“You should have sent flowers like everyone else.”

“You liked that card a hell of a lot more than a bunch of roses. Admit it.”

Colleen pursed her lips. “I admit nothing. Unlike your mother, I refuse to encourage your behavior.”

Bodie’s gaze drifted to Portia, recalling Colleen to the amenities. “Oh, Paula …This is Bodie Gray.”

“Her name is Portia,” he said. “And we’ve met.”

“Portia?” Her forehead wrinkled. “Are you sure?”

“I’m sure, Auntie Cee.”

Auntie Cee?

“Portia? How Shakespearian.” Colleen patted Bodie’s arm and smiled at her. “My nephew is relatively harmless, despite his terrifying appearance.”

Portia wobbled ever so slightly on her needle-sharp heels. “Your nephew?”

Bodie reached out to steady her. As he touched her arm, his soft, menacing voice slid over her like inky silk. “Maybe you should put your head between your knees.”

What about the trailer park, and the drunken father? What about the cockroaches and the trashy women? He’d made it all up. This whole time he’d been playing her.

She couldn’t bear it. She turned and pushed her way through the crowd. Faces flashed by as she dashed into the hallway, out of the restaurant. The night air hung thick and heavy with heat and exhaust. She set off down the street, past the shuttered shops, past a graffiti-splattered wall. The Bucktown restaurant edged the border of less fashionable Humbolt Park, but she kept walking, not caring where she was going, only knowing that she had to keep moving. A CTA bus roared by, and a punk with a pit bull gave her a sly, assessing eye. The city closed around her, hot, suffocating, filled with menace. She stepped off the curb.

“Your car’s the other way,” Bodie said from behind her.

“I don’t have anything to say to you.”

He caught her arm and dragged her back up on the curb. “How about apologizing for treating me like nothing more than a piece of meat?”

“Oh, no, you don’t. You’re not turning this back on me. You’re the one who lied. All those stories …The cockroaches, the drunken father. Right from the beginning you lied to me. You aren’t Heath’s bodyguard.”

“He can pretty much take care of himself.”

“This whole time you’ve been laughing at me.”

“Yeah, sort of. When I wasn’t laughing at myself.” He pushed her into the recessed doorway of a shabby flower shop with a dirty window. “I told you what you needed to hear if the two of us were ever going to have a chance.”

“Lies are your idea of how to start a relationship?”

“They’re my idea of how this one needed to start.”

“So this was all premeditated?”

“Now, there you’ve got me.” He rubbed his thumbs over her arms where he’d been holding her, then let her go. “At first I was jerking your chain because you pissed me off. You wanted a stud, and I was more than happy to comply, but it didn’t take me long to start resenting being your dirty little secret.”