Stealing Phin (7 page)

And to make it worse, here I was talking to a guy who, if I was honest with myself (and I was drunk enough to be
brutally
honest with myself), I was extremely attracted to. As much as I wanted to dislike him, a part of me was flattered that he hit on me. And that’s what made this so wrong. An evening of innocent flirtation with Carlito was one thing. But a drink with Byron, who’d not only seen me naked but also had a habit of creeping into my thoughts whenever I wasn’t thinking of Douglas, was another thing altogether.

It was official—I was a hypocrite.

“Ugh,” I said, totally disgusted with myself.

“What’s wrong?” Byron said snidely. “Just realized your date might be a schmuck or a nutria after all?”

I scowled at his tone. “Carlito is a nice guy. A perfect gentleman, in fact.”
Unlike
you,
you
arrogant
ass.

Byron did his eyebrow thing again and took a drink of his whiskey. “If you ask me, he seems a tad shady. I’d be careful around him.”

“Well, I didn’t ask you,” I snapped. “Besides, you don’t know anything about him.”

“Neither do you,” he said with irritating accuracy. “I’ve been watching him since you came in. Trust me, I’m a good judge of character. And guys are particularly easy to read.”

“But
you’re
not.” I swayed a little and had to catch a hold of the counter to balance myself. “You walk around with that perfect smile on that perfect face of yours, laying the charm on real thick. But I see through you, Lord Byron. You’re not the
charmer
you think you are—you’re the
snake
. And I can tell this snake is hiding something.” I pointed to his eyes with my two fingers, except I think my aim was a little off. “You’ve got secrets.”

For a second, Byron’s carefully controlled and guarded expression fell away, and he looked surprised. He probably wasn’t used to a girl calling him out on his pretenses.

But I was beyond caring anymore about what he thought, and I was too drunk to filter the junk coming out of my mouth. So, I shamelessly continued with my drunken rant.

“Plus, why were you watching us?” I squinted at him. “Shouldn’t you be creeping on some local chicks or sorority girls on spring break?”

Byron’s serious expression cracked with a wry half-grin. “You’re different, Phinegan Swift. And despite my better judgment,” he said more to himself than to me, it seemed. “I’m beginning to like you.”

I looked him straight in the eye to see if I could tell whether he was being sarcastic again, but my vision blurred before I could make a determination.

All I could make out were the outlines of his strong jawline, the shadow of his dark stubble, and the curvature of his lips. His wonderfully full, slightly parted, sexy lips.

For a few moments, I was hypnotized.

“Is something wrong?” he asked, breaking my trance.

“I have to go make a call.” I spun away quickly from him like a satellite just managing to escape the gravitational pull of Saturn. I did not want to become just another space rock in his orbital rings.

I stumbled my way toward the bathrooms and stopped in front of the payphone on the wall across the ladies’ room. From my wallet, I pulled out the international phone card I’d purchased at the airport in Chicago and dialed Douglas’s cell phone number, knowing full well that I was breaking every law against Drunk Dialing your ex, but not caring.

My heart pounded in my chest and then rose up to pound in my throat as I waited to hear his voice.

After the fourth ring, his voicemail picked up.

Hello,
you’ve
reached
Douglas
Dickenson.
Leave
a
message,
and
I’ll
get
back
to
you
as
soon
as
I
can.

The sound of his voice made my heart ache. I wanted to hear it again, so I hung up and dialed a second time. Then a third. And a fourth. Each time it went to voicemail, my desire to hear his real voice grew. Six dials later, when the tears began to sting my eyes, I hung up the receiver. Rule number two, Phin. Rule number two.

I made one last attempt, trying his home phone this time. When his answering machine picked up, an automated voice recording played over it:
The
minutes
on
this
phone
card
are
about
to
expire.

“What?” I said, flustered. “I just bought this card. How can it expire when I’ve barely used it?” I asked the lady on the recording with the English accent.

The
minutes
on
this
phone
card
are
about
to
expire,
she repeated annoyingly.

“What a rip off,” I muttered. I began to hang the receiver up when, suddenly, I heard a voice say, “Hello?”

My heart stopped. The voice didn’t sound like Douglas. It sounded…female.

“Hello? Who is this?” I said.

But the only response was the automated voice.
This
phone
card
is
now
expired.
The call cut off, and the dial tone sounded.

What
just
happened?

My hands shook as I hung the receiver back on the hook.

“Are you okay?”

Someone touched my elbow. I turned around. It was Byron again. At first, I thought he’d followed me, but then I figured he was probably on his way to the men’s room.

I couldn’t decide if the expression on his face was one of concern or morbid curiosity.

“I’m fine.” I tried to stand up straight and look dignified, but this only made me sway to the side. Byron caught me before I tumbled to the floor.

“Easy there, champ.”

“I said I’m fine.” Lord, can I just be in the same room as Byron
once
without humiliating myself?

Not knowing what else to say to him and feeling overwhelmed, I left him standing there in the small area in front of the bathrooms.

On my way back to the table, I could feel my face burning. Too many emotions thrashed inside me. Whose voice was that on the phone? Was it really female or was that just my imagination? Oh God, was it
her
?

The thought made me want to hurl. The Guaro churned and gurgled in my gut, threatening to reappear all over my strappy sandals.

“Where the hell were you?” Dez’s eyes were glazed, and she was sitting in Estevan’s lap. Both guys looked lit, too. They must have done another round or two of shots while I was gone.

“I got a little lost,” I fibbed and sat back in my seat. I immediately took the shot of Guaro Carlito passed to me.

As my rationale became more flexible under the influence of the Guaro, I was able to convince myself that the voice on the line wasn’t a woman’s. That didn’t make any sense. Douglas and I had just broken up a few days ago. And he’d claimed his infidelity had been a one-time thing—even called it a mistake. There was no way he and the floozy were together now…right?

Suddenly, I remembered Douglas had a maid. Yes, that must’ve been who picked up the phone! A huge sense of relief fell over me, although a tiny question niggled at the back of my intoxicated brain:

What
is
Douglas’s
maid
doing
at
his
place
this
late
at
night?

Unable to deal with the possible answers, I pushed the question, along with all the others clamoring with it into a box, which I locked and placed into a dark corner of my mind.

As the evening passed, I tried to focus on anything but the voice on the phone. But it was like the purple elephant that
wasn’t
in the room. It held my mind captive. It echoed in my thoughts, whispered into my ear, haunted me like a phantom.

I didn’t know how to get away from this ghost. It didn’t help that the boys and Dez were having a blast and getting drunker still, but I’d stopped drinking over an hour ago. As I began to sink into the lows of sober-dom, the shine started to rub off the world. The music hurt my ears and gave me a headache. The strings of red lights made everyone look like red-skinned devils. The temperature inside had also risen from the body heat of the crowd. I felt like I was inside an actual volcano, except I was the one who was about to explode.

Though I hated to admit it, there was one thing that worked to keep my mind occupied. Byron. I didn’t want to pay any attention to him, especially after his presumptuous and rude comments at the bar, but it was nearly impossible.

I snuck peeks at him, noticing that he never moved from his seat at the bar, nor did he have to. The women flocked to him. They were like impatient grocery shoppers at the deli counter, waiting for the person ahead of them to be serviced and dismissed, so their number could be called next.

I shook my head at how hard the women tried. Granted, some of them had impressive moves—the women in this country had killer curves, and they knew how to use them—but at the end of the day, they could all sit back and take a lesson from Dez.

And yet, Byron had resisted Dez. He may not be gay, but there had to be something wrong with him. No man turned Dez down. It was like one of the Laws of the Universe, along with gravity and those other Newton laws, which I’d learned in high school physics but had long since forgotten.

And for him to hit on me after I’d clearly expressed my disinterest made me even more curious. Maybe he liked the girl-next-door type. But despite my intoxicated state during our conversation and the giant wall he put up, I’d detected something that tainted his flirtation with me. During the brief moments when his iron curtain lifted and I could see a tiny bit of his true self, I’d sensed that mixed in with his seemingly genuine interest in me was a pinch of contempt and a heaping spoonful of bitterness.

Even more baffling was the fact that every once in a while, he met my gaze. And although my instincts told me to turn my eyes elsewhere, I couldn’t. He had a way of holding me with his eyes. The way he looked at me made me feel as if we were sharing a secret. He wasn’t just looking at me—he was noticing me. Reading me. Watching me with a purpose. As creepy as it might sound, I had to admit I enjoyed the feeling it gave me—like I was the only woman in the room.

I wasn’t used to this. With Douglas, I’d always had to compete for his attention. But that was natural. Guys had wandering eyes—it was a scientific fact.

The one time I had confronted Douglas about it, he emailed me article after article showing research concluding that men were programed, right down to the chromosomes that made up their DNA, to copulate with as many women as possible.

This, in turn, Douglas had argued, meant it was natural and completely out of his control to check other women out. He claimed he didn’t even realize he was doing it, which I didn’t buy. But who was I to argue with science? And as long as I was the one Douglas went home with, it didn’t matter in the end what his DNA forced him to do. Even though it hurt my feelings, not to mention my pride.

Byron was different from other guys in more ways than one. Most guys were easy to read—their agendas tied like banners to everything they said and did.

And then there was Byron, whose agenda was hidden—a secret—and whose eyes held something more of substance behind them. I wanted to believe he was the same kind of shallow womanizer I’d met a million times in a million bars. I could sniff those guys out a mile away and write them off in a millisecond.

But deep down, a part of me suspected, though I didn’t want to acknowledge it, that there was more to Byron than meets the eye.

As if he could hear my thoughts, Byron looked at me again. This time, he winked and gave me one of those half-nods men do that was equal parts acknowledgement and solicitation. Just as I’d started to warm up to the guy and think he was different, he had to go and do something typical.

So annoying.

But at least it helped to clear the mystery behind him up. He had to be one of those guys who was so used to getting whatever woman he wanted that he kept the game interesting by chasing after the ones who didn’t seem interested. It threw some challenge back into the chase. And that’s what men loved—the chase. I’d acted like I wasn’t interested, so of course, his man-ego decided to land its sites on me.

I set my jaw. Well, I wasn’t going to let him win this one. Suddenly, I felt sorry for all the women he’d probably seduced this way, placed under his spell, charmed into his bed. He had a way of making a girl feel special, that’s for sure.

I can’t say I didn’t get a small thrill every time I felt his eyes on me. But that just meant he was a skillful player. Someone to be wary of. Not like Carlito, who was sweet and charming in an innocent, guileless way. Flirting with him reminded me of flirting with boys in high school. It was playful, a little naughty, and not at all sleazy or filled with hidden agendas.