CHAPTER FOUR

      “AW, HELL,” TASHA said morosely, “it’s not like I didn’t know better than to hook up with Diego/Luc/whatever-he-wants-to-call-himself in the first place.” She knocked back a long swallow from her glass of the house red, then looked at Jenny and Harper seated on the other side of their booth at the Anchor. “I knew not to go there. But instead of paying attention to my instincts, I went ahead and hooked up with him anyway.”

      “How would you know better?” Harper asked with the near-British inflection that made her sound so boarding-school refined. “Did he have Lying Drug Dealer written all over him?” Her black ringlets shivered and swayed as she tipped her head to study Tasha. “And what, precisely, does such a person look like?”

      “Beats me. I only meant that I hadn’t intended to hook up with anyone on that vacation. It was just my bad luck that the one time I broke my own hard-and-fast rule, it was with a guy who landed me in a Bahamian jail.”

      It felt odd to have told yet another person about that time in her life. Her imprisonment in the dark, cramped cell had been the single most terrifying forty-eight hours of her life—its minutes stretching like dog years as she’d wondered if she would ever see the light of day again. When they finally did let her go, she’d wanted only to forget and had kept the incarceration a closely guarded secret, relating her experience to no one but Jenny. Now, after maintaining a stony silence for seven years, in less than twenty-four hours she had not only blurted it to Luc last night but had just told Harper, as well.

      But although she may have known Harper for only a couple of months, her new friend was fast becoming important to her. And she’d deserved to hear about her prior relationship with Luc if she was ever to understand why Tasha was so furious with him now.

      Raucous male laughter exploded from a table over by the window, but Harper didn’t spare so much as a glance in the group’s direction. She leaned into their own table. “You were on vacation,” she said. “Why wouldn’t you want to meet a hot-looking man?” She gave Tasha a knowing look. “And I think we must admit that Luc Bradshaw is that, yes?”

      Oh, yeah. He is definitely that. Not that she intended to say so aloud. She did, however, dip her chin in the tiniest acknowledgment.

      “It all stems back to her mama,” Jenny said and raised a hand to hail the cocktail waitress. Catching the woman’s eye, she circled an index finger over their glasses, indicating refills all around.

      “Your mother wouldn’t approve of you having a vacation fling?” Harper inquired. “Is she quite strict, then?”

      Both she and Jenny laughed. “No,” Tasha said. “Quite the opposite, actually. My mom was known around here as the whore of Razor Bay. She moved to Olympia almost six years ago, yet there are still a few people who like to throw her reputation in my face every now and then.” She shrugged. “Of course, they’re morons. And don’t get me wrong, I love my mom. But she and I are nothing alike.”

      “No fooling,” Jenny said and turned to Harper. “Nola, Tash’s mom, lives strictly in the moment—I don’t think I’ve ever seen her give a microsecond’s thought to what might happen tomorrow. Tash, on the other hand—she’s a whole nother animal. She is the most goal-oriented person I’ve ever met.”

      Harper gave Tasha a bright olive-green-eyed gaze, then turned in her seat to study Jenny. “I know you two have been friends for a long time. But I don’t believe I’ve ever heard exactly when or how you met.”

      “It was my second day at Razor Bay High School when we were sixteen,” Jenny said with a fond smile at Tasha. “I was new in town, and Tash stepped in when some kids started giving me shit about my father’s well-publicized incarceration for a Ponzi scheme—which we will talk about another time,” she added with a little grin when she saw the light of curiosity in her biracial friend’s eyes. “I just loved her from the start, because she had even less standing in that school than I did, yet instead of covering her ass and walking on by like any right-thinking individual would have done—”

      Tash snorted and Jenny flashed her a grin.

      “—she just jumped right into the fray. We went from that to bonding over the pizzas she made in her mama’s single-wide and a mutual determination to move beyond our circumstances.” Shaking her head, Jenny smiled ruefully. “I thought I had plans at the time. But Tash already had a full-fledged, neatly typed business plan for Bella T’s in her underwear drawer.”

      It was true, so Tasha merely shrugged. But then she slapped a hand against the scarred wooden tabletop and straightened in her seat. “You know, I’ve been thinking about this off and on for a while and it seems to me that calling my mother a whore is kind of unfair.” She made a waving motion as if to erase her words. “Oh, not that she hasn’t slept with an astounding number of men. But I can tell you that it was never for money. I’m not even convinced it was because she loved sex all that much.

      “I didn’t understand for the longest time why she constantly slept around the way she did, and God knows I had to live down her reputation from the day I was old enough to understand what people meant when they said Nola Riordan was a slut. But not long before Jenny came to town, I began to realize that Mom views each new sexual encounter as a potential love match. And I’m talking Luuuv with a capital L.” Her tone leaned toward the sardonic, but it couldn’t be helped. “Against all evidence to the contrary, my mother sincerely, consistently and faaar too optimistically believed—”

      “Believes,” Jenny interrupted.

      “Right, and I have no doubt always will believe that each new relationship is going to be the real deal. She’s convinced that this time the prince will ride in on his white charger to sweep her off her feet. That this new lover will be The One.”

      Harper propped her chin in her hand and sighed. “She’s a romantic.”

      “No kidding.” Tasha made a rude noise. “Mom is definitely all about the fantasy.” She had a sudden flash of Nola coming back to the trailer late at night, lipstick smeared and hair mussed, smelling of cigarette smoke and spilled beer. Her mom would wake her up and pull her out of bed to whirl her around the room. “He’s going to take us away from this rattrap, baby,” she’d promise. “Just you wait and see.” God. How many times had she heard a riff on that tune?

      Enough that she’d quit believing by the time she was nine or ten. Or younger.

      “You don’t believe in romantic love?” Dropping her hand, Harper sat back. “Please, tell me it isn’t so.”

      “Okay,” Tasha agreed amiably. “It isn’t so. At least to the extent that I’ve watched you and Jenny fall in love and can see a genuine magic to your relationships with the Bradshaw boys. I just don’t think it’s in the cards for the Riordan women.”

      “Don’t be silly,” Jenny said. “Of course it is.”

      “Excuse me if I don’t find it all that silly, Jen,” she snapped. “But not everyone’s as lucky as you.” She took a deep breath, gave her best friend a grimace of apology and said in a more moderate tone, “I’m sorry. That was stupid. But how many years did I watch Mom’s crazy quest for her prince and not believe? All of them, right? When I decided to unclench my grip on a bit of my hard-saved pizzeria money to take that trip to the tropics, all I was looking for were some white sand, blue sky memories of sipping mai tais in the shade of a palm tree. And, okay, maybe a few good photographs to lord over you.”