He had the kind of voice that made everything sound a little ironic. When he turned to fill Victoria’s order, I tore my attention from the back of his head—and the back of the rest of him—and reminded myself that I’d come here to talk to her.
“You two know each other?” Victoria asked me once Nick was out of earshot.
“Something like that,” I said, refusing to allow him any more real estate in my mind. Instead, I searched Victoria’s features for some resemblance to the Ana I’d seen in pictures. Their hair was different, but they had the same eyes—same shape, same color.
“He’s cute,” Victoria commented offhandedly. “If you go for the rough-around-the-edges, angry-at-the-world type, which I suspect you do.”
I didn’t go for any type. I preferred flying solo—and Nick had reason enough to avoid girls like me.
“You asked him to water down the drinks,” I observed evenly.
“We’re not looking to get anyone drunk,” Victoria said.
“You just want them to think they are,” I inferred. “It’s amazing how people start to act drunk as soon as they think they’ve had a lot of alcohol.”
“You’re a perceptive one, aren’t you?” Victoria almost but didn’t quite smile. “Enjoying yourself tonight?”
Eyes on her. No looking behind the bar, Sawyer.
“By some definitions,” I said, and then I cut to the chase. “How old are you?” If she was a senior in college, she was probably too old to be Ana’s baby, but I had to ask.
“Twenty-one.” She arched an eyebrow at me. “Why don’t you ask me what you really want to know?”
I wasn’t sure what she was expecting—maybe for me to ask for the inside track on how to prove myself worthy of the White Gloves—but I took her up on the invitation to be blunt. “Are you related to Victor Gutierrez?”
“Are you asking on your own behalf?” she said mildly. “Or on behalf of Campbell Ames?”
It took me a second to parse that response.
“I hope she knows that business is just…business,” Victoria said lightly. “Whatever my father’s intentions or grand plans, I assure you, they have nothing to do with me.”
Nick appeared then with the first three bright-colored drinks, setting the martini glasses down on the bar in front of her.
“I’ll be back for the others,” Victoria told him. She glanced at me. “And for you.”
As she retreated, I lost my excuse not to look at Nick. I let my eyes travel in his direction, but reminded myself that if he’d wanted to contact me in the past month and a half, he could have.
“Long time no see,” I said.
“Last I checked…” Nick grabbed a rag and ran it over the bar between us. “…you’re not old enough to be on this side of the ropes, Miss Taft.”
I wondered what Emily Post had to say about telling a guy to take his sarcastic use of the word Miss and shove it up his—
“Oh, yeah,” Nick continued, in a way that made me pretty damn sure he was trying to get a rise out of me, “you’re not really big on rules—or laws. Are you?”
It was hard to tell how much of that was a compliment—and how much was an insult.
Nick had played a key—and largely unwilling—role in Campbell’s plan to take down her father. The four of us hadn’t exactly endeared ourselves to him, given that the plan had involved him being arrested.
Twice.
Then again, it wasn’t like he’d been forced at gunpoint to say yes when I’d asked him for that dance.
It wasn’t like he hadn’t enjoyed it.
“Pretty sure you’re not old enough to be back here, either,” I commented, giving Nick a look. “Legally. By the rules.”
“I’m not drinking.” Nick flashed me a smile more akin to a poker player laying down a winning hand than any kind of invitation. “I’m serving.”
“Not very well.” Inebriated Frat Boy slid in at the bar beside me. Based on his intact appearance, I assumed the bouncer had managed to defuse the fight in time. “How many rounds do I have to buy to get a little service around here?”
“You can have a little service once I have your keys.” There was nothing overtly challenging in Nick’s tone or his stance, but it was clear as glass that what he’d just said was nonnegotiable.
“My keys?” The frat boy leaned forward in what I could only assume was meant as a loom. “You think you can tell me not to drive?”
“I think,” Nick replied, “that anyone who orders more than three beers in an hour gets to give me their keys. House rules.”
I could have told the frat boy not to bother arguing—and not just because of the line of tension now visible in Nick’s jaw. His brother was in a coma because of a drunk driver. Campbell’s father.
“I want to talk to the manager,” Frat Boy blustered.
Nick arched an eyebrow at him. “That would be me.”
If Frat Boy had been in possession of even half the sense God gave a goose, he would have seen the glint of warning behind Nick’s hazel eyes.
“Then I want to talk to the owner.”
Nick placed his elbows on the bar and leaned his weight onto them. “Also me.”
Now it was my turn for raised eyebrows. “You own this place?”
Nick cut a glance toward me and shrugged, his shoulder muscles pulling at the confines of his shirt. Frat Boy slammed his keys down on top of the bar.
Wordlessly, Nick took them. “What can I get you?”
I had to wait a full minute before he circled back around to me.
“Since when do you own a bar?” I asked.
“The owner put it up for sale a few weeks ago.” Nick began making Victoria’s remaining three drinks. “I had a friend who worked here. Nice guy. He had a new baby. Couldn’t afford to be out of a job.”
“So you bought the bar?” If I’d been talking to Walker, that might not have surprised me. But Nick? “Where did you…”
“Get the money?” Nick saved me the trouble of saying the m-word myself. “Your grandpa paid me off. You know what they say about blood money—it really does burn a hole in your pocket.”
Blood money. I shouldn’t have been surprised that the Ames family had paid him off. The senator’s guilty plea would have opened them up to all kinds of liability on the accident that had put Nick’s brother in a coma—not to mention the cover-up.
“Davis Ames is not my grandfather.” Of all the ways I could have replied, that was the one that pushed its way past my lips without so much as a by-your-leave. In the past month, I’d thought a lot about what the revelation of my true parentage meant with respect to my relationship with Lily, with John David, with Campbell and Walker.
I hadn’t thought about what it might mean for my relationship—or lack thereof—with Nick.
I’m not related to the person who put your brother in that coma. That blood money? It has nothing to do with me.
“Right,” Nick replied tersely. “Forgive me for speaking an inconvenient truth.”
“The truth,” I said, my voice low and every muscle in my body tight, “is that my mom lied. I’m not an Ames.” I swallowed, and the only thing that let me continue was the fact that the noise level in this place was so high. “I’m an Easterling.”
Nick stared at me. For the first time since I’d recognized him standing behind the bar, I felt like he was really seeing me, and I reminded myself that when it came to the opposite sex, no good came of being seen.
“Easterling,” Nick repeated. “Isn’t that…”
My cousin’s last name.
Before Nick could press me further, Victoria reappeared. With one last, long look at me, he turned to her and nodded to the drinks he’d just made. “I’ll put these on your tab.”
Someone else came up to place an order then, and whatever had been brewing between Nick and me—if anything was—receded, like a boiling pot set back to simmer.
Like a dance where neither person said a word.
Good, I though
t as he turned his back on me. It’s just as well. I didn’t come here to see him. I needed to focus on Victoria. I doubted I’d made much of an “impression” tonight. This might be my one and only White Glove soiree.
My only chance to ask, “Are you related to Ana Gutierrez?”
“Why all of this interest in my relatives?” Victoria retorted.
“Ana Sofía Gutierrez,” I reiterated. “She’d be in her thirties now. Your sister, maybe? Or a cousin?”
Before Victoria could reply—or decidedly not reply—someone pushed between the two of us, forcefully enough that I stood up from the stool I’d been sitting on.
“Where are my keys?” Frat Boy had returned. Based on his volume and tone, I had to wonder if he’d drunk the entire last round he’d purchased himself.
No way was Nick giving this guy back his keys.
“Call a car,” I advised him. “Or get a ride.”
The second he turned to face me, I knew that drawing his attention my way had been a mistake. He reached out, brushed the hair out of my face. I tried to step back, but his sweaty palm settled on my neck, holding me close.
“Hands to yourself.” Victoria surprised me. Her voice was steel. Not pleasant—not even pretending. “Ask before you touch. Got it?”
Frat Boy ignored her. “What’s your name?” he asked, his grip on my neck tightening as he brought his mouth closer to mine. I could feel his breath on my face.
I could smell it.
“Ask before you touch,” I said lowly, “is a very good rule.”
He was probably expecting me to push him away, but I didn’t grow up at The Holler without learning to use expectations—not to mention momentum—to my advantage. As he leaned closer still, I hooked my ankle through a barstool, jerked it between us, grabbed his arm, and pulled.
Two seconds later, Frat Boy was sprawled on his stomach, and my heel was digging into his back.
“Nice,” Victoria told me appreciatively. I felt and heard Nick leaping over the bar but didn’t turn to look at him as he came to my side.
Let him wonder what the hell had just happened.
Let him remember that I wasn’t just some poor little rich girl.
I applied a tad more pressure to the drunken a-hole beneath my foot and offered Victoria a smile. “I try.”
awyer? I think I can feel my shoulder.”
“Can you feel your hands?”
“No.”
“What about your legs?”
“No.”
“Can you move?”
“Let me check…Also no.”
“Then what good could it possibly do us that you now have feeling in your shoulder?”
“I don’t know, Sawyer. But I think I hear someone coming, and you’re the one in charge of coming up with plans.”
he Friday after Memorial Day was marked by the end of forty-eight hours of record-breaking summer storms, mildly less tension on Aunt Olivia’s part as she packed for another weekend trip to the lake, and a cryptic text that Lily and I received at the exact same time.
@) - -‘ - , - - -
It took me several seconds to realize that if you held the phone sideways, the image resembled a rose. The text that arrived on the rose’s heel was more immediately recognizable.
~ ~ ~ ~ ~8<
A snake. Together, the two symbols left very little doubt about who the messages—and a third text that followed from the same blocked number—were from.
Falling Springs. 2:30 a.m. Tonight.
“What’s Falling Springs?” I asked Lily.
She shushed me. Once she’d glanced back over her shoulder to verify that Aunt Olivia was still absorbed in cross-referencing two of her lists, Lily pulled me into the foyer. “Falling Springs is a cove on the other side of the lake,” she said softly.
“Is it a scandalous cove?” I asked in an exaggerated whisper.
Lily realized halfway through nodding that I was joking. She pointed her manicured index finger at me in a manner that I assumed I was supposed to find forbidding.
“Okay, okay,” I replied. “No jokes.”
“It’s not the cove associated with Falling Springs that’s scandalous,” Lily whispered in a tone that told me I’d been begrudgingly forgiven. “It’s the cliffs.”
That night, wearing swimsuits and the barest of cover-ups, we snuck down to the dock at two in the morning, lowered the smaller of the family’s two boats into the water, and glided silently backward into the darkened cove. Picking up Campbell and Sadie-Grace on the way, we made for Falling Springs.
“So…” Campbell took up position next to me. “What’s the plan?”
She’d kept her voice low, but I still cast a glance at Lily, who was focusing on driving the boat, and Sadie-Grace, who was “helping Lily focus,” before I supplied a response. “The plan,” I murmured, “is to talk to Victoria again.”
I’d caught Campbell up on the conversation I’d had with Victoria Gutierrez at The Big Bang. Cam was as invested in finding Ana’s baby—her half-sibling—as I was. And that meant that she was just as interested in what Victoria had to say.
“I didn’t actually expect you to answer my question,” Campbell murmured beside me. “It was more of a courtesy question, really. You were supposed to ask what my plan was.”
Having seen one of Campbell’s schemes up close and personal, I was almost afraid to ask. “What’s your plan?”
“Talk to Victoria.” She smiled, her teeth a flash of white in the dark. “No offense, but I’m better at talking than you are.”
“Me too!” Sadie-Grace appeared between us. “I’m so good at talking that sometimes, once I start, I can’t even stop!”
Neither Campbell nor I had a reply for that. We sank into silence, my brain working overtime calculating the likelihood that Cam could get more out of Victoria than I had.
“There,” Lily said suddenly. She eased off the gas, allowing momentum to push the boat farther and farther into a long and narrow cove shaped—appropriately—like a snake.
Following Lily’s gaze, I understood why she hadn’t wanted her mother to even hear the words Falling Springs. I could make out five or six boats, each marked with a single light on the front, tied together in a line, front to front and back to back. As we approached, someone picked up a pole that one of the lights was fixed to, and used it to wave Lily to the far side of the line.
That wasn’t the wild part.
Velvety darkness had settled over the water, but the bobbing lights on the boats and a white and glowing half-moon overhead cast just enough light to illuminate the nearby shore. Cliffs stretched up overhead, five or six stories at least. The farther up I looked, the steeper the incline got, until at the top, the drop-off was sudden and complete.
In isolation, what I was seeing wouldn’t have struck me as ominous—or ill-advised. But as Lily had explained to me hours earlier, the term Falling Springs wasn’t just synonymous with this cove and these cliffs.
It was a shorthand for the activities the cove and the cliffs were most known for. Parties. Debauchery. Liquid courage.
And jumping.
ow many of you have jumped off Falling Springs before?”
Victoria stood on the front of the largest boat in the line, the one that was anchored and holding all of the others in place. Her voice traveled along the water. In the silence of the night, I could practically feel it all around us, even from my position three boats away.
“Show of hands,” Victoria continued, before repeating her question. “How many of you have jumped off Falling Springs?”
Across the other six boats, I could hear motion but couldn’t make out exactly how many Candidates’ hands there were in the air. Beside me, Campbell’s arm was fully extended.
“And how many of you have jumped off Falling Springs in the dark?” A light breeze caught Victoria’s dark hair. In daylight, you might have been able to see shades of brown in it, but at night, with scant lighting, her long, thick waves might as well ha
ve been shadows.
Beside me, Campbell’s hand was still raised. Lily shifted slightly. Even on a boat, after having snuck out and arguably committed grand theft naval, she sat with her knees together and her feet poised on the floor beneath us, just so. Perfect posture. Perfect manners.
Based on Victoria’s questions, I could only conclude that those things wouldn’t give my “cousin” much of an advantage here.
“And how many of you,” Victoria continued with a cunning smile that I could hear in her voice, if not quite see on her face, “have jumped off Falling Springs naked?”
“When she said naked,” Sadie-Grace whispered behind me, “what exactly do you think she meant?”
The four of us, along with our fellow Candidates, had made our way across the line of boats, climbing from one to the next until we reached the one closest to the shore. I was about to supply Sadie-Grace with the definition of the word naked when Hope saved me the trouble.
“You can leave everything but your swimsuits here, ladies,” she announced. “You’ll ditch the suits before you jump.”
“Oh,” Sadie-Grace said. “That kind of naked.”
My primary concern had less to do with what we’d be wearing when we jumped than it did the height we’d be leaping from—and the depth of the water we’d be plunging into.
“Scared?” Campbell asked beside me.
“I don’t do scared,” I told her. “I also don’t do broken necks.”
“People jump off Falling Springs all the time.” Lily held her head high as she stripped down to her swimsuit. I wasn’t sure if she was trying to convince me or herself. “These aren’t the only cliffs at the lake; they’re just the only ones at a spot where the water gets deep really fast.”
“I cannot help but notice that you ladies are still fully clothed.” Victoria appeared beside us and zeroed in on me. “Of course, disrobing is optional. Totally your call.”
The Candidates were many. The Chosen were few.
“Will you be joining us?” I asked her. Whether Campbell made good on her plan or I went with mine, talking required face time.
Victoria studied me for a moment. “That depends,” she said with an arch of her eyebrow. “Are you four planning to jump from one of the lower ledges—or the top?”
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