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My lips twisted up into a smile.
“Thanks a lot, Folsom,” I said softly.
“Anytime, anywhere, anything,” she replied.
Folsom was a good friend of mine. I’d met her years and years ago when I’d saved her from a rapist. He’d been hurting her behind a dumpster in an alley outside of a bar that I used to frequent when I was younger. Though I hadn’t been there to stop the act, I’d been there in the aftermath to help get Folsom back on her feet.
Ever since, she’s said she owed me.
She didn’t.
The child in the background started going bonkers, and then I smiled. “How’s she doing?”
“She” being her daughter, “Payne.”
Payne was a holy terror, and I loved hearing about her shenanigans.
“She’s a freakin’ genius,” she answered. “And it’s literally so hard to keep a genius occupied.”
Was it? I wouldn’t really know.
“I’ll keep that in mind. Let me know if you ever need any help,” I offered.
Though, I knew without a doubt she wouldn’t take me up on it. Folsom was a private person. Her child was her heart and soul, and she was scared silly that the baby would one day have to survive what she had.
Needless to say, I always offered, just in case one day she might let me help her.
“I won’t,” she didn’t surprise me with her words. “Tell your girl I’d love to meet her one day for coffee, though. Sounds like her life was rough like mine.”
With that, Folsom hung up, leaving me with my phone to my head and my eyes on the lawn where Matilda’s father had once stood.
I pulled the phone away from my head, then went back into the house.
Matilda’s gaze immediately came to mine.
“Everything okay?” she asked curiously.
I smirked. “Shouldn’t I be asking you the same thing?”
She shrugged. “Maybe. Maybe not.”
I looked over at Cassius just in time to see his eyes dart to the glass behind me.
I turned to find a young woman getting out of her car with a stack of pizzas in her hand.
I started to walk toward the door, but Cassius beat me to it, not bothering to stop even half a second as he pushed the screen door open with a loud, resounding thud.
He walked right up to the pizza delivery girl and started talking to her, taking the pizzas out of her hand while he was at it.
He tucked them against his body, then leaned down into the girl’s face to say something to her more privately.
“Whoa,” Matilda came up to my side and stared out into the yard with me. “What’s that about? Do you think that’s the girl that threw him for a loop?”
“If I had to guess? Yes,” I confirmed. “He tell you anything about her?”
“Yeah,” she nodded in my peripheral vision. “He was trying to cheer me up because my dad’s an asshole.”
I smirked. “That’s pretty rare for Cassius. He doesn’t share much at all.”
“Well, he shared with me,” she grumbled. “That girl? If it’s her? He wants her bad. But he thinks she’s way too young.”
She did look young.
I wasn’t sure how young, but she definitely wasn’t anywhere near our age.
Midtwenties, if I had to guess.
“Whoa,” Matilda whispered. “She’s poking him in the chest with her finger. She’s a total badass, because I would pee my pants if I had to tell him something he’d done wrong.”
The discussion went on even longer, but eventually they separated with a harsh shout to each other.
Cassius thundered toward the house. The girl stomped toward her car.
Both of them looked back at each other at different times.
Cassius came in just as the girl yelled a parting statement. “You’re an asshole, Cassius Costas!”
I would’ve laughed had the look on Cassius’s face not looked quite so ferocious.
To give him time, I took the pizzas from him, then called Matilda to the table where I had plates and napkins already set up.
Once I was there, I took a seat, waited for her to grab a slice, then explained what I did with her bank account.
“So, I did a thing…”
CHAPTER 11
Unblock me. I wasn’t finished.
-T-shirt
MATILDA
I’d slept like a baby.
As in, right smack-dab in the middle of Etienne’s Alaskan king-size bed.
It was soft, like sleeping on a cloud, and I seemed to sink right into it.
The good—or bad thing depending on how you looked at it—was the bed was so big that I couldn’t even tell that I was sleeping in it with another person.
Not until he’d move, and I’d wake slightly, and remember that he lay beside me.
I slept straight through until morning, woke well past nine, and found myself staring at the wall for all of twenty minutes before I finally pulled myself out of bed.
I didn’t have any appointments today until noon, which meant that I had plenty of time to shower and get by the clinic to check on the progress with Diana before heading to work.
