“Try the chocolate shake.” He nudged it toward her. Yes, he wanted her to taste it because the milkshakes at Daisy’s were a revelation, but he’d be lying if he didn’t admit that a part of him wanted to watch her suck the thick shake through that red-and-white-striped paper straw.

She obliged, and it was everything he imagined and more.

“Rainsford,” he repeated thoughtfully, as if the blood hadn’t rushed to his nether regions.

Sarah looked at him, her elegant eyebrow arching. “Yes?” So perhaps he wasn’t pulling the wool over her eyes.

“I’m just repeating the correct pronunciation of your name so it will be stuck in my—” He broke off because the repetition of her surname had tugged forth a faint memory from his brain. “Wait a minute.” He felt his eyes narrow as he tugged a little harder. “Four years back . . . It was all over the news.” His mind was dropping Tetris pieces into place. “There was a missing heiress . . .”

“Everyone presumed was dead? No body found.” Sarah shrugged and took another slurp of the milkshake. “Yeah. That’s me.” She said it as if she were talking about the color of her socks.

Mick shot to his feet, needing to move, jammed his hands in his pockets. “You’re that Rainsford? The missing Rainsford heiress?!”

“The one and only,” she replied, calmly dunking a French fry in the ketchup and stirring it so two-thirds of the fry was coated in the sauce before eating it.

“Holy crap.” He shook his head, trying to clear it. “I was obsessed with that case. Kept hoping she would be found, safe and sound.”

“And here I am.”

Mick was finding it difficult to wrap his mind around this latest revelation. Hell, the entire day had been pretty bizarre. He cast his mind back, flipping through magazine and news images. He could see similarities in her profile. Sarah had the same color eyes, and her hair was obviously dyed. However, the woman could be running an extremely sophisticated con on him, or perhaps she was mentally unstable and suffered from delusions. “So you’re actually blond?”

She smiled ruefully and tugged at her dark hacked-up hair. “Yeah.” She studied him across the table. “You don’t believe me, do you?”

“I’m not sure.” Mick knew he was being surly, because her being the Sarah Rainsford actually made a weird sort of sense. From the second he’d laid his eyes on her, he’d had the feeling that he knew her from somewhere. Had initially attributed the odd sense of deja vu to the erroneous supposition that she was a scheming actress or an undercover reporter.

“Why would I lie?”