Lies I Told(49)

“Yeah, how did you get her to let you drive?” Olivia asked. “She never lets us drive.”

I felt a childish twinge of satisfaction. “I told her Parker wanted me to have my own car in case the cops showed up.”

“You pulled the Parker card?” Olivia laughed. “Good one.”

“So she really likes him?” I asked. I knew they texted and had been out a couple of times, but Parker was otherwise close-lipped about how far things had gone between them.

Olivia leaned forward between the two front seats, and I caught a whiff of her perfume, expensive and French. “I think it’s more the chase, you know? Rachel’s not used to having to work for it.”

“Work for it?” I repeated, turning onto Rachel’s road. “Seriously? We’re talking about my brother here.”

“Sorry. You know what I mean.”

“Guys usually fall all over themselves for a shot with Rachel,” Harper explained from the backseat. “I thought she was going to die of embarrassment when Logan broke up with her.”

“Logan broke up with her?” I don’t know why I was surprised.

“Yep,” Olivia said. “Gave her the old ‘it’s just not a good fit’ line. Like he was firing an employee. She was totally humiliated.”

I let that sink in as I turned onto Rachel’s street and stopped at the end of the driveway. I used the call box, then waited as the gates swung open.

Rachel was standing near the garage, looking completely comfortable in spite of her silky pajama-like pants and loose tank top. Her only nod to the cold was a cardigan draped over one arm.

Olivia opened the back door. “Ready to partay?”

Rachel rolled her eyes. “Only if you move over. There’s no way I’m sitting in the middle.”


We all laughed as Olivia moved to the center of the backseat.

There wasn’t an exact address to type into the Saab’s GPS, so I left the peninsula and followed Rachel’s directions up PCH toward Malibu. Harper complained that it was the long way, but Rachel insisted it was faster than driving inland to the freeway only to work our way back out again to get to the beach.

As we headed up the coast, I began to relax. It was oddly intimate being crammed into such close quarters, the car dark except for the lights on the dash. Selena dished about David, telling us how his voice had shaken when he met her dad and how he’d asked permission to kiss her after they’d gone to a movie the night before. We talked about Liam’s reported hookup with a quiet girl no one seemed to know and about a locker raid that had busted two of the school’s top students for possession of Adderall. In between, they passed around Harper’s compact mirror, freshening powder and reapplying lip gloss. We’d been driving for nearly an hour when Rachel finally told me to slow down.

She leaned forward, gazing out the window past Harper, her eyes combing the beach. “There,” she said. “Park up ahead by those other cars.”

“Where are we?” Harper complained. “And how do you hear about this stuff?”

Rachel didn’t answer.

I pulled into a turnout at the side of the road and parked behind a silver Lexus. When I cut the engine, music drifted in through the closed windows. A bonfire lit up the beach below us, everything dark outside its perimeter of light.

“You sure this is the right party?” Olivia asked.

“It’s somebody’s party,” Rachel said, opening her door. “And I need to get out of this car.”

“Wait . . .” Harper slid out after Olivia. “Are you saying you didn’t know if there was a party here? That we weren’t invited to this one?”

Rachel waved the questions away. “There’s always a party up here. And it’s a public beach. It’s not like they can kick us out.”

“You always do this,” Harper huffed.

Selena stood next to me as I locked the car.

“Is this cool?” she asked me softly.

I looked around. The bonfire was on an empty stretch of beach, the water on one side, a giant hill leading up to the road on the other. The party seemed pretty low-key, with less than fifty people sitting around the fire. Someone laughed, and it was carried up to us on a rush of wind.

“I think so,” I said. “And if it’s not—I dangled the keys in front of her—“we can always leave.”

Rachel pulled a bottle of vodka from her shoulder bag. “Let’s go.” She headed to the beach with Olivia and Harper.

“I can’t believe we’re doing this,” Selena murmured as we fell into step behind them.

I smiled reassuringly despite the fact that my nerves were clanging like a wind chime. The success of any job relied on controlling the elements of the con. We’d been taught to know our marks and the other players, weigh the odds, assess the risk of any situation before making a move. The bonfire at the Cove had been easy, almost controlled. A mile from home with people we’d carefully researched in attendance, it was only the details that were unknown. Would I have a chance to talk to Logan? Would I get the opportunity to win over Rachel?

Now I knew nothing about the situation we were walking into, and I braced myself for anything.





Thirty-Seven


We descended to the beach using a set of concrete stairs built into the hill. The music got louder, the hum of conversation audible as we stepped onto the sand. Now that we were closer, I heard the thread of two different songs—one playing through a minispeaker propped up on a cooler, the other strummed softly on a guitar by a long-haired guy near the fire. The smell of pot mingling with salt water hung over the beach, and several of the kids turned nervously our way as we headed toward them.