauregard produced a box of toys from somewhere.

“A couple of times a week. Marianna is a friend of Vee’s, and she’s still finding her feet in the city.”

“How did Lola know my name?”

Blane’s brows drew together. “Honestly, I’m not sure. Marianna drops snacks off for me at Tilt from time to time, and the kids often tag along, so maybe she saw you there?”

It was possible, although I was good with faces and I didn’t recall bumping into them.

“I guess.”

“Lola’s very clever, and she has an excellent memory. Every time I buy her a new book, she reads it overnight and tells me about it the next day.”

“She can read already?”

“Okay, so they’re mostly full of pictures, but she can read a little. ”

“How old is she?”

“Four. She just had a birthday.”

“You’re a good man, Blane.”

“There are many who would disagree.”

If only I’d known that in less than a week, I would be one of them, then I’d have done things differently. Fled the country with Kayden, or even taken a cab back to the Rest-E-Z Motel and prayed. Although praying wouldn’t have done me much good, as it turned out.

But clairvoyance wasn’t one of my gifts, so I just finished making the coffee, drew a cat in the foam on Lola’s hot chocolate, and took a seat at the table. The cookies were lumpy but delicious all the same, and Marianna cut slices of strawberry shortcake and served those too. How did Blane still have abs?

“I wish I could bake like this,” I mumbled around a mouthful of fruity goodness. “I mean, I’m fine with the basics, but…”

“I learned from my mom,” Marianna said. “She worked in a hotel in Los Angeles.”

My mom had been too busy trying to make ends meet to teach me to cook. Kayden and I had mostly been left to fend for ourselves, locked in the apartment while she went out to work. At the time, it had been normal, having a mom who was barely there. She used to come home in the early hours, send us to school, and then sleep until it was time to pick us up again.

But one morning, when I was eight years old and Kayden was seven, she hadn’t come home at all. We’d been terrified when the police broke down the door, more frightened still when we were shipped off to foster homes and expected to adapt to a whole new way of life. Too old for anyone to want to adopt us, too young to understand the details of what was happening. In the beginning, we’d sometimes get placements together for a month or two, but most of the time, we were shuffled around Wyoming alone, fed and clothed but never truly wanted. Email was our lifeline until I followed him to Nevada.

“My mom wasn’t that great of a cook.”

There, that sounded better than saying she was in prison for dealing drugs, didn’t it? Although she swore she’d only been acting as a courier, the jury hadn’t believed her. Did I believe her? Honestly, I barely knew her. We’d lost touch over the years, and I had no idea what to think.

The one certainty was that she hadn’t been much of a mom.

“If you want, I can show you how to make a cake,” Marianna offered.

“Cookies,” Lola said. “Peanut butter ones.”

“Or cookies.”

My heart gave an awkward flip. I’d always struggled to make friends. There’d never seemed much point when I always got moved on again a few weeks later, and if I kept my head down, the bullies mostly left me alone. Caria was the one person who’d seen the real me. Caria, the extrovert who’d insisted on dragging the introverted new girl at yoga out for cocktails and showing her the city. And as for Lola, I had to be reading too much into the situation. She was just a normal little girl who loved peanut butter.

“I’d like that. Cookies or cake, I don’t mind which.”

Marianna beamed at me. “Great! I’ll give you my address, and we can arrange a day. Maybe this weekend? I promised Lola and Pablo that we’d go see the Wildlife Habitat at the Flamingo on Saturday, but we could do Sunday?”

This Sunday? No, no, no, Caria had to take priority. And Marianna wanted me to go to her home? Keeping a low profile was more important than baking. Now I needed to decline, but politely. Darn it, I should have learned. Keep your head down, Wren.

“Uh, I’m not sure…”

But Blane interrupted. “Why don’t you come over here? I’ll provide all the ingredients, and Lola can play with Myrtle. Joseph won’t mind watching Pablo.”

Beauregard didn’t look thrilled at the idea of playing babysitter, but he nodded his agreement. “Anything for cookies.”

“What about…you know?” I asked.

“All in hand,” Blane assured me, and Marianna didn’t seem to pick up on the tension.

“Oh, sure. We can come over, but I’ll bring the ingredients.”

“Then it’s a date.” Blane quickly corrected himself. “For the two of you. Well, not a date, more of a… Never mind. We’ll see you on Sunday.”

Awkward, but I knew how to handle that. When the conversation gets tough, change the subject. That philosophy had stood me in good stead through the years, including in my current job. Or at least, the job I should have been doing if I weren’t lying low in an apartment to avoid a psychopathic killer and his henchmen. If a guest got too personal, I steered the conversation back toward blackjack. If he suggested some quiet time alone, I asked how his wife was.

“Who’s Myrtle?” I asked. It was an unusual name. “Is she a friend of yours?”

“She’s a cat. And I also have a cousin named Myrtle—actually, she’s my fourth cousin once removed—but cat-Myrtle is around more than girl-Myrtle.”

“You own a cat?”

I hadn’t imagined Blane as the type of man who’d have a pet. He seemed too…I don’t know…not so much self-cent red, more focused on other things. But he’d surprised me plenty of times over the past twenty-four hours, so maybe I’d been too quick to judge by appearances?

“She’d dispute the ‘own’ part, but she mostly lives here.”

“Mostly?”

“She comes and goes.”

“A mouser, huh?”

Blane spluttered his coffee. “Heavens, no. She likes to sneak into shows on the Strip.”

“Really? How do you know?”

“Because I put a tag on her collar, and people keep calling us to collect her. Do you like cats, Wren?”

“I always wanted a pet, but when I was younger, I got moved around too much.”

“How about now?”

“Now? I guess…I guess I still dread having to leave at a moment’s notice, and it happened, didn’t it?”

“We’re going to fix that.” Blane watched me over the rim of his mug. “You said you got moved around. Who moved you? Your parents?”

Ah, crap. Why didn’t I learn to watch my big, stupid mouth?

“Not my parents. My brother and I were both in the foster system.”

“I see. Was that a good thing or a bad thing?”

“I…I…I’m not sure.” Honestly? I’d missed my mom, but she hadn’t been a great parent by any measure; I’d learned that as I got older. What I craved was stability, but it still remained stubbornly out of reach. “There was no point in wishing for what-might-have-beens, because I didn’t have the power to change anything.”

“But you do now. In the winds of change, find the courage to spread your wings and soar.”

Soar? He had me confused with someone else. Survival was my goal. Survival, occasional flickers of happiness, and chocolate milkshakes from Good Eats. Nobody made milkshakes the way they did, health violations be damned. Caria always told me I should take a chance. And once, I had taken a chance. I’d accepted Dominic Winchester’s proposal and moved from Clearmont to Cheyenne, only to find him in bed with a barely legal intern a month before we were due to get married.

I shrugged, non-committal. The thought of getting into a deep and meaningful conversation with my boss, his weird assistant, and a virtual stranger gave me the heebie-jeebies.

Beauregard came to my rescue. “Spread your wings and soar? You got that out of a fortune cookie.”

“So? That doesn’t mean it’s not true.”

Marianna giggled. “I got one from Wong Fu’s last week that said ‘A closed mouth gathers no feet.’”

“Why would you want to gather feet?”

“I have no idea.”

“Probably written by someone with a foot fetish,” Beauregard said. “It’s a thing.”

That was true; it was. “One of the girls in my yoga class sells pictures of her feet on the internet. She makes good money. People will pay a fortune for unwashed socks.”

“Are you joking?” Marianna asked.

“Swear I’m not. She gets a pedicure every week and writes it off as a business expense.”

And we were away from the subject of my past. Phew. Beauregard found a dubious website—toenail clippings for thirty bucks a bag, anyone?—and Marianna eww-ed as she finished her coffee. Lola drank her hot chocolate, and Pablo managed to knock the top off his sippy cup and spill juice everywhere. When Blane wiped up the mess, I found myself slightly surprised he didn’t have a housekeeper for that. He’d always struck me as a man who would avoid doing his own dirty work. Life is full of surprises. While the three of them chatted, I got back to fretting over Caria. How was she being treated? Was she even still alive? The helplessness of the situation left my stomach churning. This was like being a child again, sitting there on the doorstep with my black plastic bag full of belongings as I waited for the harried lady from CPS to show up with news of my next adventure.

“Have you heard anything from Zion yet?” I asked Blane after Marianna and the kids had trooped into the elevator. Beauregard had departed too, muttering about an issue with scheduling in Club Dead.

“Not yet.” Blane’s phone rang right at that moment, and he glanced at the screen. “I have to take this.”

“Is it…?”

“No, it isn’t. Nothing for you to worry about.” He flashed me a smile, but there was a tightness in his expression. “Everything is just fine.”