Dirty Read online

  I cringed at the language and became aware, suddenly, that I was being just the sort of nosy neighbor I despised, peeking out the blinds. I stepped back from the window but could still see through it. Could still hear Mrs. Ossley’s shouts through the open screen. More thumps and thuds as more things flew out the back door to land in the grass, and then I saw what they were.

  Books.

  The bitch was throwing books. One of them struck Gavin on the shoulder and fell in a flutter of pages to the grass. He bent to pick it up, his arms full of them. His face had twisted.

  She threw another one, and I realized she wasn’t just tossing them out the door. She was aiming for him. This one, a thick hardback, struck him in the hip hard enough to knock him back a step.

  They say that people in tense situations can do things like lift cars or run into burning buildings. This wasn’t as dramatic as that, but I did move fast, without thinking, and was out my back door and into my yard before I even had time, really, to ponder it.

  A waist-high chain link fence separates our patches of grass. Mindful of my privacy, I’d had it installed when I moved in. It had served to keep my neighbors from encroaching on my property, but now it kept me out of theirs as effectively.

  “Gavin,” I said. “Are you all right?”

  He startled, though he had to have seen me flying out of my kitchen. He opened his mouth to say something, but his mother answered for him.

  “Get inside the house, Gavin.”

  I looked over at her. Silhouetted in the light from her house, she was no more than a shadow. I had no trouble seeing the glass she still held. Apparently not even throwing books was enough reason to set it down.

  Gavin bent to pick up the books she’d thrown.

  “Leave that,” she ordered. “Get inside.”

  “Mrs. Ossley. Is there a problem?” My voice sounded colder than I’d meant it to, and it must have antagonized her.

  “No, Miss Kavanagh” came her retort, the words spitting out of her like they tasted of vomit. “Why don’t you go back inside and mind your own business?”

  “Gavin?” I asked quietly. “Are you all right?”

  He nodded and moved toward the house, then paused to pick up one more book. This once had landed, open, in a puddle left from a late afternoon shower. The spine had bent and cracked, and a few of the pages fluttered to the ground when he lifted it. Mud splashed the rest of them.

  It was my copy of The Little Prince. The one my childhood neighbor Mrs. Cooper had given me. He handed it to me over the fence, refusing to meet my eyes.

  “I’m sorry,” he muttered.

  I had nothing to say as I took it from him. I could only watch him head inside. The shadow in his doorway moved aside to let him in, and the door slammed behind him, leaving me standing in my pajamas with a ruined book in my hands.

  Chapter 10

  “This is the place you took me to, the day we met.” I looked up at the sign, which showed a rather grisly drawing of a wolf’s head, mouth tearing into the body of a sheep. “The Slaughtered Lamb.”

  “Very observant.” He held the door open for me to go inside. “Let’s find a table.”“I could hardly forget a place with a name like that. Do they serve food?”

  “Very good food.”

  “Good,” I said. “I’m starving.”

  We found a table toward the back and sat. He smiled as he handed me the menu, which featured traditional pub food like fish and chips and shepherd’s pie. He grabbed the beer list.

  “Me, too.” He studied the list. “I’m glad you eat.”

  I laughed. “Of course I eat.”

  “No. I mean you eat,” Dan said. “I take some women out and they just nibble.”

  “Oh.” I kept my eyes on the menu and fought back a blush. “Well. No, I don’t suppose I miss many meals.”

  “Hey,” Dan said so I’d look up. “I like that.”

  “Do you?” As he had the habit of answering his own questions, I had a habit of posing ones that didn’t need any.

  He grinned. “Yeah. I do.”

  Compliments, unless they’re about my mental prowess, fluster me. Not because I automatically assume the person giving them isn’t sincere, but because I am never quite sure if they expect me to give them one in return.

  “Good” was all I said, and looked up as the waiter approached. “I’ll have the fish and chips, please, with malt vinegar and tartar sauce, and fries. And…a Guinness?”

  I looked at Dan, who nodded. “Make that two. Of everything.”

  The waiter, who couldn’t have been any older than the minimum drinking age himself, smiled. “Hey, a chick who drinks real beer. Cool. Most girls drink light beers.”

  Dan looked at me, then the young man. “She’s something else, this one.”

  The waiter nodded, two men sharing an appraisal. “I can see that.”

  It struck me, their differences. Dan, clean-cut but not preppy, favored expensive business suits or khaki pants, oxford shirts, whimsical ties. Today he wore dark denim jeans, straight-legged, low slung and a white T-shirt beneath a scoop-necked black sweater of fine knit, light enough to wear in the summer heat, the sleeves pushed up on his forearms. Casual but not sloppy.

  The waiter, in contrast, wore his jeans cinched with a black leather belt studded with small spikes. His dark hair looked like silk, shorter in back and long in the front to fall over one eye. Tattoos covered his arms and multiple piercings ornamented his ears, his eyebrow. His nipples, too, I noticed through his tight white T-shirt. He had eyes of startling blue and a voice that spoke of too many cigarettes, pitched lower than you’d expect from someone so slender. He flashed me a smile of brilliant, white teeth, and I understood why the group of girls sitting in the corner had been giggling when we came in.

  “What’s your name, man?” Dan reached into his pocket and pulled out a pack of cigarettes.

  He offered me the pack and I took one, a man’s brand, not a dainty menthol or clove cigarette. I let him light it for me and sucked the smoke in deep, holding it long enough to impress both of them before letting it out in a series of rings.

  “Nice,” admired the waiter. “I’m Jack.”

  “Dan.” They shook hands. Dan indicated me with a slight lift of his chin. “This is—”

  “Jennifer.” I gave the false name without pause.

  “Nice to meet you, Jennifer,” said Jack and he lifted my hand to his lips and kissed the knuckles.

  I glanced at Dan, who smiled through smoke. I looked back at Jack, who could have been flirting with me, or just being silly. I didn’t seem to be his type. Too old, too conservatively dressed.

  “Be right back,” he said. “Holler if you need me.”

  Okay. The look he gave me proved it. Definitely flirting. I watched him head toward the bar, stopping to elicit another round of giggles from the college girls. He looked over his shoulder at me and shot me that striking grin again.

  “He thinks you’re hot.” Dan stubbed out his cigarette.

  I’d barely smoked mine, but I put it in the ashtray to smolder. “Does he?”

  “Definitely.”

  I gave him a thoughtful look. “Does that bother you?”

  There was no reason it should. I was simply curious. Dan grinned.

  “Nope. Why’d you give him a fake name?”

  “I don’t like just anyone knowing my name.”

  “So you usually give a fake one?”

  I tidied the menus and put them back in their holder. “Yes.”

  “You told me the truth.”

  I looked into his eyes, and we shared another of those looks I couldn’t quite describe. “Yes.”

  “Lying to someone about your name could cause trouble later, if you want to know them better and they find out you started off the relationship with a lie.”

  “I told you the truth,” I said evenly. “Why should you care what I tell anyone else?”

  “I guess I don’t.” He looked to the bar, wher