“More like…obligation,” I say after a moment’s thought.
Liam looks down at the honey-colored liquid in his glass tumbler. There’s a reckless expression in his ice-blue eyes. “Something else we have in common, then.”
“Lucky us.”
He looks up at me suddenly. His piercing expression makes my heart leap a little in my chest.
“Let’s get out of here.”
Another leap. He can’t possibly mean what I think he means, can he?
“Where to?” I say, trying with all my might to summon an air of I-don’t-care in my tone. But my voice cracks on the “to,” somehow turning it into two syllables.
Damn it, April!
Liam leans forward and speaks into my ear. Invisible whiskers on his jaw scratch softly against my cheek.
“I was thinking somewhere private,” he says.
Woah. Woah!
My heart isn’t just leaping anymore. It’s doing the freaking cha-cha.
“I…uh…” I stammer, casting wildly about for the right words. “But I don’t even know you.”
“Of course you do,” he says, sidling closer toward me. The smooth fabric of his suit slips against my bare knee, and for a fleeting, wild moment, I wonder if I might actually fall out of my chair. “I’m Liam, and you’re Sophia.”
I gaze up at him, stunned.
This is what normal people do when they go to bars, isn’t it? They happen to cross paths, share a few laughs over a drink or two, and, at some point, they let their bodies take over and do the rest of the talking.
As I gaze up at him, admiring the smooth angles of his face and the strong, straight slope of his nose—he’s so good-looking and so perfectly charming that it’s almost unfair—I wonder what it would like to be a normal person, just for a night. What would it feel like to have his body pressed against mine? To live, just for a night, with careless abandon, fueled only by romantic passion?
But there’s a different kind of passion that drives me.
And it has nothing to do with romance.
A part of me wants to shout yes—several parts of me, actually—but my head is already shaking.
“I’m s-sorry,” I find my lips stammering. “I’m just not that kind of girl.”
And then almost as if he was never leaning against me in the first place, he steps lightly away. He’s there and then he’s gone—just like that.
Suddenly I am shivering in the absence of his body heat. When I look up, I expect him to look annoyed, or even angry—but to my surprise, that’s not what I find at all.
Instead, an expression of bemusement flits across his handsome face, like he can’t possibly process the fact that he’s just been turned down.
I cast a quick, nervous glance over my shoulder, still seeing no sign of Barbara or Charles Hawthorne among the crowd. Not that I expected to.
I’ll have to ask Miranda for advice on what our next move should be. The Hawthornes are probably long gone—just as I should be. I’ve overstayed my welcome here, anyway. I half-expected to get kicked out by now; it’s a miracle that no one from the country club has figured out yet that I don’t belong here.
I fumble for my clutch and stammer out a “Sorry.”
“Too bad,” Liam says, his voice hardening slightly, “though of course that’s your prerogative. But I’ll admit that you intrigue me, Sophia.”
He reaches into his suit and withdraws a business card. He places it onto the bar and slides it over to me.
“If you change your mind, give me a call,” he says.
I watch his retreating back as he strolls away. When I turn back to the bar, what I find makes me gasp out loud. A few heads turn my way.
First letting Barbara and Charles Hawthorne evade me—and now this, I silently chastise myself. I’ve been a fool twice today.
I force myself to look down and re-read the name embossed on the card, just to be sure it’s real.
And, unfortunately for me, it is.
Printed on the thick card stock, along with a personal phone number, are the words:
William Hawthorne.
2
“You let them go?!”
Miranda’s voice is shrill and livid in my ear.
I try not to groan into the cell phone. I roll over in my bed and kick off the tangled hotel sheets.
I couldn’t bring myself to call Miranda last night to tell her about my enormous screw-up. I was too angry with myself—and, I’ll admit, a little nervous to discover how she’d react. My cousin is not exactly known in the family for her patient personality.
And as she starts shrieking into my ear, I wince and think to myself: Yup, pretty much exactly what I expected.
“Yeah, I know I messed up. I let the Hawthornes slip away,” I admit. “But we know where they live. We know the kinds of places they visit. We’ve done our research—and we’ll find them again.”
“This throws the entire plan out of sync, you know. The timing hinged on you making the first contact last night, so we could set up the second ‘accidental’ run-in in time for Mardi Gras,” Miranda sighs. “I just really wish you would’ve let me come with you back to New Orleans.”
“What are you talking about? I can handle this. Besides, you’ve more than pulled your own weight helping me research and plan. Don’t worry. I’ve got this,” I reassure her.
Still, I know the real reason why she’s upset that she didn’t come along for the ride.
It’s not just that she’s afraid I’ll botch up the plan. Her deeper fear is that somehow she won’t get her fair share of whatever we manage to steal from the Hawthornes.
But she’s worked with too many dirty people. I’m not like that.
In fact, I couldn’t care less about whatever diamonds or dollars we manage to extract from the Hawthornes. There’s only one reason why money is a part of the equation at all: because it was the only way to recruit Miranda’s help. Hot-tempered personality aside, she’s the only person on the planet who can guide me through this. She’s something of a professional at this kind of thing: the con.
Supposedly, it’s a skill that runs in the family—and, ultimately, the reason why I’m here.
I still remember the day, fourteen years ago, when I glanced at the newspaper and saw my parents’ faces on the front page. I was taking my bike around the neighborhood for a morning ride, when I decided to stop by the convenience store for an ice cream pop. The papers were stacked outside the front door.
LOCAL RESIDENTS REVEALED TO HAVE STOLEN MILLIONS, the newspapers screamed at me.
Even in my confusion, I knew that couldn’t be right. We lived in the modest part of town, on the bottom floor of an aging apartment complex. If my parents had really stolen millions, why did my mom keep telling me that they couldn’t afford to buy me a new bike? Had they been lying to me?
But the papers had the whole story, all three thousand words of it. They went into detail about how my parents had forged hundreds of checks and swindled millions of dollars from “honest, hard-working families across the country.” There was even talk of possible money laundering. According to the newspaper, my parents had been running an extensive confidence scheme from inside our apartment for the last decade—and I never had the slightest idea.
It didn’t seem possible to me. My parents weren’t bad people. There was no way that they were capable of doing something so awful. I was convinced that the article had to be a lie.
But when I came home, clutching through the newspaper in my small, trembling hands, I found them shoving everything they owned into suitcases—coats, shoes, loose papers, even glassware. I remember how my mother jumped and dropped a ceramic mug when I burst through the door. It had shattered into a thousand pieces when it hit the floor.
It had been the Hawthornes who broke the story. I knew that my parents had occasionally brushed shoulders with them; my father was an electrician by trade, and being particularly skilled at it, he often went to work in the homes of New Orleans�
� wealthiest families. It was never clear exactly how the Hawthornes had discovered my parents’ deception—not that I wanted to know. My father used to have a bad tendency to blab too much to his customers and occasionally say things he shouldn’t—like about my embarrassing fondness for Kenny G, or how my mother used to quote lines from old episodes of Friends in her sleep.
It frightened me—the possibility that my father may have let his guard down one day and accidentally gone too far. If the newspapers’ accusations against my parents were true.
If.
Because there were details that just didn’t add up. Like this—why was my father still working as an electrician, when he was supposedly running multi-million dollar cons? And what reason did the Hawthornes have for taking their suspicions about my parents to the newspapers?
After they were sent to jail, I spent countless hours revisiting these incongruous little details. And every time I’d begin to convince myself of my parents’ innocence, I’d recall something that seemed to indicate the opposite—a sudden shining piece of jewelry hanging from my mother’s neck one day, never to be seen again afterwards. Impromptu vacations across the country, first-class tickets both ways. Sometimes they’d bring my aunt, uncle, and cousin Miranda along for the ride.
Miranda used to say that it was these vacations, these little glimpses of a glamorous life, that inspired her to try her first confidence scheme. We had just graduated college, living together in a little ramshackle apartment in Oklahoma City and subsisting on a diet of ramen and scrambled eggs.
“How difficult were your parents’ cons, do you think? Like what was involved, exactly?” she asked me one evening when we were sitting at the fold-out kitchen table. She was glaring at the ramen, which was still steaming in its styrofoam cup. “I’ve been reading about it, you know. The con artist thing. The way I see it is—you meet some people, get them to like you, ask for a little ‘investment,’ and you’re gold. I mean, people tell me I’m a people person. How hard can it be?”
“You’ve been ‘reading’?” I echo back doubtfully. “What, is there a manual or something?”
She rolled her eyes. “No, silly. I’ve just been reading old profiles on famous con artists and stuff like that. And all the articles about your parents, of course. But I bet there’s all kinds of details that the papers left out.”
She leaned forward, forgetting her noodles.
“So give me the scoop. How did your parents do it?”
I tried to tell her that she had it all wrong. My parents weren’t con artists.
But there was a quaver in my voice as I said the words. A part of me still wasn’t sure.
For years, I’d spend my nights tossing and turning, faces flashing in my mind—my mother, my father, the Hawthornes. I’d mentally go through all the scattered pieces of information, trying to separate fact from fiction.
None of it made any sense.
But I know one thing now. The Hawthornes are at the heart of this.
Amid the din of accusations and half-truths, they’ve always known the real story of what really happened. If it hadn’t been for them, then my parents would have never gone to jail. My life would never have fallen apart.
And so now, finally, I’m going to make them pay.
“It’s not too late for me to come out to New Orleans and walk you through this,” Miranda says on the other end of the line, her words bringing me back to the moment. “Just say the word and I can be out there as soon as the next day.”
I furrow my brow, confused. I thought she was still back in Houma, Louisiana, where she and I had holed ourselves into a hotel room and endlessly rehearsed our plans. Houma’s barely an hour’s drive away.
But of course she must have grown fidgety already. Miranda was never one to stay in the same place for too long—that’s what made her such a good con artist. Or maybe it was the other way around—that it was her profession that turned her restless. Either way, I’m sure she’s long gone by now. Maybe she’s somewhere on a private beach, where there’s a muscular man in barely-there swimming shorts feeding her grapes.
“Okay,” I say, and then with effort, slowly dragging the words out of myself, I add: “But there’s this other thing you should know about.”
“Yeah?” Miranda says, intrigued. “Spill.”
“So I just randomly started talking with this guy last night at the club—“ I begin.
Miranda’s laughter cuts me off. The sound is loud and annoying in my ear.
“Say no more. That explains everything,” she says in between her giggles. “If I had a dollar for every time I’ve let some pretty boy distract me from a job…”
“No, listen,” I say impatiently. “Yes, he was handsome, but that’s not the point. Here’s the thing—we were chatting, just because we happened to be standing next to each other at the bar, and he asked me out—“
Miranda interrupts me again. “April, you can’t let this guy distract you, no matter how handsome he is. Remember why you’re here—“
“His name was Liam,” I say, cutting her off. “As in William Hawthorne. Barbara and Charles’ son.”
Without missing a beat, Miranda does a total 180.
“So what did you say?” she says eagerly.
I look down at my hand. My palm is shiny. I wipe it off on the sheets and slide off the bed, heading for the bathroom. I need to splash some cold water on my face.
“You said yes, right?” Miranda urges.
“Not…exactly…” I say slowly. “More like…no.”
“What? Why?” Miranda doesn’t even try to mask the disappointment in her tone.
“I didn’t even realize it was him until he gave me his business card. You didn’t see anything about a nickname when we were researching him, right?” I say nervously. “And he didn’t look anything like his photo, by the way.”
“Nada. No nickname that I saw.”
“But anyway, I guess it’s overstating it to say that he asked me out. More like he asked for a one night stand.”
The words hang in the air for a moment. We both know the significance of Liam’s request. I’ve barely even had a boyfriend before, let alone slept with one.
I hold my breath, waiting for Miranda to suggest an alternate plan. Surely there has to be another way.
But then she says, “April, you’ve got to call him.” Her tone is vehement. “Forget about going directly to the parents. This is your in. Liam is your in.”
“But what about our plan? You spent so much time writing it up,” I say, hating the whine in my voice. “What about the run-in we planned for Mardi Gras?”
“Forget that plan. I hate that plan now,” replies Miranda immediately. “Why work so hard to earn the parents’ trust when the son already likes you? Give him a call, get him to take you out on a few dates. Get him to fall in love with you. And when you have him eating out of the palm of your hand, that’s when you can ask him.”
“For what?” I say.
“To invest in your exciting new business opportunity. Or to write you a check for ten thousand dollars, just to hold you over until the funds transfer from your account in the Caymans,” she says.
There’s a familiar drawl in her voice, the kind you get when you’ve said something too many times. I wonder what unfortunate chump reached for his checkbook after Miranda fed him these lines.
But still, it gets me thinking. “Or to tell you the deep, dark, forbidden family secrets?”
“Yeah, sure.”
I pause. “But he doesn’t like me, not really,” I say, fidgeting with the metal faucet. “He just asked me for no-strings attached sex. Do you really think that sounds like the kind of guy who falls in love easily?”
“All men are the same, April,” Miranda says. “Dating, sex, the chase—it’s all a game to them. You just need to know how to play it.”
I look up at my reflection, examining my flat mouth and mousey brown hair. I hardly look like the kind of glamorous woman that a man like Liam wo
uld fall in love with. Miranda was always the beauty of the family, with her raven black hair and va-va-voom hips, like something out of a pin-up.
“If you say so.”
“Stop that.”
“Stop what?” I ask.
“I can hear the negativity in your voice, doll,” Miranda says. “You can do this. Just don’t over-think it. Trust me, I’ve done it before. And it should be easy for you, you’re gorgeous.”
“No I’m not,” I protest, but I can hear my voice softening.
“What are you talking about? After you came to live with me and my folks, all the boys in the neighborhood were tripping over themselves for the chance to ask you out.”
“But we were just kids back then. They were just being silly.”
“True, and maybe I’d write it off as just silliness—but then it kept happening through high school! Don’t tell me you never noticed.”
I reach my hand into my long hair and grab at a strand, twisting it around my finger nervously.
“Not really,” I reply. I had been too much in my head back then, burying my nose in books of poetry and fantasizing about an alternate universe in which my parents weren’t in jail.
Miranda says, “Honestly, I’m hardly surprised that Liam Hawthorne wants to get in your skirt. It should be easy enough to make him fall for the rest of you. Just do that thing you do with your shoulder and you’re golden.”
I drop my hand. “What thing with my shoulder?”
“You know, the thing. That little shrug you do, usually combined with that flirty half-grin. You know what I’m talking about.”
Honestly, I have no clue. But it’s not worth arguing with Miranda.
“But what about—you know…”
“What?”
“The…” I hesitate, nervous to even say the word. Oh, stop being such a baby, April, I think, and then I blurt it out: “Sex. The sex.”
“What about it?”
“You know I’ve never done it before…”
Miranda’s voice drops low. “April, doll, you don’t have to do anything you don’t want to do. But at least consider it, okay? I mean, you told me that he was a babe. And there are worse things than sleeping with a hot guy, right?”
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