Jade reached over and opened the passenger-side door. “Where do you want to go?”
The girl threw her a grin and slid into the car, long bare legs flashing in her high-waisted denim shorts, red Converse sneakers the same bright shade as her lipstick.
“Wherever you’re heading is good,” the girl said. She looked around the car and gave an impressed whistle. “This is a sweet ride.”
“I thought you said you need a ride somewhere.”
“I do. Just out of here. Where you’re going is good. As long as I don’t have to be here.”
Jade should’ve kicked her out of the car then. But the careless way the way the girl spoke, like she didn’t really care where they went and just wanted an escape, spoke to exactly what she was feeling.
She put the car in gear and took off.
The girl giggled and threw her head back in the seat. “This is some monster you got. I bet you get in trouble speeding all the time.”
I wish. The truth is nothing so interesting.
“Not really. I brought it with me here from San Diego but I probably won’t drive it much.”
“What do you mean? Miami is Flashy-car Town, USA. We probably passed a couple of million-dollar rides pulling out of the building.”
The building’s parking garage hadn’t been all that impressive when Jade arrived. All she’d wanted to do aside from make sure no one hit her baby, was to get into the building and get the job done. Now she was too keyed up to notice more than this random girl begging a ride.
“You know you shouldn’t jump in strangers’ cars like this. You never know where they’ll take you.”
“I can take care of myself,” the girl said, settling more comfortably into the black leather seat. She pulled a pair of sunglasses from on top of her head and slid them over her eyes. “The last thing you’d ever have to worry about is me,” she said with a quick sideways grin.
Something about that smile and arrogant tilt of her nose struck Jade as familiar, but she couldn’t put her finger on it.
“Where are we going, anyway?” the girl asked.
Really, what the hell was she doing hitching a ride in the parking lot of Diallo Corporation? Had she just wandered off the main road and decided to check it out? There were definitely more interesting places out there. This was Miami after all.
Jade flicked on her turn signal and changed lanes close to a slow-moving black Mercedes. “I’m driving to a place up north, near Boca Raton.”
The declaration jumped from her lips, unsummoned.
Okay. I guess we’re going to my parents’ house.
She’d told Carter she needed to work on his PR crisis but truthfully, she needed to get up to her parents’ house and take a look at it. She’d been putting it off for far too long. Three days in Miami and all she’d seen were the inside of the lawyer’s office, her hotel room and the car.
Looking at the house and deciding what to do with her parents’ things was the reason she was here. Being a coward usually wasn’t her way. But she was breaking a lot of new ground this week.
She cringed, remembering how she’d practically run out of Carter’s office with her tail between her legs.
“Boca...” The girl leaned over to mess with the dual temperature control. Cool air gushed from the vents on her side. “Where the old folks are, huh? Thinking of buying a place up there?”
God, that sounded like a nightmare.
“No, not really,” Jade muttered, barely resisting a shudder of distaste.
“Good.” The girl fiddled with the radio, scrolled through a few stations before plucking her phone from her back pocket and pairing it with the car’s Bluetooth. “If I ever bought a place, I’d stick to Miami. It’s pretty boring up there.”
If she ever bought a place... Jade eyed the girl. Nothing about her stuck out as particularly poor. The little cloth fanny pack around her waist looked like any you could pick up for a couple of dollars at the fair, her Chucks were clean and seemed relatively new, and the rest of her was clean too. She smelled like fresh oranges.
“My parents lived up there,” Jade finally said after giving up on guessing what was up with the girl.
“That sounds about right. What, they realized they’d die of boredom if they stayed up there?”
“No, they just died.”
She felt the girl’s eyes on her, like she was checking to see if Jade was lying. “That’s rough,” she finally said. “Sorry.”
Jade was still trying to figure out if she was sorry. “It’s fine. We weren’t close.”
“Seriously? I can’t imagine not being close to my family. Even when they’re being asses.”
“That’s good. It means you love them.”
“Yeah, I do...” She turned a brilliant smile to Jade then leaned back in her seat, tapping her feet to the music, sexy and hard-driving reggaeton Jade had never heard in her life. The woman on the track rapped about a man who’d done her wrong on the dance floor. And she planned on doing the same to him. Repeatedly. The song sounded good though, so she didn’t complain.
The girl chattered on about the specs of the car, obviously excited. All these things Jade knew about it; after all, those were the reasons she bought the car in the first place. “And it must be custom. I’ve never seen one like this at the car shows.” She touched the buttons and the gleaming surfaces, clearly appreciative, but not at all covetous. It was interesting to watch. Refreshing.
Then she took a series of selfies with the car’s controls in the background.
“So,” the girl said when she’d finished her photo shoot. Her impish smile showed itself again along with the ultrasharp-looking canines that made her look both wild and oddly childlike. “My name is Dee, what’s yours?”
Names. Right. Asking the young stranger’s name probably would’ve been the sensible thing to do before she even got into the car.
Jade tilted a look at the girl but kept an eye on the road. Dee, huh?
She was tempted to tell her J and see what the girl would make of it, getting a fake name in exchange for a fake name. Whatever her name was, that was a crap attempt at subterfuge. Why, though? It wasn’t like Jade was interested enough in the girl to try to find out her real name. No reason at all to do that. Although young, she seemed over eighteen. If she had parents that she had run away from, the girl had her reasons. Although from what she’d said earlier, her family meant the world to her.
“My name’s Jade.”
The girl cracked a laugh. “Was your mom a fan of China or something?”
Jade shrugged. “No. That was the name my father’s favorite girlfriend went by.” Probably wasn’t even her real name.
Dee stared at her, wide-eyed. “For real?”
Jade shrugged again. It was one of those things she’d grown up knowing, something her mother had thrown at her father during one of their arguments that Jade never forgot. She didn’t even know if they’d been aware she was there, twelve years old and shocked.
Not just that her parents were having an argument—one of the two she remembered—but that her mother had allowed it. Hearing that revelation, she realized then at twelve why her mother very rarely called her by her name. It was “honey” or “sweetie” or something along those lines. Only