Her Sexiest Mistake Read online

  Hope kicked the toe of her black-soled boot against the hardwood floor, leaving a dark scuff mark. With the smoothness of one well used to covering her tracks, she stepped on it. “I thought I’d, you know, come see LA.” Her voice was soft, and thick with a Southern drawl.

  Mia did not so much as glance at Kevin. She’d told no one where she was from, not even Tess, and that wouldn’t change now. “Is Sugar with you?”

  “No.”

  “Did you fly?”

  “No.”

  “Did you take the train?”

  “No.”

  Kevin sighed and nudged Hope again. “Listen, you got lucky. You could have pulled your little B&E session on a cop’s house. Or one with a guy who might have been extremely happy to find a young girl in his bedroom. Do you know what I’m saying?”

  “Yeah. You don’t want to do me.”

  Kevin pinched the bridge of his nose. “I’m a teacher,” he said. “A high school teacher. That means that I supposedly have a boatload of patience, but that’s a complete crock. What I have, Hope, is an unfortunate understanding of how your mind works. We’re not the bad guys here.”

  She said nothing, but scuffed the wood again with another kick of her foot.

  Mia winced and eyed her perfect wood floor.

  “Talk to us, Hope,” Kevin said.

  “I didn’t mean to break into your house.” She spoke directly to her boots. “And I wasn’t stealing nothing, I swear it.”

  “I didn’t say you were,” Kevin said. “I said you were snooping.”

  “I was looking around. I wanted to see her stuff.”

  “Whose? Mia’s?” He asked this in a much more patient tone than Mia could have come up with. She wanted answers, and she wanted them now, but Kevin wasn’t rushing anything. In his eyes was an understanding of Hope, one that said he’d been there.

  Hope nodded. Yes, she’d thought she was looking at Mia’s stuff.

  Mia straightened, momentarily forgetting she stood there in nothing but her robe, gripping a glass of wine. “So why were you in Kevin’s house?”

  “Because I mixed up the address.”

  “Keep talking,” Kevin said.

  “I didn’t know anything about her, okay?” Hope lifted her face, bright now with embarrassment. “I wanted to see what she was like, see if I was going to want to stay, and I messed up the two and five of the address.”

  “So you’ve never been to your aunt’s place?”

  Mia’s stomach tightened as Hope shook her head.

  Kevin was nodding as if he understood this crazy situation perfectly. “So you were looking in my drawers, thinking you had Mia’s things in front of you?”

  “Yes.” Again she rolled her lips together, as if fighting with herself. “I’m sorry,” she said, the words seeming to cost her. “I didn’t mean to invade your privacy.”

  “I got that.”

  Hope looked at him. Her face was still mostly covered with her long, streaky black hair, but she actually made eye contact.

  He smiled approvingly.

  She didn’t smile back, but she kept her head up.

  “Now tell us what you’re doing here all alone.”

  She kicked at the wood floor again, and Mia did her best to not yell Stop!

  “I wanted to come to LA like Aunt Apple did,” Hope said. “I wanted to get rich and live like this.”

  “Aunt Apple,” Kevin repeated pointedly and looked at Mia, who suddenly wished she’d downed the entire bottle of wine.

  “Yeah. I mean, look at this place,” Hope said, gesturing with a jerk of her shoulder at the foyer into the large, clean, beautifully decorated living room.

  Mia knew exactly what it looked like to her: a mansion.

  “I want to live like this,” Hope whispered in awe.

  Mia went to say that it took a hell of a lot more than want, but Kevin shot her a warning glance and she slowly closed her mouth. She hated that he was running this show but admitted to herself she was so far out of her league she couldn’t even see her league.

  “How did you get here?” Kevin asked Hope.

  “For my sixteenth birthday a couple months ago, she sent me money. Five hundred dollars.”

  Kevin let out a low whistle. “Score.”

  “I bought a car. An eighty-nine Dodge Diplomat. I drove out here using the return address from the card she sent, but the ink got smeared when I got pulled over and spilled a Coke—”

  “You got pulled over?” Mia asked, horrified.

  “Only once,” she said defensively. “I was speeding by accident.”

  “Oh, my God.”

  Kevin shot her another zip-it look. Mia just shook her head, feeling sick. The kid had driven across the country, by herself. Good God, what if it had been her street name that got smeared? Hope might have gotten lost entirely, and then been at someone else’s mercy, someone possibly not as kind or understanding as Kevin had been to find her prowling through his things.

  “I think my car died in front of your house,” Hope said morosely. “It was on its last legs anyway.”

  Mia let out a choked laugh. The implications of it—of a young girl on her own, and all the inherent dangers she must have faced—made her nauseous. Anything could have gone wrong, and for a moment, thinking about it, she could hardly speak. “Why didn’t you call me?”

  “I dunno.” Another kick of the wood. “You’ve never called me.”

  Over Hope’s head, Kevin looked at Mia. “Never?” he repeated in an even tone that didn’t need any recrimination in it because it was all in his eyes.

  “Never,” Hope said.

  Kevin’s eyes were cool now. “Huh.”

  Oh, yeah, he was done wanting her. She opened her mouth to defend herself, to try to explain the complicated reasons for the lack of physical contact and that she and Sugar had never been close.

  It sounded like a cop-out.

  It was a cop-out.

  “Does your family know where you are?” Kevin asked.

  Hope shook her head. “It’s just my mom. She probably thinks I’m at a friend’s house.”

  “For days?”

  “It’s only been three, but yeah.” Beneath the makeup, she went red. “I—we’ve had some…problems.”

  “Like?”

  “Um…” Another kick of those black boots on her wood floor. “It’s complicated.”

  “Did it involve the police?”

  “Sorta.”

  Oh, that was it. Mia tossed back the wine.

  “All right, my little snooper,” Kevin said. “Wait here.” He cocked his head at Mia and offered a smile that didn’t meet his eyes. “Mia? A minute?”

  Both Hope and Kevin looked at her, seeing her wet hair, her lack of clothes, her tightfisted clench on the now empty wineglass.

  And she’d never felt more naked, more vulnerable in her life.

  Kevin’s eyes didn’t zero in on her body, as she’d have liked, but stayed on her face, his mouth grim. Just last night he’d had his hands and mouth and body all over hers in wild, hot, reckless abandon.

  Now this. Under different circumstances, she might have relished making him feel an inch tall, but without her armor she felt helpless.

  Finally, taking matters into his own hands, Kevin smiled reassuringly at Hope and pulled Mia by the arm into the kitchen.

  Yanking free, Mia went directly to the counter and poured herself another glass of wine. “I can handle it from here.”

  He cocked a brow as he leaned his hips back against her table. An insolent, know-it-all pose. “Can you now? Apple?”

  She looked right into his eyes wanting to kill him with one glance, but at the last minute she held back, knowing damn well if she let him know how much it bothered her, he’d love it.

  “What’s the matter?” he asked. “Cat got your tongue, Apple?”

  “Call me that again and you’ll be walking funny tomorrow.”

  He let out a slow grin, even as she silently kicked her