Finder's Keeper (16 page)

“This is about the watch, isn’t it?”

She shoved her hand toward him. “Here. Search for it.”

Chase gripped her hand. A mimosa blast of frustration. He jerked his hand back. “You don’t want the watch. You want your family to stop planning their lives around it. That’s not going to help us find it.”

“Dr. C?”

Mia spun toward the door, yanking it open. Nasrin shifted nervously on the other side. “Did you want to do that challenge thing now?”

Mia gave a stiff nod. “Yes. Absolutely. Thank you.” After Nasrin retreated back to the front office, Mia threw a glare over her shoulder. “How do you always distract me from the matter at hand?”

He grinned. “It’s a skill. You ready to be spanked by magic?”

She stumbled a step, shooting him a startled glance.

“Trash talk,” he explained. “I promise not to spank you unless you ask me nicely.”

“You are a strange man.”

They entered the main office area and Stephanie’s wide eyes convinced him perhaps he shouldn’t have mentioned spanking quite so loudly.

“You ready for this?” he asked Mia. “Science versus Magic, Round One?”

“I was born ready.”

He snorted out a laugh. “All right. Challenge on.”

“I won!” Mia twirled in a circle, holding Stephanie’s misplaced cell phone above her head like a trophy as she shook her booty in a victory dance. “I won, I won, I won, I won, I won.”

Chase couldn’t hold back a grin, leaning toward Stephanie to stage-whisper, “I think she might have won.”

He should’ve known she’d be a competitive little thing.

She was still smiling when she turned to him. “I’ll go with you to your belated birthday thing, too. It’s only fair.”

“The loser isn’t supposed to get what he wants, Mia.”

“I want to. Think of it as a consolation prize after the way Science whooped Magic’s ass.” She beamed at him, smug with victory. “Besides, I owe you for bringing me lunch. Oh! I have something for you.”

She darted back into her office. Stephanie and Nasrin instantly closed in, leveling identical glares at him.

“I don’t understand,” Stephanie began.

“Science won. Congratulations, your careers are vindicated.”

Nasrin frowned. “But we cheated so Dr. C would have to go on another date with you. You were supposed to win.”

“And yet Science emerged victorious.”

“I
told
you where I hid it,” Nasrin growled.

“I thought of it as hard as I could,” Stephanie protested.

“And you were both very helpful.”

“So you threw it?” Nasrin asked indignantly.
“Why
?
”

Mia emerged from her office, all but walking on air, her smile beyond radiant. Chase felt his own lips curving in response. “Wouldn’t you do just about anything to make her smile like that?”

Mia bounded over to them before her assistants could reply. She thrust a Tupperware at him. “Nonna said you wanted to try her cannoli. I almost forgot I had it in the fridge here. I planned to drop it off on my way to work, but then I realized I don’t know where you live.”

“I don’t remember any discussions about cannoli.”

“Okay, technically, she shoved this on me and told me I should tell you that I baked it for you, but it’s Nonna’s special recipe. You’ll love it.”

Chase accepted the chilled Tupperware with a grin. “I should probably get going. Let you get back to work.”

She tipped her head to the side. “Was there some other reason you came by?”

The accident…his crappy past…

She was smiling. Her eyes were bright. Everything felt easy and light and wonderful. Sparky.

He couldn’t tell her. Not now.

“Nothing that can’t wait. You probably have a lot of work to do.”

“I am behind. I’ve wasted half the morning trying to figure out why the—well, let’s just say there’s a test anomaly that’s bugging me.”

He caught her arm, rubbing his thumb across the smooth skin at the crook of her elbow. He was braced for the intangibles that always hit him when he touched Mia, but this time there was only a single, sharp, focused and unwavering thought.
I want to know why the dopamine levels are high in the test results out of Birmingham
. The internal chord snapped taut and Chase saw the answer.

“They’re lying about sex.”

“How did you…? Oh.
Oh.
” Mia frowned and her eyes went distant, her brain obviously moving at warp speed. After a moment, she cursed under her breath. “We asked about recent intercourse, but the results were from a strongly religious area… If the screeners skipped the questions about sexual activity… Crap. That could explain the elevated dopamine levels. I have to…” She was gone. She might still be standing right in front of him, but her thoughts were a million miles away.

Chase caught her hand and gave her fingers a squeeze. “I’ll see you Thursday.” He slipped out of the office without even a blink of reaction from Mia, her RAs staring after him—Nasrin with a puzzled frown and Stephanie with gooey adoration.

As he trotted down the stairs to the parking lot where he’d chained his bike, he pulled out his cell phone and dialed Brody, leaving a message telling his buddy he’d see him on Thursday…and that he’d better start planning a belated birthday bash.

Chapter Sixteen

High Hopes, Heartbreaks & Houses

If possible, Mia was even more nervous on Thursday afternoon than she had been on Sunday.

She’d known what to expect on Sunday. Her family’s insanity was predictable, at least, but she was out of her element tonight. She’d always sucked at social situations. All those pretty, useless social lies. Pretending she gave a damn about the weather and traffic and other idiotic surface topics which existed only so people could feign agreement with one another and avoid conversing with any depth. Mia liked to slice through to the heart of the matter. No nonsense, no bullshit. If there was nothing of substance to say, she would much rather sit quietly and mull over the results of her latest experiment. Thoughtful silence over thoughtless chitchat. Which made meeting new people excruciatingly awkward.

She’d never before felt such a need to make a good impression on a date’s friends. Even when she’d been dating Peter, there hadn’t been this nervousness. They’d known all the same people, run in all the same circles, so there were no awkward introductions. No nervousness about the fact that she sucked at small talk. If she was perfectly honest, she’d never really cared if Peter’s friends liked her because Peter was more an accessory than an attachment.

Chase was different. Even if they weren’t really dating.

She wanted to be perfect for him tonight.

Nasrin and Steph had helped her pick out her outfit, arguing the entire time about whether she was a summer or an autumn—with a Skype-conference consultation from Gina to settle the matter.

Mia studied her reflection in the windows of her office as she waited for Chase to arrive. The burgundy wrap dress gave the illusion of cleavage where she had none and flowed around her knees when she walked. She looked feminine and she felt weird. Like a girl. From the nervous knot in her stomach to the urge to fuss with her loosely flowing hair.

She
never
felt like a girl. And she wasn’t sure if this change was a good thing, or a very, very bad one.

The door to her office flew open as Stephanie rushed in, flapping her hands in excitement. “He’s
here
,” she gushed. Nasrin stood behind her, her hands clasped at her bosom and her black eyes gleaming wetly like a proud mama seeing her baby off to the prom. The pair of them had declared they would be working late as soon as they heard Chase was picking her up at seven.

Mia smoothed suddenly icy hands down over her hips and grabbed her clutch. Her research assistants parted like the Red Sea as she approached the doorway. She stepped into the hallway and saw Chase waiting in the outer office, once again looking like he’d stepped right out of a Calvin Klein ad. Mia reminded herself this wasn’t a real date, but it was hard to remember when her heart started to race at the sight of him, when Chase told her she looked lovely and Nasrin and Steph sighed in unison. Harder still when he winked at the pair of them and opened the door for her. Then opened the car door of his station wagon downstairs. Chivalry. It was…kind of nice.

The car was in better condition than she’d expected. Cleaner. A palm tree-shaped air-freshener hung from the rearview mirror and the back was cluttered with colorful hockey puck-shaped containers she thought were surfboard wax, but there were no old fast food bags littering the floorboards and not even a speck of sand.

The engine started smoothly as Chase turned the key and steered them toward O’Flannigans. The car cut through the night and Mia watched the passing lights blur. Preoccupied by her own nerves, she barely noticed how silent Chase was until he suddenly spoke.

“There’s something you need to know. Before we get there.”

Mia looked over at him, noting for the first time his clenched jaw and rigid posture. Strain marked the lines that framed his baby blues. It was like all his charm had been sucked inside him and the doors barred to keep the world out. “Are you okay?”

“I’m fine,” he said, the sharpness of the words marking them as a lie. He didn’t look at her, staring straight ahead. “I just don’t talk about this if I can avoid it.”

“You don’t have to—”

“No. Brody will mention it and if we were a couple, it would be weird that you didn’t know.”

Know what? Was he terminally ill? About to go on trial for a felony? Mia was suddenly very sure she
didn’t
want to know whatever he was about to tell her. Good, bad or ugly, it would make him real in a way she wasn’t sure she was ready for him to be.

“Six years ago, I was studying architecture at Penn…”

Crap. Already her perceptions of him were shifting. Penn was a damn good school and architecture was a real profession, none of that useless Eighteenth Century Russian Literature crap.

Chase’s voice took on the sing-song lilt of a well-told story, even though Mia was certain this was a story he never told. “I was a semester away from graduation when I asked the cutest, sweetest sorority girl on campus to marry me…”

Her stomach clenched. He’d been engaged?

“My parents had come up for a weekend to celebrate the engagement, along with my brother and his wife, who was expecting their first child. Katie…my fiancée…went out to dinner with them to talk wedding plans with my mother, but I’d had to study. I had a big project due on Monday and promised to meet them at the restaurant when I was done, but I lost track of time. I never made it to dinner. All work and no play…”

The sing-song words choked off and Chase coughed. The harsh sound seemed unnaturally loud in the hush of the car. Mia sank deeper into her seat, cringing against what she could feel was coming.

“There was a storm that night, rain falling sideways it was coming down so hard. An instant. That’s how quickly it happens. They died instantly—people kept telling me that. What they managed to scrape up of the other driver showed a blood alcohol level of twice the legal limit. But whether I blamed God or the poor ass who died with them, it didn’t bring them back.”

Mia wasn’t a crier, but Chase said it so matter of factly, she felt her throat tighten on the threat of tears. She pushed them back. She wouldn’t do him any favors by blubbering all over him. “All of them?” she asked, when she could be sure her voice wouldn’t break.

“One fell swoop,” he said without inflection. “I dropped out of school, starting surfing a lot, and the rest is history. Seemed like you should know.”

It obviously pained him to talk about it.

“Thank you,” Mia said softly, swallowing down the bubbling tide of her shock. Her chest hurt, the pain that of her heart cracking open.

The knowledge didn’t change who he was so it shouldn’t change her opinion of him, but she couldn’t dismiss him as a too-hot-for-his-own-good charmer anymore. He wasn’t just a caricature of his own attractiveness—which admittedly, he hadn’t been for days, but he wasn’t just an antagonist who liked to push her buttons either. He was real now and she ached for him.

“Here we are,” Chase announced as they pulled into the parking lot. He cleared his throat, still pointedly not looking at her. “Sorry to lay all that on you right before you meet Brody and Molly, but…well, they were going to be the best man and maid of honor at my wedding so it might come up.”

“No, I’m glad you told me.”

“They’re great though, Brody and Molly. You’ll love them.” He was making an effort to change the subject so Mia went along.

“Will they…will they like me? I mean, am I what they had in mind for you?” She wanted to ask if she was anything like Katie—not sure whether she was hoping to be similar or different—but stopped the words.

“They’ll love you. They both think I need to grow up so the fact that I’m dating an adult will delight them.”

Mia squirmed in her seat, suddenly hyper-conscious of the fact that she was older than Chase. And not by just a month or two. Six years was a daunting margin. Wanting maturity wasn’t the same as welcoming a woman who was already past her best child-bearing years.

He flashed her a smile, and for the first time she saw layers in it. The twinkle in his eye was wry, the quirk of his lips amused. There was intellect in his charm, and a carefully constructed wall. “Come on, beautiful. You’ll be great.”

O’Flannigan’s Pub was crowded for a Thursday—at least to Mia’s socially ignorant eyes—but Chase knew exactly where he was going. He navigated them through the tables with a hand on the small of her back, guiding her to a booth in the back corner whose high seatbacks formed walls to block out the noisy pub. They were five minutes early, but the booth was already occupied by a professional-looking, dark-haired man and a trophy-wife-perfect brunette, both about Chase’s age.

The dark-haired man, Brody apparently, launched himself out of the booth as soon as he saw them coming. “Mia!” he shouted. “You exist!”

Molly followed him out of the booth, smacking him playfully on the arm. “Ignore him,” she said to Mia dryly. “He thinks he’s funny.”