Total pages in book: 118
Estimated words: 113072 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 565(@200wpm)___ 452(@250wpm)___ 377(@300wpm)
Estimated words: 113072 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 565(@200wpm)___ 452(@250wpm)___ 377(@300wpm)
I bark out a laugh. “Really? From his own employee?”
She nods seriously. “He said, ‘Regan speaks so highly of you. What would it take to get you to work up here instead?’ He was such a grump that I didn’t want to say yes. So I told him I’d only work for him if he paid for my college classes during the summer. It was just the first thing that popped into my mind. And he immediately said yes.”
“That’s… wow.” It’s more generous than I would have expected him to be.
She grins. “It is wow. I do two classes every summer, and it isn’t cheap. At this rate I won’t graduate until I’m thirty. But it also taught me something about him.” She shakes her head, like she still doesn’t quite believe it. “He said, ‘I like that you weren’t afraid to name your demand. That’s the kind of person I want on my team.’”
“The bloodthirsty kind?”
Darcy shrugs.
“Here we are, ladies.” Our sleek waiter reappears at my side. Even better, he’s holding two huge cocktails with salted rims. “I got the bartender to make margaritas.”
“Regular margaritas?” I ask, bracing myself to hear that they’re flavored with squid ink or bone marrow.
“As regular as they come,” he says, sliding a bowl-shaped glass onto the table in front of me. “He drew the line at making a blender drink.” He gives a slight shudder. “So this is on the rocks.”
“It’s beautiful,” Darcy says with true reverence. “I’ll treasure it always. Or at least for the next half hour.”
He does something weird with his mouth that I think is supposed to be a smile. “I’ll return momentarily with our Mediterranean platter and some truffle fries.”
We hold up our giant cocktails and touch them together before we each take a life-affirming sip. “So I guess they have some game behind that bar,” Darcy says.
“Thank goodness.” I sigh happily. And when our waiter reappears a minute later with a whole lot of mini pita breads and dips, and a large funnel of fries, I feel like I might survive this day after all.
Darcy plucks something from our collection of cute little ramekins and pops it into her mouth. “Holy cow, a deep-fried olive. I didn’t know I needed that in my life. Try this.”
She passes me the little dish, and we spend the next half hour bonding in a way that only overpriced bar food can instill in a friendship.
Everything is wonderful until Darcy says, “So I have some questions for you about Chase Merritt.”
A truffle fry stops halfway to my mouth. “What about him?” Then I realize my mistake. “And why me?”
She gives me an arch glance. “We’ll get to that in a second. But that call he took tonight? It’s from a lawyer in Minnesota.”
“Minnesota,” I echo. That’s where he grew up.
“She keeps calling,” Darcy says, her light blue eyes trained on mine. “As if it’s urgent. When I ask what she needs, she says it’s a private matter. But Chase never returned her calls.”
“Well, that’s…” Weird. Confusing. Chase never talked about his family, even when I asked him point blank. I know his mother is dead, but I don’t know anything about the rest of the Merritts.
“Thanks to you, she finally got him on the line tonight. He listened for a minute, and then he said, ‘I don’t want it. Give it to someone else.’” Darcy shrugs. “Whatever she said next made him seriously grumpy. Then he said, ‘Send it to the team headquarters. Whatever.’ And hung up on her.”
I have goose bumps now, and I don’t even know why. “And you’re telling me this because…?”
“Well…” She spreads something on a wedge of pita. We’ve already lost track of which dip is which, and we don’t care. “I edit the player bios every season, so I know Chase Merritt once played hockey for Coach William Walsh in Minnesota. And that’s your uncle, right? I googled you after I learned you were joining the team.”
Uh-oh. “Yes.”
She shrugs. “It’s a small world, so I didn’t think anything of it. But tonight, after I tricked Merritt into taking that call, he was super mad. I thought he was going to yell at me. But he just said, ‘Don’t ever send Zoe to do your dirty work. That’s low.’”
“Oh,” I say slowly.
“Yeah, I shouldn’t have poked that grumpy bear.” She gives me a faint smile. “But something about the way he said your name made it sound like you two know each other. And then I saw you confront him before he left. What’s up with that?”
Oh, hell. I don’t know what to say.
Darcy’s eyes grow large. “Wait, really? Did you and Merritt have a thing?”
“No,” I say quickly. And then I wince. “Well, briefly. He was nineteen, and I was eighteen. It was just kid stuff. We were both working at… a summer camp.”