Slightly Irregular by Rhonda Pollero Read Free Book Online Page B

been calling you for the last two hours, and when you didn’t answer your landline or your cell, she called and asked me to come check on you.”
    “It’s Sunday.”
    “For me, too,” he said. “I was working on my car.”
    “I hope you were working on pushing it off a bridge.”
    He cocked his head to one side. “Call your boss so I can get back to what I was doing.”
    As he turned to leave, I said, “Don’t ever walk in my house without an invitation again.”
    “Speaking of invitations, I accept.”
    “Accept what?”
    “I’ll escort you to your sister’s wedding.”
    I was still staring at the closed door five minutes after he left.

Favors you do for friends; everyone else pays.

four
    I sat down and listened to the half-dozen voice mails Ellen had left on my machine. With each one, her voice sounded more irritated than concerned. “So why send Liam?” I muttered as I copied her home number onto the Lilly Pulitzer notepad I kept near the phone, along with a matching pen, of course.
    Curious, I wanted to check my set-on-vibrate cell phone. So I grabbed my purse—a major score if I did say so myself. Coach. White leather with cute little tassels. Well, that wasn’t exactly true. Only three of the original four tassels were still in place, which is why I paid less than thirty dollars for it in an eBay auction. My mother had cut me off from Jonathan’s trust fund more than a year ago, her version of teaching me to fend for myself and be more responsible.
    Jonathan and my mom married when I was still a toddler. He’d adopted me when I was three and always treated me as if I was as good as, if not better than, my sister. I’d discovered myillegitimacy and adoption when I was thirteen, after sneaking into my mother’s lingerie drawer. My goal had been to check out the La Perla. Instead, I got the whole scoop on attempts to notify Misters Finley and Anderson. Eventually, my mother explained the whole story, but it was Jonathan who’d sat next to me, gently stroking my hair and my self-esteem.
    At any rate, he’d left Lisa and me individual trusts but had given my mother the power to control any withdrawals. Lisa had full access while I was cut off, sending me into the nether world of discount designers and factory damage.
    I was a master at it now. Not even Becky had clued in to the fact that my designer stuff was secondhand at best, gently used at worst. And I’d like to keep it that way. A girl’s gotta have her secrets.
    Just thinking about secrets, my mind drifts to Liam. Forget that I know virtually nothing about him. The one thing I do know is that he keeps everything close to the vest. Thankfully not literally. A guy in a vest does nothing for me. The mere thought of secrets instantly had Liam’s face taunting my thought processes.
    I was still fuming mad about the babysitting thing, and even angrier at myself for allowing things to go as far as they had. He thought nothing of bursting into my home without so much as knocking. For all he knew someone could be in here holding me hostage at gunpoint. And therein lay the rub. He was completely wrong for me, and yet in the past, he’d risked his personal safety for me. Did he have to be chivalrous and irritating at the same time?
    I took in a deep breath, then let it out slowly as I slid thebar on my iPhone and instantly discovered I had seventeen more messages from Ellen and one from Becky. I deleted them without listening, sure they were just repeats of the “call me immediately” mantras she’d left on my landline. Dane-Lieberman owned me five days a week, and Sunday wasn’t one of them.
    “Lieberman.”
    “Ellen, this is Finley returning your—”
    “So Liam finally found you.”
    “It’s Sunday. I was at the beach, not in the witness protection plan.”
    “Excuse me?”
    I winced. Probably not the smartest move to be a wiseass to one of my bosses. “Sorry, sunstroke,” I muttered. “What do you need?”
    “I’ve scheduled an