She continued to glare at him. Cute, hard-assed glare.

“You know where Palos Verdes is, right? They were originally going to put USC there, but then some sadistic fuck decided it would be funnier to have the wealthiest underachievers in the state living in constant fear by putting it in South Central instead.” Maybe it was the tied-to-a-tree-and-left-for-dead shenanigans, but he was enjoying giving her a hard time. “Okay, I’m just messing with you; I was born in the theocratic authoritarian fundamentalist state formerly known as Persia. But I grew up in LA.”

“Iran?” she asked, and he nodded. “Your family had to leave?”

“After the revolution, we had a little bit of ye olde . . . grandfather getting executed for being the president of a university when the shah was in power, that sort of thing.”

She blanched. “That’s awful.”

“Yeah, that is awful!”

“That was it? That was his crime?”

“Well, he had a lot of business and professional ties here, also spent quite a bit of time in the U.S. when he was younger, and said some nice things about American educational institutions in Persian publications over a period of a few decades before the revolution. That turned out to be an oopsie-daisy.”

She looked at him, humbled. “So . . . you’re an asylum case?”

“Hell yeah, I am, in both senses of the term.” He popped the rest of the lobster tail into his mouth, smiling a self-satisfied smile. Amused though he was, his bad joke seemed to make her uncomfortable, so he decided to shift gears. “So where do you live now?”

“Riverside.” She forced herself to take another bite. She had gotten through . . . maybe 30 percent of those taters. “And you in New York?”

“Usually, but my family owns a house in Yorba Linda where I’m staying while I write my book.”

“They have a spare house for you whenever you move into town?”

“Right now they do. Investment property, but their last tenant lost everything in the crash and had to move back in with his parents or something. My mom was going to turn it into a short-term rental, but I was like, no, I want that house! There’s no market for short-term rentals right now because everyone’s broke. It’s a huge schlep from LA, but it has the best backyard. I told her to try to rent it out after the economy bounces back. So right now, I’m basically just paying the property taxes on it.”

“How many properties does your family have?”

“Investment properties, or properties in general?”