“It’s the one meal I can afford to do so,” she insists.

For dessert, she passes on the coconut ice cream served in a hot dog bun in favor of a roti stuffed with bananas and sweetened with condensed milk.

“So what’d you do while I was in class?” Bridget asks as we stroll beneath strings of lights stretching across the street.

“Talked with my mom,” I replied.

“That’s nice. What did you guys talk about?”

“You.”

“Really? What did she say about me?”

“That I’m not good enough for you.”

Bridget does a double-take, then chuckles. She thinks I’m joking.

“I had a chat with your mom today, too,” she tells me.

“My mentioned that. When did that happen?”

“While you were golfing. We sat by the pool together.”

“What did you guys talk about?”

“You.”

I smirk. “What’d she say?”

She thinks for a moment. “She asked if I was in love with you.”

I hesitate, because I’m not sure I want to know the answer, but Bridget doesn’t seem the type of person to fall for someone too easily, unlike her friend Amy.

“What did you say?” I ask.

“I said ‘hell, no, I’m just using him to get a free trip to Thailand.’”

I laugh.

“In reality, I told her we haven’t known each other long,” she reveals.

“So the answer was ‘no.’”

She pauses, then asks, “Did you want a different answer?”

I also pause. I’ve never regarded crowded street markets, made muggy by the mass of people, filled with a variety of smells both aromatic and pungent, as romantic. But looking at Bridget, that was the way I felt. Like I did want a different answer.

I brush it off. “’Course not.”

Like me, she seems faintly disappointed, then tries to lighten the tension by joking, “I told her we were just about the sex.”

“Good.”

We continue walking, but when her hand grazes mine, I decide to take it.

Chapter 24

DARREN

Past

I had just come as close to making love as sex gets for me, and Bridget ruins the moment by telling me afterward that she talked to Joseph Mok.

“I told you to stay away from the guy,” I say as we lie in bed.

Outside the bedroom window, the moon is nearly full, a bright white coin in a cloudless sky.

“Why?” Bridget asks.

“Because I said so.”

She groans. “Just because I let you do your BDSM thing doesn’t mean you get to boss me around outside of sex.”

“My BDSM thing?” She has no idea what “my BDSM thing” really entails.

“Besides, it’s not like I went up to him,” she continues. “He came and sat down next to me at the pool.”

“Could you have walked away?”

“Yes, but that would have been rude at first.”

I roll my eyes.

“Okay, I was a little curious about him since you seemed to dislike him so much,” she admits. “Did you really sleep with his girlfriend?”

That fucking douche told her that?