“Twenty-nine.”
Hamish shook his head and sighed. “What does his sister think of all this?”
My eyes widened, like they always did whenever Lola Hudson was discussed. I sucked in a breath and turned my head. “I do not know. No one’s heard from her for the past year.”
Hamish sat up, causing the chair to scrape against the hardwood floor. “That’s right. His brother was trying to arrange her marriage to that oil tycoon’s son, uh... Jackson; no, that’s not right. Jacob—”
“Julius Harold Lexcore the Third.”
Hamish threw his head back and laughed, but I did not join.
After some wheezing, he sat up. “Oh my god, I remember that guy. He was like a super creepy version of Dick, if that’s even possible. No wonder she ran.”
Good. There should be a law where it was illegal to marry or come within one hundred miles of Julius Harold Lexcore the Third.
“Yeah.”
Hamish’s laughter faded as he stared at me. “You’re not laughing, Jenner.”
I shrugged. “Just not in the mood today. Didn’t get a good night’s sleep,” I lied.
Sighing, Hamish leaned forward, resting his elbows on the small square table, causing it to wobble. “I remember Lola; she was incredibly sweet. I kept thinking, how could someone with a father like hers end up so kind?”
Something in my heart cracked.
“Yup, nice.” I nodded but kept my gaze focused on the large window that overlooked Fitzlee Street as the people clutched their coats against the bitter cold and falling snow.
“What aren’t you telling me?”
Surprised, I blinked and turned my gaze back to Hamish. “Huh?”
My heart thumped loudly in my chest. He didn’t know; no one knew my secret. That wasn’t true. There was only one other person who knew, and she had more to lose than I did if it got out, so there was no reason for her to ever breathe a word of it.
“You’re usually the one with all the gossip. Telling me everything you know about someone in the latest scandal. What’s going on in their life; if they’re a jerk, etc. But I mention Lola, and it’s a ‘yup, kind,’ and that’s it. What aren’t you telling me?”
Hamish may have made many poor decisions in life, but unfortunately for me at the moment, he was no dummy.
I slapped on the most awkward smile I could muster and shook my head while I told the biggest lie of all. “There’s nothing to tell. Sure, she’s pretty and kind, like you said, but she’s just one of those people who never really made an impression on me. Like, if she was in the room, I wouldn’t even notice her.”
Hamish focused on me for quite a while, and I felt the suffocating heat from his stare, but I refused to let him see me wipe the sweat from my brow.
“I never said she was pretty.”
Fuck.
“Really? I must have misheard you,” I lied again.
Ugh, that wasn’t like me. Sure, as a lawyer, I twisted things to make my clients appear to be upstanding pillars of the community, but I never flat-out lied.
I knew what lies did—they destroyed lives. I had witnessed it too often with my clients and their spouses, their jobs, or their personal lives in general.
It was all the talk of Lola. There were things about her that drew you in, like a magician about to put you in a trance. It was exciting.Shewas exciting. But then, once you woke up from the spell, you’d be left with a cold emptiness that made you regret ever meeting the magician to begin with.
Lola was beautiful, but it was her sweetness that was the true spell. When she disappeared, I thought it was the worst thing to happen in my life. But now I realized she did me a favor by performing her vanishing act—it was the only way to get me to wake up from her spell.
Hamish sighed. “Look, I will not pry into whatever happened between you and Lola. But if something happened, you better hope her brother Eric never finds out. He may be a hot mess, but he’s a scary hot mess.”
I swallowed. Hamish was right.