The Devil Gets His Due (The Devils #4)(38)

His mouth curves, almost as if he can remember her too. “I take it that wasn’t successful?”

I shake my head. “No amount of money was going to fix a voice as bad as mine.”

I wish he could have met her, though. He’d understand it then. My mother was all sparkle and light. She had the biggest ideas and the biggest dreams and very little follow-through, but it was fun to live in her world. I grab Mark’s bagel. “Okay, so we’re all set for next Saturday?”

He nods, and then his tongue slides over his lower lip. “Do you still have your ring?” he asks quietly.

I’m a little embarrassed by the truth. “Yeah, I…” I’m not sure what I was going to say, how I was going to excuse it. I’m not sure why I didn’t just leave it in the hotel room when I woke.

“I still have mine too,” he says.

Neither of us can meet the other’s eye.





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24





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KEELEY





On Saturday night, we put on our rings and take the elevator downstairs to the garage. I come to a complete stop when I realize he’s driving a Volvo SUV.

“If you showed up for a date in this car,” I tell him, “you’d never get a second one.”

“Given how far you apparently go on the first date, I wouldn’t need a second one.”

I laugh. I like that I can give him shit and he always gives it back.

He holds the door for me and carefully shuts it. Being raised by a single mom clearly had its drawbacks, in his case, but he certainly is good about all the dumb little rules.

“It’s just a rental since there’s no point in owning a car in New York,” he says when he climbs in. “It was the only SUV available that was rated high for safety.”

“You just made it so much hotter, what with all the concern about your safety.”

“It wasn’t about my safety,” he mutters. “It was about yours.”

By which he really means the baby’s, but it’s still kind of sweet.

“Okay,” I say after I’ve plugged in the address for my dad’s new home, which I’ve never even seen, “let’s get our story straight. How did we meet? I’m thinking we tell them you saw me working in the hospital when I was a resident and became obsessed with me. You followed me all over the country until I gave in—”

“Or we could just tell them the far more likely truth, which is that we met through the union of your best friend and my brother.”

I sigh. “That’s so normal.”

“Keeley, tonight is going to be hard enough without asking me to keep up with some ridiculous story you’ve concocted. Besides, I’m too cheap to follow anyone around the country. You know that.”

I laugh. This is true. I could be his soulmate and he probably wouldn’t even shell out for an Uber from Santa Monica to midtown.

“Fine. What did you fall in love with first?”

He rolls his eyes. “How careful you are financially.”

This is going to go disastrously. Graham can’t even be bothered to assure me I don’t look big. There’s no way he’s going to convince Shannon he’s in this situation by choice.

“What do they do for a living?” he asks. “Ostensibly, that’s the kind of thing I’d already know.”

“They’re retired now, but they were both English professors. That’s how they met. Oh, and he dumped Shannon for my mom, so that’s touchy too.”

“Wait a minute,” he says with an incredulous laugh. “Did you seriously just tell me that your father and your stepmother were English professors?”

“Is that really so hard to believe? It’s not like I didn’t finish high school. I am a doctor.”

“The last thing I saw you reading was ‘The Cast of Dawson’s Creek: Where are they Now?’ So, yes, I did not expect you to be the child of an English professor.”

“Well, you’d have gotten a little burned out on reading, too, if every time you picked up a book as a kid you had someone making fun of you for it.”

I’d almost forgotten there was a time when I enjoyed reading, back before there were too many instances of Shannon making fun of me. “Anne of Green Gables?” she’d say, looking at her daughter or my dad with that gleam of amusement in her eye. “By the time I was your age, I was reading Milton.”

Eventually I just gave up. I guess I’d be a little closer to the person Graham thinks I’m supposed to be if I hadn’t.

“They’re older, by the way,” I warn as we pull up to the house.

He gives a low laugh. “Were you worried I’d announce that they both look old?”

“Well, I doubt anyone’s called you tactful. Barely a day’s gone by that you haven’t mentioned my weight.”

“That’s not true,” he argues as I climb from the car. “I was trying to console you, and you look fine.”

“Right. You look fine is exactly the kind of compliment women love to hear. Anyway, since my dad was so much older than my mom, I guess I always felt like I needed to warn visitors.”