A Previous Engagement by Stephanie Haddad Read Free Book Online

my answer to a nod, afraid to commit any further. If she wanted to talk about the game, I was so screwed. Why couldn’t I have opened with something I actually knew about? “Hey did you catch that Lifetime movie last night? No? Oh, it was a good one! Teen pregnancy again, but this time, the father was an illegal immigrant. She needed to marry him or he’d get deported, but her parents would give their permission!” I didn’t know anything about teenaged, unwed mothers impregnated with the children of illegal aliens, but I knew Lifetime. You had to go with baseball, didn’t you, Tess?
     
    “That Pedroia homer in the ninth was wild!” Her smile broadened. I racked my brain for a Pedroia. “Dan was complaining the game was over by the fifth, but I wouldn’t give up on my Sox. I told him, Pedroia’s a clutch hitter. He always works it out, just give him some time, you know?”
     
    In all of that sports jargon, my brain clung to one word only: Dan. I suspected he may be a potential roadblock, so I put on my best girl-talk voice and resolved to find out more.
     
    “Dan, huh? Is that your boyfriend?” I sounded like my mother.
     
    “Oh, God, no!” she laughed. “Dan’s my little brother. He’s visiting from Maryland to look at colleges. No boyfriend here.”
     
    Jackpot. This “reconnaissance” stuff wasn’t as impossibly French as previously thought.
     
    “Are you from Maryland?”
     
    “Yeah,” she hesitated, flipping open her portfolio pad to a fresh page. “I know what you’re thinking: a Sox fan from Maryland?” That wasn’t at all what I was thinking, but I let her continue. “My family is from this area originally, but we moved just outside of Baltimore when I was twelve. I couldn’t give up my Sox, you know? Not for the Orioles .” She scoffed as though switching teams was a capital offense. Was it? “Have you ever been to Baltimore?”
     
    Cha-ching! “Actually, yeah,” I smiled. “My friend Christian went to Johns Hopkins, so I visited all the time. It’s a great city. After he graduated and moved back here to finish photography school, I missed the trips.”
     
    “Wow! Photography school? Good for him.” Savannah rooted in her purse, extracting a package of Luden’s cough drops—another one of Christian’s favorite things. A trail of destiny’s bread crumbs lay between them; I just needed to follow it. “I always wanted to be a photographer.” She tossed a cherry cough drop back and forth in her mouth. “I worked as an assistant for a while. Never worked up the guts to go for it though.”
     
    “Why not?” I shifted to the edge of my seat, overcome by the eerie perfection of it all.
     
    “My parents wanted me to get a four-year degree. I thought I’d just go to photography school after I got my business degree, then open up my own studio, you know?” She shrugged. “But one thing led to another, now here I am. I never had the time to try it out. I really admire your friend. Christian, right?”
     
    Setting them up was going to be a cakewalk.
     
     
     
    ****
     
     
     
    I was late for dinner. Twenty-two minutes late to be exact. It wasn’t my fault that one of my interns missed her deadline by nearly forty-five minutes. It also wasn’t my fault that two grocery stores were completely sold out of strawberries. It especially wasn’t my fault that there was traffic because some cat was stuck up in a tree in the town common. Stupid cat.
     
    When Kendra opened the front door, I flinched. I really hated when she yelled, so it helped to be prepared.
     
    Instead, she smiled. “Oh good, you’re right on time. Early, actually.”
     
    My eyebrows pulled together in confusion. “Huh?”
     
    “I planned dinner for seven-thirty, but told you seven. It’s Tess Time.” She scurried back to work as I stood in the doorway.
     
    “Tess Time? Seriously?”
     
    She turned to me, grinning sheepishly. “It’s kinda this thing we do to get you to show up on