From the Jump(39)

“Right.” Her response is lacking the conviction I’d prefer, but it will do.

“Right,” I agree. Resolutely, I spoon some passion fruit into my mouth. The tiny black seeds in the center crunch between my teeth.

Naturally, I’m attempting to pick them out when Deiss shows up. He doesn’t seem to notice, though. He just snags a coffee mug so tightly it looks like he wants to tilt it up over his face and lick the insides. He’d probably look haggard if he weren’t so tan. As it is, he’s half sunshine, half sultry evening. It’s tremendously unfair. If I’d spent the night being bounced around a bed, I’d be a tangled mess the next morning. I certainly wouldn’t look like I was searching for sustenance to get me through the next round.

He sinks into the empty chair next to me and plucks the ripe fig off my plate. Without a word, he shoves the entire thing into his mouth.

“No,” I say sharply, like I’m chastising an errant puppy. “We do not touch Olivia’s plate.”

Unabashed, he reaches for my half-eaten naartjie. I slap his hand away, and he groans like he’s been wronged.

“I need sustenance,” he says, reaching in his pocket and pulling out my phone and debit card. He drops them next to my plate, and I remember that I failed in my drunken efforts to type in the twenty-four-hour customer service line’s thirty-seven-digit number after I got back from the pool. He must’ve made his way back this morning and spotted them on my nightstand.

“There’s a whole buffet of sustenance inside,” I say, picking up the phone. “But thanks for this.”

He shrugs off my gratitude. “I didn’t know if you’d gotten a chance to call yet.”

“You would’ve known,” Phoebe says, grinning dirtily, “if you’d spent the night in your own bed.”

I spot a voicemail from the office and listen to it as Phoebe and Simone mine Deiss for details. To my surprise, it’s Marian Hammersmith following up on her suggestion that we meet over lunch. I hang up quickly, as if she might come through the phone and physically drag me away from this adventure and back into work. Grabbing the debit card, I dial the help number on the back.

Beside me, Deiss is giving Phoebe and Simone nothing, not even a line about gentlemen never telling. Instead he squints at them like they’re speaking Greek and successfully snags the rest of my naartjie. In between pressing prompt after prompt designed to get me to settle for a robot’s help, I manage to snatch the last two slices back.

“I just want to know which girl it was,” Phoebe says as I finally manage to convey my issue to a real human.

Deiss leans back in the chair and crosses his arms over his chest. The sun beams through the clouds, making his eyes glint in a way that doesn’t match the dark smudges of sleeplessness under them. When he finally speaks, it’s in a lazy drawl. “How do you know I was with someone? Maybe I wanted to spend my last night in Africa alone, communing with the hippos.”

I shake my head as the representative puts me on hold.

“No,” I say to Phoebe. “There would’ve been crocs out there, too. He’s got a fear of biters.”

Phoebe beams at me and turns to him. “Well? It clearly wasn’t that.”

Deiss shoots me a look, but his mouth twitches with amusement.

“It’s not my fault you wanted to talk about phobias,” I say, volleying his look right back at him. “If you didn’t want anyone to know, you shouldn’t have admitted to it.”

His head tilts, and a slow smile stretches across his face. His eyes hold mine, reminding me his fears aren’t the only thing he’s admitted to. Rather than seeming to fear it as another secret I won’t keep, he looks entertained by the knowledge it’s something I’ll forever have to hold in. His confidence in my restraint is disconcerting. He’s right—I couldn’t out him even if I wanted to. I’ve spent too many years trying to overcome my past to destroy someone’s effort to do the same. Somehow, Deiss has figured me out in a way that I haven’t managed with him.

The representative comes back on the line, and I wave Deiss away as if he’s speaking aloud instead of beaming messages at me through his piercing blue eyes. I must not be prepared for real words because the ones I hear through the phone make no sense at all. Blankly, I repeat after him. But rather than coming out like a statement, big fat question marks make my words go high at the end: “You didn’t put a block on the card? The account is empty?”





CHAPTER 12


The trip home is a nightmare. It’s hours upon hours of being trapped—in a car, on a plane—unable to do anything whatsoever to rectify whatever is happening with my finances. It’s not just my checking account that’s empty; my savings is, too. Everything has disappeared. I have an appointment at the bank the morning after I get back to figure out how to restore the funds, but until then, I’m flat broke.

In the meantime, all I have to my name is the wrinkled hundred-dollar bill that Mac pressed into my palm “in case you need to buy extra water for the flight.” He laughed off my effort to refuse the offer, reminding me that looks like his pay way more than is fair. Even if I had my credit card with me, it would be worthless. The bank has issued a new one with different numbers, which should arrive at my home within the next forty-eight hours. It’s part of the security alert they’ve attached to my name, in case I’ve been a victim of identity theft.