Girl Gone Viral (Modern Love #2) - Alisha Rai Page 0,21

hesitated. “Except there is one thing. I was doing a round and Ms. Smith opened the door to her office and yelled at me.”

Ms. Smith was the name the guards used for Katrina. It was a simple way to make sure no one who overheard knew who their client was. “Yelled at you?” That was very unlike Katrina. In all the time Jas had known her, he’d never heard Katrina raise her voice to anyone. She was unfailingly polite to contractors and people on her payroll.

“Yes. She said I scared her, that she couldn’t see who I was.” The boy’s eyes widened. “I swear I didn’t mean to scare her, and the exterior lights were on. But I thought you should know. She seemed calm when I left her.”

“Thanks.” He didn’t reassure Richard. He’d talk to Katrina first, in the morning. “Will you be relieved soon?”

“Yes, sir. John’s arriving in about an hour for the night shift.”

“Excellent. Good night.”

Richard all but saluted him. Jas stopped when he was almost at his cottage and looked over his shoulder. From this angle, he could see the dim light from Katrina’s office spilling out onto the patio. It was late. If he wasn’t her bodyguard, if he was someone . . . else . . . to her, he’d go check on her now.

He wasn’t, though.

He went inside and shut his door firmly. If only he could shut the door on his wayward feelings as easily.

His phone buzzed and he smiled faintly when he saw who it was. He put the phone on speaker and toed off his loafers, depositing them on the shoe organizer next to his front door. “Hello, Mom.”

“Hello, dear. How are you?”

“Fine. Just got home.” He went to his bedroom and tossed his cell on his bed. He pulled his shirt off over his head, placing it neatly in the hamper.

“Where were you?”

“I went out with some friends in L.A.”

His mother paused. He could imagine Tara Kaur sitting in the living room of his parents’ small two-bedroom condo. They lived in a more affordable suburb of the City, but nothing in the Bay Area was affordable for the middle class anymore. The fact that they had a second bedroom was a miracle and a product of tight rent control and a generous landlord.

“You went out with who?”

“Uh.” He took off his socks. “Friends?”

“You have friends?” his mother asked, and he tried not to be offended by her skepticism, since he had basically been marveling at the same thing earlier in the night.

“What did he say?”

Jas winced at the booming voice of his stepfather. Oh no, this was about to become a family affair. He crossed his fingers that his stepbrother, Bikram, wasn’t also lurking on the call.

“He said he went out with his friends in L.A., Gurjit.”

“What friends?”

His mom spoke to him. “You’re on speaker. Jas, your father wants to ask you who these friends are as well.”

“I can hear him. That’s what speaker does.” Jas sat on the side of his bed.

“What friends are these, in Los Angeles?” his dad demanded. “We don’t know them.” Gurjit was a high school history teacher and he spoke with the gentle firmness of a man used to handling shenanigans.

“You don’t know all my friends,” he said, and was immediately annoyed by how defensive he sounded. He was thirty-nine years old, for crying out loud.

“Dear, of course we do,” his mom said. She had a sweet lightness to her voice, as if the peach farm she’d grown up on had infused her with the fruit’s essence. “Who is in Los Angeles?”

“Rhiannon’s boyfriend and his friends.” Though his parents had never met Rhiannon or Katrina, they knew everyone’s names. They peppered him with a million questions about his life when he was with them.

“Samson Lima?” There was excitement in his dad’s voice now. “Say, when are you going to get me a football signed by him?”

“I don’t know him well enough for that sort of thing.” Samson would probably happily sign a football for his dad, but Jas wasn’t accustomed to asking anyone for anything.

“Don’t make him hit up his little buddies for autographs,” Tara admonished.

Jas bit the inside of his cheek, amused at the idea of his mom calling anyone who had once been a linebacker a little anything.

“Did you have fun?”

A stab of guilt ran through him at the eagerness in his mother’s voice. They worried over him so much. It would have been easier if he had gone home after