“Who’s Caleb?” Esa asked.
“He’s my cousin—a state police officer. It doesn’t matter who he is.” He leaned down and spoke softly near her ear. “The point is that I asked you to come to my grandmother’s Halloween party tonight in Bridgeport.”
Her eyes got bigger behind her glasses. “Oh. I see.”
“Not that I’m forgiving you for taking off like that all of a sudden again. Still, I can see how it must have been a little…disconcerting for you.”
She snorted at what she must have considered to be a bald understatement.
“Will you come?” he asked, hoping like hell that was excitement making her pulse leap at her throat and not anxiety about being accosted by a madman in the middle of traffic.
The horn behind them blared loudly.
“O-okay,” she said unevenly.
He grinned. Even the jerk blasting his horn behind him didn’t seem half so annoying. “I’ll pick you up then. At eight?” he asked as he stood.
“I-I, uh…I think it’d be best if I met you there.”
“I’ll come with her,” Carla piped up. She leaned over the console to look up at him. “Jess invited me to the party but he said he needed to help your mom and grandma out. I said I’d get there on my own. He gave me the address.”
Finn frowned as he transferred his gaze to Esa. She stared up at him, her full, pink lips parted, a bewildered expression on her pretty face. She looked so soft at that moment…so vulnerable.
He resisted an urge to lean down and give her a long, thorough kiss through the car window.
He’d prefer to pick her up himself so that she didn’t have such an easy manner of escaping him yet again. But he’d take her any way he could get her.
For the moment, anyway.
“I left you the address on your cell phone, but seeing as how it wasn’t the right number… You’re sure you have the address?” he asked Carla. She nodded eagerly.
“I’ll see you at eight then.” He gave Esa a hard look, daring her to call him a liar, before he made the return trip walking through Dan Ryan traffic.
Chapter Twelve
Esa was so nervous by the time she parked the car at 7:58 that evening that she felt like a sixteen-year-old on the night of her junior prom.
“Jeez, Jess wasn’t kidding when he said that the party would be packed, was he?” Carla said as they got out of the car and followed a football player and a mummy down the street. Sounds of rock music and children shouting with glee filtered through the pitch-black night. Esa had had to park three blocks away, the streets surrounding Finn’s mother’s house were so packed with partygoers’ cars.
“Finn implied he was related to half of Bridgeport by blood or marriage,” Esa recalled.
“Maybe I should have worn a costume,” Carla mused, her eyes on the bright white bandages of the mummy walking in front of them. “Something sexy…a French maid’s outfit or something.”
“That’d have made stellar first impression on Jess’ mom.”
Carla snorted. “As if it matters what kind of an impression I make on her.”
Esa was too distracted to respond. Ever since she’d learned from Finn that he’d tried to call her this week she hadn’t been able to think about anything properly. She glanced down at her body in the darkness, assuring herself that she hadn’t put on her clothes inside out. She recalled Carla’s uncustomary warm praise about her hair and outfit earlier when Esa had picked her up, so she supposed she hadn’t been so out of it that she’d applied two different colors of eye shadow on each lid or something.
Somewhere in all that mental stewing she’d decided that she’d tell Finn the truth about her. Toni
ght.
She was sick of lying to him. She hadn’t engaged in such a bald-faced lie since her undergraduate days. Even back then her mother had suspected the truth about her moving into her smarmy boyfriend Jarvis’ tiny, disgustingly dirty studio.
This was different, of course. Finn wasn’t her mother. So what if he no longer wanted to hook up with her—reprehensible phrase—once he understood she didn’t regularly engage in casual sex flings and work as the publisher of a racy singles’ magazine? Why would she want to be around him if that were the case, anyway?
So that you can get in a few more rounds of what was most likely the best sex you’ll ever have in your life? a sly voice in her head answered.