Page 28 of Hold

Then she started to write another check. “Thea,” Liam warned.

“The faucet, the toilet, and the air conditioner, right?” she said airily. “Plus the time you took to teach me the tiling. Appreciate that, by the way.”

Pat seemed to find his voice. “This is too much, uh, miss—ma’am, uh, Ms. Fielding. We’d charge two hundred, max, for what we did today.”

She loved hearing him stammer. He’d obviously expected her to make big eyes at Liam and not pay anyone anything for today. But she’d warned Liam when he’d made the suggestion. And now she had even more to prove.

Liam’s face was thunderous. “Okay, then,” she said, “give the other hundred to Liam and I’ll write this one for another two. Okay?” She’d already done it, ripped off the check, and thrust it out to Liam.

His arms were folded, as usual, but he couldn’t ignore her outstretched hand. He took the check as though it carried smallpox.

“Good!” she piped, brushing between the two of them to open the front door. “So I’ll see you later, Liam? With the others? Celebrating the end of class?”

Liam let his dad out of the door first, but he stopped before he walked out. “Goddammit, Thea,” he said in as low a growl as she’d ever heard from him.

“I’m glad we’re all square,” she said, equally low, with a giant fake smile on her face. “I’d hate to feel obligated to you or anything.”

He couldn’t say anything else; his father was waiting at the van. “We’re not done,” he said, jabbing a finger at her, and walked down the stairs, remembering not to touch the railing.

Thea let go of the door handle she’d been holding in a death grip and sank onto the couch. Five hundred dollars. She’d just given him five hundred dollars because she was pissed. Not that she didn’t owe it to him, but if she’d been thinking straight, she could have maybe paid off what she owed him in installments.

But it wasn’t about the money, was it? And logic didn’t come into this… dynamic she and Liam had gotten themselves into.

She collapsed back into the cushions and took a deep breath to try to stop her racing heart. This was how she’d felt after yelling at Gabe, sometimes. Justified but still feeling as though she’d lost.

Another deep breath. In through the nose, out through the—

“Shit! The cookies!”

Chapter 8

Liam contemplated skipping the party altogether. Half the time he was so ticked at her he was blinded by it. Handing him her check like she was giving him a knighthood. That pissy look on her regal face.

You didn’t think it was regal until you found out who she was.

What did that say about him?

Wait a minute, I’m not the one at fault here. I was just trying to be nice. She threw it back in my face, along with that goddamn check.

So don’t go to the party. You never have to see her again, right? This was all a big lie anyway, remember?

But he liked the others. He needed to fix a date with Zahra to visit the kids in her neighborhood. He’d been thinking of pulling David aside to ask about the best way to save the money he needed to start school again next year. He figured David could be trusted not to tell the others. He didn’t feel like getting that knowing look from Chloe again.

So, yeah, he’d go. He changed into a collared shirt, Chloe having made it very clear it was a party tonight, not a study group, and a nicer pair of jeans Avery had bought him when she was busy “fixing” him. He hadn’t realized that was what she was doing at the time, of course. And he was frugal enough that he wasn’t going to throw out a two-hundred-dollar pair of jeans. Besides, he got more respect at school when he wore labels the kids recognized. Same with the decent pair of brown suede oxfords. He stopped the truck at the liquor store and picked up some wine and beer, then at the restaurant where he ordered a couple dozen sliders to go, and drove to Thea’s house.

The sun was lowering in the sky, but it was still light out when he arrived. Still, the lights were on in Thea’s living room, and as he cut his engine, the sound of music blasted out of the window. He could see someone small dancing in the middle of the room.

“Hi, Mr. McConnell!” Benji called when he walked in the door. “Chloe’s teaching me the jitterbug!”

Chloe was holding both of Benji’s hands, and their feet were moving at impossible speeds while an old-time piano played out of the TV. On the set, Jerry Lewis was flinging himself around a dance floor with a platinum blonde in a sparkly silver dress. Seth and David were on the couch with their feet lifted to give Chloe and Benji more room, and Zahra was over in the entrance to the kitchen, laughing and keeping her drink out of the way of the action.

Liam was quite dazed, and it was a second before he found Thea. This was because she was crouched down by the TV, facing the shelf of books and DVDs beside it. “I know I have it,” she was saying. “Just wait, Ben-ben, you can dance the Charleston next.”

The song ended, Jerry Lewis collapsed onto the floor in a tuxedo-ed heap, and Thea said, “Ah-ha!” before turning around with a DVD in her hand and noticing him.

Her hair was down again, cascading over her shoulders and chest and onto her crouched knees. Her eyes looked huge, looking up at him like that, and she was in a red dress—God help him, ared dress—that floated over her frame. A gold bar sat at her throat, above a hole in the fabric, which from her position gave him a view he immediately had to look away from.

She was trying to kill him. She was actually trying to kill him.

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