Oh. My. God.That’swhat he remembers about me?
“Looks like you do now, though,” he murmurs, looking away.
My face catches fire and my brain scrambles for some embarrassing memory about him to make us square. Except all my memories of Dylan seem to revolve around how ridiculously cool he’s always been. There has to besomething.Oh! I know a good one. “Well, since we’re taking this fun little trip down memory lane, what about that time you listed your virginity for sale on eBay?”
He groans, covering his face with his palm. “I’m going to kill Hayley for telling you about that.”
“Mommy said you shouldn’t kill people,” Ella says in a singsong voice, dragging a comb through her doll’s ratty blonde hair.
I have to stifle my laughter. “She’s right, Dylan. You shouldn’t kill people.”
“Not even when they tell your secrets?” he asks Ella.
She shakes her head. “Nope.”
After pinky-promising his niece that he will not murder Hayley, Dylan waves his scepter at me and says, “Did my sister tell you the whole story about the eBay incident? That the only reason I did it was because my parents refused to buy me this expensive bike and told me to raise the money myself?”
She hadn’t told me that part. “No. If I’d known that, I would’ve bid ten cents instead of five.”
He hums a laugh. “You didn’t bid a thing, you little liar. You were still in pigtails.”
“So think of how much five cents actually meant to me.”
When his gaze holds mine for a long moment, Nate’s warning pushes into my head.“Stay away from Dylan King. That guy’s trouble.”
Why am I standing here talking to Hayley’s brother instead of getting that sweater? For some reason, I can’t seem to bring myself to leave.
A smirk tugs at my lips. “It’s a shame that eBay deleted the listing. With the number of girls who’d have thrown themselves off a bridge for you back then, you could’ve gotten ten bikes. Hayley called you the Still Springs Heart Slayer. One look from Dylan, and bang—instant death.”
I expect a witty comeback or another humiliating story about my past. Instead, the smile falls off Dylan’s face, and something shifts in his eyes.
He tugs his bottom lip between two fingers and then angles his body to face Ella, who’s trying to force a tiny shoe onto her doll’s foot. “When you go downstairs, can you ask Iris to come get Ella?” he says to me. “Tell her the babysitter’s tired.”
“Yeah, no problem. I was just kidding, by the way,” I add for the record.
“Don’t fret, Little Jade.” He doesn’t look at me as he picks up Ella’s doll to help her with the second shoe. “I’ll see ya around.”
The abrupt dismissal makes my throat burn. I swallow tightly and head back toward the hallway, confusion swirling in my chest. I’m halfway out the door when I overhear Ella ask Dylan what “virginity” means. By the time he responds in that deep, smoky voice of his, I’m too far away to hear the explanation.
CHAPTERFIVE
DYLAN
When my bestfriend from college lost his mom after a long battle with cancer, he’d had to deal with one small house and an ugly dog that never met a floor it didn’t rub its ass on.
He and his siblings had been slowly getting rid of her lifetime collection of porcelain houses over the course of her illness. His sister adopted the dog, they donated the rest of her belongings to charity, handed over the keys of the house to a real estate agent, and then washed their hands of the rest.
From the stack of pages listing our parents’ assets sitting in the middle of the table, I’m pretty sure my sisters and I are in for a shitshow. Not what you want to wake up to first thing on a Monday morning.
“So you’re basically saying we all have to be here every step of the way?” Hayley asks.
It’s nice to know I’m not the only one shitting it here.
Miriam, our parents’ lawyer, shakes her head. “No, I said that all four of you are listed as executors on your parents’ will, which means if you’d like to sell anything, you will all need to sign the paperwork and have it notarized.”
“But I’m supposed to go to Greece for a month and Croatia after that,” Hayley says in a small voice.
Ah, yes. My sister’s soul-searching trip around the Mediterranean that she booked as part of her New Year’s resolution for more “self-care.”
