“Tell you what,” Iris digs in her wallet and pulls out another card and hands it over. ‘I’ll sign autographs while you run this card, okay?”
Then she cuts her eyes to me and drops her voice. “You got any paper, professor?”
“We have paper trays,” the girl with Iris’s card announces.
“Perfect—” Iris ducks again and reads the girl’s name tag. “Perfect, Kami.”
Kami squeals.“King!Raven Blackwell knows my name!”
I pass a stack of paper trays to Iris who has already produced a pen. She gets through two of them before Kami says, “Uh oh.”
Iris looks up. “Whatuh oh?”
“This one’s declined too.” Kami’s suspicious gaze cuts to Iris. “You sure you’re really Raven Blackwell?”
Iris’s brows lower. “I’m sure I’m Iris Adams.”
Kami smirks. “That’s what I mean. Why your card don’t work?”
Iris sighs.
I dig out my wallet again.
“I told y’all that wasn’t her,”a voice from the back of the crowd crows.
“Here.” I slap a twenty on the counter. I’ve seen that look on Iris’s face before. She’s hungry. She’s tired. And she’s about to freak out. I need to get her out of here. “Can we have our food?”
“Can we have our autographs?”
I see Kami’s eyes go wide with horror before she turns. “Brian, shut it.” She turns back and hands me the bags. I give them to Iris in exchange for the stack of autographed paper trays, but not before Mica makes a strategic move to stick his nose in one of the brown bags.
“Hey—”
“Down, Mica,” Iris scolds, more stressed than I’ve ever seen her.
I jerk the bags away before the dog can steal anything and hand over the paper trays. “Keep the change.”
I don’t think I leave skid marks on the drive thru pavement, but it’s close.
“Shit,” Iris hisses.
I brake at the edge of the parking lot. “On a scale of one to ten, how bad was that?” I ask, referring to the exchange with her fans.
“That?” She points back at the Sonic. “That’s not the problem.”
I’m picturing one of those kids posting a video of her card being declined, but if she’s not worrying about that, I don’t want to add it to the list.
“The money?” I don’t want her worrying about that either.
“Yes, I mean—” Her face falls like she’s just been handed the weight of the world. “What has she done? How am I going to pay for things? How am I going to pay Ramon and this new manager, and, shit, an attorney?”
“We’ll figure it out.”
She blinks out of her panic, and her eyes focus on me.“We?”
“Hell, yeah.” I smile at her. “You’re my girlfriend, remember?”
It’s small, but a smile lifts the corners of her mouth. “We,” she says again, but this time the word sounds like relief. Then mischief overtakes the look in her eyes. “You know what she would absolutely hate?”
