Page 18 of #Awestruck
Why did it feel just as dangerous to give him my number as it did my address? But with no cards left to play, I rattled off my cell number.
And all of my feelings of having won something disappeared when I saw his smirk. He’d outsmarted me in the end.
Evan put his phone back in his pocket and picked up his jacket. I turned off the gym lights as he opened the door.
“Hey, Ashton, do you hear that?”
“What?” I asked, holding still, wondering if we’d set off an alarm somewhere.
He moved closer, again making my senses go nuts. “It’s the sound of this, happening.” He whistled as he went out into the hallway, leaving me standing in the door with my mouth hanging open.
How did that make me both want to laugh and hate him more at the same time?
CHAPTER SIX
I went into ISEN the next afternoon to tell Brenda about my progress. Rand gave me a hard time about being “the teacher’s pet,” but I ignored him as I headed into her office. I told her about the dinner date we had planned, along with the charity appointment with Tinsley. Her eyes lit up when I talked about the dinner. She wanted to know when and where, but I told her I didn’t know yet.
As if he somehow sensed he was being talked about, my phone dinged with a new message.
I handed her my phone to let her see his text.
She stared at my screen for a long time. It made me a bit uncomfortable. I wondered if she’d mention the basketball part since I hadn’t told her anything about it. I probably should have. It just didn’t feel like it was any of her business since it didn’t have anything to do with the story. Only the outcome had mattered—that we were going to dinner.
Speaking of, Rodrigo’s was a new restaurant that had opened downtown and was basically impossible to get into. Aubrey had been trying for months to get reservations for her and her husband.
Which of course wouldn’t be a problem for a guy like Evan Dawson.
“This is really promising, Ashton. Make sure he gets some wine in him, and you have your phone handy so you can record whatever he’s saying.”
She handed my phone back to me, and I put it in my purse. “For sure.” But the idea of getting him drunk in an attempt to make him confess everything felt ... wrong. When I found out the truth, I didn’t want there to be any coercion or trickery involved.
“Even though you don’t have any official intel yet, it sounds like you’re making progress. Good job, Ashton. Keep it up. And keep me informed.”
I promised I would and then pitched in for a few hours to help out with the workload. The other interns all glared and muttered things about me just out of my hearing. It made sense that they’d resent me. I’d resent me, too. I was getting special treatment. But their behavior started giving me nervous flashbacks to high school, and I ended up leaving earlier than I had intended.
After I grabbed some dinner from the bistro where I usually ate lunch, I headed over to Aubrey’s house. She and my brother-in-law, Justin, lived in the same upper-middle-class suburb where we’d grown up, just two blocks over from my parents’ house.
I knocked on their door, and when Aubrey answered, I got bowled over by my four-year-old niece, Charlotte, and my two-year-old nephew, Joey. “Auntie Ashton!”
“Hey, guys!” I said with a laugh as they clung to my legs. I walked inside slowly, their weight slowing me down.
“Are you here to play with us?” Charlotte asked, her big hazel eyes imploring me to say yes, her red hair in two braids that made her look a little like Pippi Longstocking.
“Charlotte, for the thousandth time, Mommy told you to go upstairs and get dressed. You can’t run around in your underwear,” Aubrey said, pinching the bridge of her nose.
Now my niece turned her big-eyed puppy gaze on my sister. “No, Mommy, why? I don’t wanna wear shirts or dresses or pants.”
“Upstairs, right now.”
With fake sobs Charlotte heaved herself up the stairs, stopping her crying only when she realized we weren’t listening to her. Then she stomped loudly all the way to her room and slammed the door once she got there.
“I am so looking forward to her becoming a teenager. You know, before I became a mom, I had no idea I could ruin someone’s day by asking them to wear pants,” Aubrey said as she pulled Joey off my leg. “Do you have to go potty?”
“No,” he said, scrambling to be put down and then running off to play with his cars.
“I don’t have to go potty, either. In case you were wondering.”
Aubrey shot me her patented Mom Look to let me know she wasn’t amused. Her phone beeped, and she glanced at the screen. “Sh—crap. Izzie’s mom just backed out of carpool on Saturday for Charlotte’s soccer game.”
