I take the jug of water on the table and pour myself a glass. “I’m fine with this for now. This place is really great, Adam. Not to be rude, though, but I’m sort of dying to know what you wanted to tell me. Do you think we could start with that?”
He sighs, fiddling with the corks that hang from the edge of his sombrero. They jostle around as he nods his head. “Yeah, I guess we could,” he says. “I mean, it’s a shame to ruin such a nice date with that kind of talk, but …”
“Adam, this isn’t a date,” I mutter.
“Huh?” He narrows his eyes at me. “What do you mean?”
“I mean, we’re having lunch together, but this isn’t a date. I’m really sorry if I gave you the impression that it was.”
For a moment, I swear to God he’s going to grab the water jug and throw it at me. He gets this really intense look in his eyes. But then it passes and another grin slides across his face. I’m left wondering if I imagined it.
“Oh, no, of course it isn’t,” he giggles. “It just slipped out. Sorry. Won’t happen again.”
“No, it’s not a problem,” I assure him. “So what is it? What did you want to tell me?”
He sits back, idly flicking one of the dangling corks. As he stares, the waitress comes over. She places a plate of nachos on the table between us.
“Oh, thank you so much,” Adam tells her, grinning as he sits forward. He grabs the edge of one between his forefinger and thumb, pulling so that the cheese separates slowly and a jalapeño topples down onto the table. “Hmm, these look tasty.”
I get the sense that he’s stalling. I take a sip of water and just stare, waiting for him to talk. He seems like a nice enough guy, but irritation is starting to gnaw at my patience.
“Well, I guess we better get down to it, huh?” he says. “Basically, it’s like this. I know that Harry is a complete dickhead to women because he got my cousin pregnant when we were kids.”
It takes me almost a full minute to wrap my head around what he’s saying. I have a confused vision of a whole line of girls holding small versions of Harry before it dawns on me. “Wait … is your cousin’s name Gemma?”
“Yeah,” he says. “How did you know that?”
I shake my head, my lips suddenly drier than my glass of water can cure. “It doesn’t matter,” I mumble. “What happened to her?”
“Pfft, nowthere’sevidence that he’s fucked in the head ten ways to Wednesday. He got her pregnant and left her to deal with the kid alone. Even when he started making decent money in his football career, he wouldn’t give her a damn penny. He’s a selfish bastard. He hasn’t paid a penny of child support ever, even when she confronted him one day and told him she was working two jobs.”
“Oh, jeez, that’s horrible,” I whisper, sitting back and clamping my hands down on my thighs. It’s either that or succumb to the urge to run. My legs twitch as if they’re urging me to just take off. “I don’t get it, though. If you’re her cousin, why would he hire you?”
“He doesn’t know I’m her cousin.” He grins, plopping a jalapeño in his mouth. “That’s why I’m here, Grace. I’m going to find some evidence against this dick-wad and expose him.”
“Evidence of what?” I ask, my head spinning about a million miles a minute.
“Of something,” Adam snarls, baring his teeth. “What he did to my cousin is just fucking sick, Grace. So I bet he’s done other sick shit. All I need is his laptop. If I had his laptop, I could pay somebody to hack into it. Just think about it. He did that to her when he was a nobody. What do you think he’d do now with all these naïve women throwing themselves at him?”
I swallow, my saliva suddenly way too acidic.
Naïve women.
Am I one of them?
It’s so hard to square the Harry I know with the portrait Adam paints.
But then, it makes sense, doesn’t it?
He hasn’t mentioned this Gemma woman, not even referenced the fact that he has a child. He doesn’t know I heard about him getting her pregnant, so I guess that makes sense.
He thinks he can lie to me.
“You need to steal the laptop, Grace,” he says. “You need to help me make sure he can’t do this to another innocent girl.”
