Page 30 of Shark’s Pride

Abbigail pushed back from the counter. “Maybe I should leave you two to talk in private.” She had a look of repulsion on her face. It couldn’t be interpreted any other way. It made me sick to my stomach, especially because there was nothing I could do about it. Because I’d fucking caused it.

“Abbig—”

Tawny cut me short by raising her hand. “No.” And then lowered it around Abbi’s wrist. “Please don’t leave on my account.”

Abbi twisted her arm free. She held her hand against her middle in blatant self-protection. “It’s all right. I have to…well…do something upstairs.”

“Abbi!” I said it louder this time.

“I’m sorry if that made you uncomfortable,” Tawny rushed to insert. “Because there’s no reason to be.” Before Abbi could finish laughing about that, she blurted, “God. I’m not doing any of this right. I should’ve started out by saying there’s a good reason Sebastian doesn’t exactly remember me.” Before I could react, she went on. “We never slept with each other.”

Abbi halted. “Oh?”

At the same time, I brought the flat of a hand down on the counter. As the teacups finished their residual clatters, I demanded, “And that didn’t seem like the better place to start…why?”

“I’m so sorry,” Tawny babbled again. “I’ve—I’ve been so scattered…”

“Too scattered not to listen when I introduced Abbigail as my girlfriend when you came in? After arriving to my house on a Saturday morning—uninvited, I might add?”

“I’m really sorry—”

“As I’m already aware.” I was a solid case of livid—with the woman and the situation. “Because so far, you’ve been nothing but a troublemaker.”

“Forgive me.” It was barely a rasp from Tawny, matching her timid fussing with her tea. “I—I only meant that—”

“That what?”

“That it didn’t surprise me that you didn’t remember the girls you sleep with, since you have a reputation of being emotionally uninvolved when you do.”

I was furious with myself for forcing the answer. The torture got worse as I looked back to Abbigail. She seemed enthralled with every word out of Tawny, nodding as the woman spoke. I couldn’t imagine what she was gleaning from the conversation, but she looked as though the dancer was imparting the damn Da Vinci code.

“Okay. Let’s just cut to the chase here.” I pinched the bridge of my nose for a long beat. Begging for some sort of calm. “Why the fuck did you write that suicide letter?”

Tawny opened her mouth, but Abbigail beat her to the punch on actually forming words. “More importantly, whose body was pulled from San Pedro Bay if you’re sitting here?”

Though it made my head threaten to blow into a million pieces, I couldn’t negate the question’s validity. Crossing my arms over my chest, I waited for an explanation. The details she owed me, damn it.

Tawny rapidly stirred some sweetener into her tea. “I’m going to give you an abridged version of the story.”

I flared my nostrils and sucked in air. “Just out with it.”

“I came to California with a lot of dreams and no cash to back them up. Needless to say, I racked up a good amount of debt shortly after moving here. For one thing, it’s hard to find a job in this town. For another, it’s expensive to live here.” She took a long look around my gourmet kitchen, and her shoulders dropped even farther. “Though I guess you wouldn’t know much about struggling to make ends meet.”

As she gave a watery laugh, I lowered my head to level our stares.

“Do not presume to know me.” But aside from my small nod of emphasis, that was all I’d offer her right now. “Continue.”

“After a lot of dead-end jobs, I fell back on the oldest profession known to man—or woman, I guess—to pay the bills. In the meantime, I got mixed up with some shitty people. When I was in too deep, both with owing debt and favors to all the wrong people, they came knocking to collect.”

“Who did?”

But the question—which seemed the most obvious one to ask at this point—was overlapped by another query from Abbi. “They literally made you fake your death?” she asked with an incredulous rasp.

“In a nutshell.” As Tawny supplied that, she winced. She looked ten years older than the picture they’d been flashing on the news a few weeks back. “But it seemed like the perfect answer,” she finally went on. “They said they would handle everything, and I didn’t have to actually do anything in return. It was the perfect deal…”

I used her tearful trail-off as a perfect chance to tighten my scrutiny with furious force. “There is no such thing. Business 101.”

“But all I had to do was disappear…”