She snatched her hand back from him. “I’m not going anywhere with you. I’m going to sit in my car until Miller calms down from his freak-out, and then I’m going to go in there and beg for my job back. I can’t believe you got me fired.”
Sweat was beginning to trickle down his scalp, and he hated Jian’s insistence that gentlemen wore long-sleeved shirts even in Phoenix in the summer. “You’re better off without that job.”
“I am not! I need that job. I need to make rent at the end of the month. I don’t have time to go get a new job someplace else and wait a month for them to pay me. I don’t want to end up sleeping in my car.”
Tristan could hear the word again echo at the end of her speech. “You aren’t going to end up homeless.”
“You don’t know that, you smug prig! Even if I walked over to Hooters or a place where girls dance on tables and got a new job right now and worked a shift this afternoon, I still wouldn’t get my first paycheck for a month or more. There’s always a delay from the time when a pay period closes and when you actually get a paycheck. I wouldn’t get money until after my rent was past due. And then there would be a late fee that I can’t afford, and then I wouldn’t be able to make my car insurance or my phone payments, and then it would all snowball from there.”
Her vision of living on the edge of financial ruin was more heart-rending than his own. “How much is your rent?”
She told him a pitiful amount.
Tristan tugged his wallet from his back pocket and thumbed through the bills inside. Luckily, Jian kept his wallet full. He counted out the correct number of hundred-dollar bills and handed them to her, and then he handed her a few more for good measure. “Will that cover your rent and necessities until you get another job and a paycheck?”
She was gaping at the money in her hands, and the edges of the bills started to vibrate even though there was no breeze in the hot summer afternoon. “I can’t accept this.”
“I just got you fired. It’s the least I can do.”
“I can pay you back.”
People living on the edge of ruin assumed others must be, too, which was why they often insisted on paying one back. And that was why wealthy people didn’t care if they paid someone back or not. “You will not. I would be offended. Can I buy you a cup of coffee? Or a drink?”
Colleen looked up at him, her brown eyes even wider than when Miller had been firing her. “I don’t know what you want me to do for this money, but I’m not that kind of girl.”
He waved his fingers in the air. “If I’d have thought you were that kind of girl, I would’ve tried to haggle. Isn’t that customary?”
Colleen blinked a couple of times. “I suppose so. How’d you know all that about Mr. Miller?”
Tristan considered being mysterious, but he liked to show off too much. “It was the tattoos and how he was dressed. He had tattoos of Nordic rock bands that are associated with white-supremacist organizations. It’s possible that the right angle of the tattoo on the side of his neck is the top of a Nazi swastika. In addition, his horrid plaid pants and white golf shirt are the current uniform of white supremacists in the United States. It’s meant to ape golf-related country club attire, though those cretins don’t make enough money or have the social clout to belong to a country club. Otherwise, they would know that’s not how people dress there. But they believe that private country clubs are one of the last bastions of approved racist admission standards, and they’re not entirely wrong. He also had a tattoo of the YouTube logo with a red circle and slash over it on his right forearm. The YouTube logo was faded with age, but the slashed circle wasn’t, so it must have been a new addition.”
Colleen shook her head and stared at the money in her hands. “I don’t even know your name.”
They hadn’t introduced themselves. He’d just noticed her nametag on her spectacular boobs. “It’s Tristan. My name is Tristan King.”
“Tristan,” she said slowly, like she was emphasizing the T-R at the beginning. “I’m Colleen Frost.”
He stuck out his hand to shake. “It’s a pleasure to make your acquaintance, Ms. Frost.”
She shuffled the bills into her left hand and shook his hand. “How do you do?”
He chuckled. “I haven’t heard that in years. You look like you could use a cup of coffee. I know I could certainly use one. So why don’t we sit down at that coffee shop right over there?” He gestured toward the corner store of the strip mall. Tables topped with green umbrellas stood on the sidewalk outside. “No expectations. You’re not going anywhere with me. But let me just properly apologize for getting you fired.”
She was still staring at the money in her hands, and she extended it toward him. “You really don’t have to do this.”
“I want to. If I don’t, I will feel guilty forever. You’re doing me a favor by allowing me to assuage my guilt so easily. But be forewarned, I’m going to check up on you to make sure you’re all right.”
“You don’t have to do that. I’m a grown-up. I handle my own finances. I’ll be fine.”
He sighed. “I’ve been in some dicey situations. There was one Christmas Eve when I was fifteen that I nearly froze to death on the streets of New York because I had nowhere to go. This was years ago, and I didn’t have any money to my name, not even a bank account or a twenty in my wallet, and I sure didn’t have a cell phone back then. Some of my rich friends had flip phones, but I didn’t. There was no adult I could call. I finally ended up using a payphone and reversing the charges to call a friend from school, and he called his grandfather who lived in the City to come and rescue me.”
“Where were your parents?” she asked and then seemed to look startled at her outburst.
Tristan swallowed. “I don’t know. I still don’t know. But right now, I just want a cup of something warm to drink. Come on. I promise I won’t abduct you between here and that Starbucks right over there.”
Tristan turned and started walking, his chest unsettled. Talking about his parents or that Christmas Eve rattled him.
He talked as he strolled, listening to her light feet tapping on the pavement behind him. “I’m dying for a really good hot chocolate. I haven’t had one in six months.”
