Page 35 of Sucker For You

I’m safe.

Safe, and she wasn’t in pain. Except. . . her panic had been as real as the onset symptoms of her migraines. She’d run to medicate herself here in the bathroom and had wasted a precious Ceretobicin capsule. Turning the pill vial over in her hand, Isabel ran a thumb across the ridges of its cap, across her name on theprescription label, across its instructions to take a dose at the earliest signs of vision loss or vertigo.

These pills made her life bearable.

She couldn’t jeopardize her access to them.

She couldn’t run from Wes again. There wasn’t time.

“Cold fish,”they’d called her.

Putting aside the bottle, she splashed her cheeks, mopped up the drips in the sink, and walked back into the living room. Her mind was clear and calm, her objective certain.Be a cold fish. No running. Not even when Wes—humming a jaunty Beatles tune, after having loaded their plates into the dishwasher and preserved the uneaten half of Isabel’s sandwich in plastic wrap—popped a loose slice of pickle into his mouth and swiped the juice from his lip.

She stopped right outside the kitchen. She studied the refrigerator door. “I—I think we should consider a few more of our questions now.”

“Sure.” He grinned. Was their awkwardness forgotten?Just like that.Was it really so easy with him? “Can I add to the list, too?”

“Yes, of course. . .”

“Good.” He dried his hands, then moved past her to kick on his shoes at the door; she followed him to the deck and into a blaze of late-afternoon sunshine. “I’ve got a hypothetical one: how’d we meet?”

She tensed in the light. But her eyes adjusted. Still, no pain. “That’s not quite hypothetical. Last night, we—”

A crystal dangling from the gate dinged Wes on his ear when he shook his head. “No, I mean, what’s ourstory? What’s the meet-cute? The kind of thing we can use for our interview.”

The fantasy, he meant.

Not a lie. Just camouflaged truth.

“I understand.” She joined him on the sidewalk. She swallowed down a little lick of bile, but said, “When I met Chase at the hospital in San Francisco—”

He stopped mid-stride. “That wasn’t my question.”

“No.” She crossed Tide Avenue’s faded yellow lines and stepped off the pavement. Moving down through pebbles, sand, and succulents, she wound into a maze of cratered rocks that formed inlets near the surf. “But I don’t know any other way for it to be.”

Her first encounter with Chase could have been a fantasy. For anyone but her, it might have been.

Handsome doctor, white smile—rescuing her from a handsy photographer.

“Cold fish.”

Waves roared in over the pools, spraying mist across her cheeks. Droplets clung to her eyelashes. She breathed through the chill. “I met him at UCSF Medical Center. I was being photographed in a promotional shoot for a drug company after one of my clinical trial appointments. Stock footage for the corporation that manufactures Ceretobicin. Chase had endorsed the medication. He’s at the organization’s headquarters now.”

“In Las Vegas.” Wes advanced onto the rocks with her.

She crouched beside the nearest pool and dipped her fingers into the water. Crabs with vibrating antennae scuttled for cover when Chase’s ring flashed a brilliant warning. Globular sea anemones waved their tentacles to catch particles of plankton. Ignoring her intrusion, a sculpin edged along the submerged rock on its pectoral and pelvic fins. “He noticed me there. He was interested in how well I’d responded to the drug. He was interested in my photographs as well. He wasn’t runningthe study or the shoot, but he knew about the trial and the promotion. . . And the rest is what it is.”

“But you’re camera-shy.”

It wasn’t a question, just an observation.

“Yes.” She examined a starfish. “The photographer kept touching me. Positioning me and—more. But there was free lunch available after the shoot. And Chase,” the charming doctor with the perfect smile, “intervened, when he saw what was happening. He said I was still a patient at the hospital, even if I was also modeling. That I needed rest after my appointment, not stress. Because I had to have a neutral neural baseline for the Ceretobicin study. He told the photographer that I was done. Then he asked me to have dinner with him. I hadn’t received my support fund from the Canadian government yet and I was grateful. So I. . .”

Wes didn’t make her say it. He didn’t make her explain. Not the photographer, and not Chase. Not her hunger.

Instead, “Free lunch,” he repeated. Hunched beside her, his voice was low, his gaze dark beneath sun-lightened eyelashes, staring hard into the tide pool. Not in wonder at its oceanic microcosm. No, because when he continued, his mouth curled with anger. “Slices of deli meat and dry cheese, with that sleazebag and his camera watching? I know the type of meal. But it probably cost more than what they paid you. They definitely didn’t pay enough!”

At least she’d been paid, even if the money had come in an envelope slipped to her under the table, with a hand grazing her thigh. She repressed a shudder to assure him, “It doesn’t matter now.”