The French doors opened, and Lexa’s mother peeked her head out. “Lexa! Briana Leigh! What are you doing out there without coats? It’s freezing!”
“We’ll be right there, Mother,” Lexa said, sounding, thankfully, normal.
“Good. There are some people here your father would like you to meet,” Mrs. Greene said. Then she closed the door with a bang.
Suddenly a tear spilled down Lexa’s cheek. She clutched her arm and looked at Ariana, sucking in a broken breath.
“Everyone wants me to be normal,” Lexa said. “But I don’t know how I can be, Ana. I don’t know . . . if I can live like this.”
I don’t know if I can let you live like this, Ariana thought, then flinched. The very idea of it pumped ice-cold fear through Ariana’s veins. She didn’t want to hurt Lexa. Lexa had been a good friend to her. And she didn’t want any more blood on her hands. Not if she could help it. Especially not when she had finally gotten every last thing she wanted. She didn’t want to have to do these things anymore. She wanted to live a normal life.
“Lexa, you’ll be fine. I promise.”
Lexa ducked her head, wiped her eyes with her fingertips, and speed-walked back toward the house. A stiff wind blew a pile of leaves up into the air, where they swirled for a moment before settling again around her feet—over Kaitlynn’s grave.
Ariana turned her back to the house, clenched her jaw, and stared down at the ground, imagining Kaitlynn smiling up at her. Laughing at her.
“You’re never going to stop causing me problems, are you?” Ariana said under her breath. She stomped once on the ground, seeing Kaitlynn’s face beneath her stiletto boot. Then she turned on her heel and, feeling only marginally better, rejoined the party.
Unfortunately, she knew that she wasn’t going to enjoy one second of it from that moment on. Because now she was going to spend the entire morning obsessing over plan B—a plan that she had yet to fully consider, hoping she wouldn’t need it. Ariana sighed as she closed the door behind her and stepped into the warm parlor. Stupid Ariana. You should know by now. You always, always need a plan B.
Ariana stood near the fireplace, sipping her mimosa as she watched Lexa socialize with their friends. The tears were gone, and she hadn’t looked back toward the garden once.
Still, Ariana had made progress on her plan B. If she could find a way to make it all come together, she would have a safety net if the world of Briana Leigh Covington came crashing down. But that didn’t mean she’d given up hope for plan A. Unfortunately, that plan involved Jasper, and he was nowhere to be found.
“Hey.”
Suddenly someone grabbed Ariana’s arm and whirled her around and through the open door to the dining room. The lights were dimmer in the wallpapered space, and as Jasper tugged her into the corner, Ariana felt suddenly closed off from the party.
Speak of the devil, Ariana thought.
She glanced past his shoulder toward the far end of the room, where Keiko and the chef were just disappearing through a pair of white doors leading to the kitchen. She and Jasper where completely alone.
“What are you doing?” Ariana demanded.
“I need to talk to you,” Jasper replied. He stepped back, putting some distance between them, and Ariana felt slightly more comfortable. He was wearing a light blue shirt under a dark blue sport coat and jeans—the only jeans at the party—but at least he’d had the good sense to wear a pair of Brooks Brothers shoes and not sneakers.
“Good,” she said, standing up straight and clearing her throat. “I need to talk to you, too.”
Jasper hesitated, pressing a fist into his hand. His eyebrows arched, intrigued. “Okay. Ladies first.”
“Okay,” she said. She glanced back toward the door to the parlor, considering all the delicate ways she could put this. But then she remembered she was talking to Jasper. And Jasper always appreciated the straightforward approach. Besides, it would be better to get this over with. “Soomie wants to ask you to the ball. Any interest?”
Jasper blinked. His hands dropped to his sides. “That’s what you wanted to talk to me about?”
“Yes,” Ariana replied. She crossed her arms over her chest. “So do you like her or not?”
Slowly, Jasper’s lips stretched into a sly smile. “Are you . . . jealous?”
Ariana’s jaw dropped. “No, I’m not jealous,” she replied. “I actually think it’s kind of annoying how you’re always flirting with me. Especially considering that I have a boyfriend. And because, apparently, you like someone else.”
Jasper took a step closer to her. The look on his face was one of pure self-satisfaction. “No,” he said, “I do not like Soomie.”
“Well, why not?” Ariana asked, frustrated now. “Soomie’s incredible. She’s smart and she’s sophisticated and she’s—”
“Not. You,” Jasper said, carefully enunciating each word.
Everything stopped. Ariana looked into his eyes, and then her gaze flicked to his lips. She recovered quickly, but if Jasper’s grin was any indication, he had seen her eyes shift.
“I notice le boyfriend is not in attendance,” he said.
“He . . . he had to go do something with his parents,” Ariana replied.
“Ah, what a good boy he is,” Jasper said, moving even closer to her. So close their knees brushed. “I’m just curious as to why a girl like you would bother wasting her time with a guy like him.”
Ariana’s heart pounded in every inch of her body. Any second someone could walk in here and see them. See Jasper leaning toward her. See her looking up at him. Note the clandestine setting. Palmer would know in an instant. But still, she couldn’t seem to pull herself away. “What do you mean, a guy like him?” she asked.
Jasper shook his head, as if the answer was so blatantly obvious. “Boring as white bread. Virtuous as a priest.”
Ariana balked. “I’ll have you know that he and I—”
Jasper held up a hand. “Spare me the unsavory details,” he said. “I’m not talking about that. I’m talking about everything else. Do you think Palmer Liriano has ever done anything even remotely wrong? Remotely questionable. Remotely . . . naughty?” He looked her up and down in a way that made her blush all over. Then he grinned into her face. “Yeah. Didn’t think so.” He took a step closer, nudging her so far back her entire body was flat against the wall. “Let me tell you something, Ana Covington. Something I know about you that you may not know about yourself. You, my friend, need some excitement in your life. Some complexity. That guy? He’s never going to be enough for you.”
Ariana was so flustered she could hardly think straight, not a familiar sensation for her. She hated that she was letting him get to her.
“Not enough?” she asked finally. “Who could be better for me than the president of the student body? The second in command at S and G?” she said, lowering her voice. “Who could possibly have more to offer than the son of a professional athlete and one of the most respected congresswomen in the House?”
Jasper smiled slowly, looking directly into Ariana’s eyes. His nose was mere millimeters from hers. The flap of his jacket lightly grazed the front of her brown dress. His eyes flicked to her lips, and Ariana felt her heart catch and her toes curl.“You need,” he said quietly, “a guy like me.”
Then he leaned in, closing the minute gap between their lips. For a wisp of a moment Ariana let go. She moved into him. But at the last second she lifted her hand, and all Jasper got to kiss were her fingers.
His eyes darted open, and he looked at her, stunned. Ariana felt proud, suddenly, for her self-control.
“Actually, there is something I need from you,” she said. “I need you to get me a Valium prescription.”
At that moment, a bell rang out in the parlor, the double doors behind Jasper opened, and out rushed the wait staff with bowls and plates full of steaming food.
“Brunch is served!” someone announced in the next room.
Saved by the bell, Ariana though
t. And then, with a satisfied smirk and a quick smoothing of her skirt, she turned and walked away from him.
At the third bail bonds storefront, in the bowels of Washington DC, Ariana finally struck pay dirt. There was a man there—if the troll she was faced with constituted a man—with the means of forging a very authentic-looking birth certificate. All he needed, he said, was ten thousand dollars. Cash. When he’d told her this, he’d done so with an evil, knowing, gap-toothed smile, as if he’d expected her to faint dead away. Instead, she had walked out, taken a bus to the nearest branch of her bank (she had decided not to bring her car into this particular part of town, since she would rather it not get stolen), and returned twenty minutes later with the money.
When the disgusting little man’s watery eyes had widened, she’d felt a distinct hum of satisfaction in her bones. Now Ariana stood in the center of the grimiest room she’d ever had the distinct horror of entering, making sure not to touch a single surface as she waited for him to complete his work. She was certain that if she laid so much as a fingertip on the oil-smeared metal bookcases, the table littered with fast-food containers, or the walls with their pockmarks and unidentifiable stains, she would die of hepatitis on the spot.
“Here you go.”
The man turned around from his cluttered desk, stubbing out a cigarette in an already overflowing ashtray. He exhaled two plumes of smoke as he handed over the green and white document that stated that Emma Jane Walsh had been born sixteen years prior on January 9 in Denver, Colorado. Ariana breathed a sigh of relief, ignoring the protestation in her lungs over having inhaled so many carcinogens while she waited. With this and the Emma Walsh driver’s license she’d had made in Texas, she could get herself a real passport. And with a real passport, she would be able to flee the country if Lexa spilled about what had happed on Halloween.
“Thank you, Mr. Blaze,” Ariana said curtly, folding the birth certificate into her bag.
“Pleasure doing business with you, sweetheart,” he drawled, lighting another cigarette. He tore open the paper band around the stack of bills she’d brought him and started to count them. “Please come again.”
That’ll be the day, Ariana thought.
She used her elbow to shove open the swinging door of his office and speed-walked past the counter, where two middle-aged men turned away from the hockey game on TV long enough to leer at her. The second she stepped out into the frigid November air, she took a long, deep, cleansing breath. Everything was going to be fine. Her backup plan was in place. Then she looked up and down the seedy, semideserted street. A garbage can had been overturned near the wall, and a scraggly cat was picking through the debris, while two men all in black argued loudly near the corner.
Now all she had to do was live long enough for the bus to arrive. She sidestepped a swaying drunk and stood near the broken and graffitied bench at the bus stop. Her phone rang.
“Dammit,” Ariana cursed under her breath, the life all but scared out of her. She dug her phone out and rolled her eyes when she saw Jasper’s face on the screen. She hit the talk button and brought the phone to her ear.
“What?”
“Wow. Tense, are we?” Jasper replied.
“I’m kind of in the middle of something,” Ariana said impatiently, eyeing a scary dude with a scar across his lip as he strolled by. He eyed her right back and puckered his lips at her. It was all Ariana could do to keep her lunch down. “What do you want?”
“Sushi,” Jasper said. “Do you like sushi?”
Ariana forced herself not to turn around and follow the scary guy with her eyes as he passed behind her. She forced herself to train her eyes on the road. If he saw that his presence was making her tense, he might see that as an opening. A vulnerability.
“I went to your room to give you the Valium—it came, by the way—and to ask you if you felt like sushi, but you weren’t there,” Jasper was saying.
Scary Dude passed her by but turned around to walk backward, keeping his gaze on her as he made it to the end of the block.
“Fine. Pick me up in the next ten minutes,” she said.
“Ana . . . where are you, exactly?” Jasper asked, suddenly sounding concerned.
Ariana’s heart warmed, surprised and pleased that he’d picked up on her tone. She looked around for someplace, anyplace she could wait inside without fearing for her life at every second. She swallowed back bile when her eyes fell on the golden arches two streets down. “I’m at a McDonald’s downtown,” she told him. “I’ll text you the cross streets.”
Jasper laughed. “Never figured you for a junk food junkie.”
“I’m not,” Ariana snapped. “I just took a wrong turn.” She looked over her shoulder at the bail bonds place, where Mr. Blaze and his two buddies were watching her, laughing.
A very wrong turn, she added to herself. She could only imagine what Noelle Lange and her other friends back at Easton would say if they knew the types of places she’d been forced to spend time in—the types of things she’d been forced to do.
“Just come get me,” she said.
Then she snapped the phone closed and jogged across the street to the fast-food joint, resolving to never again get herself into a position that would land her back in this part of town.
“You need to try the spicy tuna,” Jasper said, leaning across the table with a piece of sushi suspended between two chopsticks. He was wearing a black sweater that made his hair look even blonder and his blue eyes brighter.
“I’m not really a spicy person,” she replied, pushing her rice around with her own chopsticks.
“Oh, I think you are. You just don’t know it yet,” Jasper told her. He popped the piece of sushi into his own mouth and raised his eyebrows as he chewed.
Ariana laughed, shaking her head. “Do you stay up nights coming up with these lines?”
Jasper grinned. “Not at all. You just bring them out of me.”
“I’m not sure if that’s a good thing or a bad thing,” Ariana replied.
“Neither am I.” Jasper took a sip of his sparkling water. “But I know you being here with me is a good thing.”
Ariana looked down at her square white plate, her two sushi rolls arrayed beautifully across the surface. She and Jasper were, once again, seated on the floor, but this time she had the benefit of comfy suede pillows beneath her butt and soothing Japanese music playing through hidden speakers. Jasper had somehow scored them a private room at Kumo, one of the most exclusive sushi restaurants in DC, so they were completely closed off from the rest of the clientele by a set of sliding, opaque paper doors. The setting was secluded and completely relaxing—doubly so since the Valium prescription he’d brought her was nestled safely in her handbag. Plans A and B were progressing nicely.
“I don’t know how I feel about being the inspiration for such behavior,” Ariana said, hazarding a glance in his direction.
“Well, I would stop, if you would just let me kiss you already,” Jasper said lightly.
“Why? Do you think that if you kissed me you’d stop feeling the need to pursue me?” she challenged, her heart fluttering.
“On the contrary,” Jasper said, placing his chopsticks down. “If I kissed you, you’d be mine for life. And then I wouldn’t have to pursue you anymore. I’d just have you.”
Ariana’s jaw dropped slightly. Every inch of her skin tingled as he stared directly into her eyes. She wasn’t sure whether to be flattered or offended, intrigued or disgusted.
“You’re staring at my lips again,” Jasper said matter-of-factly.
Ariana started to protest, but stopped. “I know.”
His eyebrows cocked. “Are your eyes trying to tell me something, Miss Covington?”
Ariana slowly smirked. “Just that you have a piece of rice stuck there,” she said, blithely returning to her food.
Jasper flinched and wiped his face with his napkin, the moment effectively obliterated. Unable to hold it in, Ariana started to laugh. Then Jasper dropped hi
s napkin and started to laugh as well. Soon they found they couldn’t stop, and Ariana had to drop her chopsticks and cover her face, tears of mirth filling her eyes.
It had been a long while since she had laughed like that. So what if she was out on a date with a person who wasn’t her boyfriend? It had been a long couple of years for Ariana Osgood.
And she deserved a good laugh.
“Did I really sound like that?” Lexa asked, pressing her hand against her chest. “I’m so sorry, you guys. But you heard my mother the other night. When I don’t get enough sleep, I kind of lose it.”
Lexa giggled as she tilted her head and rested it against Conrad’s shoulder. Ariana smiled, happy to see that her friend was able to joke about her public breakdown. Maybe their little talk in the garden had worked.
“And besides, April should do her job,” Lexa added, lifting a shoulder. “She’s always showing off how organized she is. Well, guess what? She’s not.”
“Huh. Maybe you are a little OCD,” Palmer joked.
Lexa shot him a look of death with her eyes, while smiling with her mouth.
“Just kidding,” he said, raising his hands in surrender. “Honestly. I’m just glad you’re feeling better, Lex.”
“We all are,” Conrad said, lifting his arm to place it around her on the back of her chair.
“How about we talk about something else?” Ariana suggested, dipping her fork into her mashed potatoes. “This restaurant is lovely. Have you ever been here before?”
The restaurant was nice, but bland. It had all the trappings of the basic, Washington, DC, steak house, the kind of place where politicos hung out after a long day of hashing out deals. The cream-colored walls were decorated with framed paintings of important moments in history; several deep, private booths flanked the dining room; and the lighting was low enough that a photographer might not be able to exactly make out who was sitting with whom. Ariana’s steak had been fine, but a tad overcooked, so now she was concentrating on her sides. Her sides and her boyfriend. At least, she was trying.