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I scanned outside to make sure the car didn’t come back.
I counted five tiles on the floor and noticed a small dark stain on one of them.
I didn’t, however, look anywhere near Corbin.
He groaned and leaned back in his chair, the wood creaking. “Who did you tell?”
“I don’t have any idea what you’re talking about,” I lied. A big fat one.
Paint was missing from the leg of one table on the other side of the bakery, and the group of evergreens they wrapped around the fireplace were lower on the left side than the right. Two cars drove by as I studied the area.
In that time, Corbin never took his eyes or his attention away from me. He stared at me as if he might pull the answer from my brain himself. He stared so long he lost some of his cute points.
That was a complete lie. Corbin was never cute to begin with. His beauty was more mysterious and refined, as if he was always a little ticked off but also half cocky and arrogant jerk. He gave off the air of a man who would eventually break your heart, but he was so pretty you couldn’t spare yourself the misery.
And unfortunately, staring at me didn’t make him lose any cute points, if anything, it made my heart beat faster. Not from fear but from wondering what he’d do if I ever ticked him off.
Which I was probably about to do.
Finally, I gave in to his endless, relentless stare and threw my hands in the air, drawing the attention of one woman behind the bakery counter. “I had to give a reason for missing work. If anyone asks, my grandma is sick.”
It wasn’t like I could call up and say, “Hey, by the way, my boss gave me a thumb drive, and now I need to find somebody to break the encryption since he didn’t leave me his password.” That would have been suspicious.
What did Corbin want from me? This was my first time doing any of this. I made a mistake.
Corbin rubbed two fingers over his left eyebrow and closed both his eyes. I imagined he was counting, but his lips didn’t move. They were stuck in a distinctive straight line. “How did you pay for your room at the bed-and-breakfast?”
My mouth fell open, and I dropped my fist on the table, causing the saucer to rattle. “They required a credit card,” I said with a hint of whine in my voice.
I wasn’t a world-famous hacker. I didn’t have ways to make fake credit cards or IDs. And it’s not like I had thousands of dollars of cash sitting around my house. I had $4.27 in the middle console of my car. I knew this because at one time I had ten dollars, but then I stopped and bought a medium iced coffee.
It was important to always to have a small stash of emergency money for coffee and doughnuts. A girl had to have priorities.
He moaned, his eyes closing again as his two fingers worked his hairline at his forehead. If he wasn’t careful, he’d end up bald on that side of his head.
Yeah, no way could I find Corbin cute any longer. Now he was super annoying. When his eyes opened and he leaned back in his chair, meeting my gaze across the table, I guessed he wanted to strangle me. But he was thwarted by a bakery full of witnesses.
And it wasn’t my fault. None of this was my fault. We needed to blame Sean. Or this Grandmaster dude.
“Babe, you are on the run. You don’t use a credit card.”
I threw my hands up again but less forcefully this time so I didn’t draw as much attention. “I’m not on the run. I was meeting with an asshole who eventually turned me away. And besides, even if I was running,” I was not at any point willing to admit that’s what happened here, “I’ve never done this before, so how would I know what to do? No one printed out the rulebook for me.”
I was four classes away from an MBA and I absolutely guaranteed that fake IDs and being on the lam techniques were not in any course syllabi. Definitely would’ve remembered learning about that at any point in my education.
A skinny brunette woman wearing a pink apron with Tabitha embroidered directly in the middle approached our small table. She didn’t spare a glance in Corbin’s direction but maintained eye contact with me and a smile as she set a platter in front of us. The small plate held two additional chocolate chip cookies, and it was clear from how she put them closer to my side that they were both meant for me.
I nodded and gave a whispered, “Thanks,” in return. Never once had I turned away a cookie.
I took one off the plate and underneath was a piece of paper with a phone number scratched into it with a blue pen.
Tabitha tapped the piece of paper twice. “If you need someone to talk to after today, text me.”
Before I even thanked her for the generosity, Corbin reached across the table and snatched the paper from underneath the cookie, barely disrupting the one that was still there. He ripped it in two before handing it back to Tabitha. “Hazel is under my care.”
Rude.
I reached out to Tabitha, and as if she read my mind, she handed me the two pieces of paper, which I slipped in my pocket before Corbin did anything about it.
