Nightstruck - Jenna Black Page 0,9
“Maybe this is a case of what he doesn’t know won’t hurt him.”
Uh-oh. I knew that look. “Whatever you’re thinking, the answer is no. I’m in enough trouble with my dad already.”
The light turned green, and Piper faced front, but I could still see the little smirk on her lips. That girl’s a bad influence, my dad whispered in my head. He wasn’t entirely wrong, but I couldn’t swear that wasn’t one of the reasons I liked her so much.
“You can’t spend your whole life trying to make your dad happy,” Piper said. “You have the right to have some fun. You’re coming out with me Saturday night.”
“Even my dad won’t be working on a Saturday night. I don’t see myself sneaking out with him in the house.” But the thought of going out with Piper on Saturday night kicked my pulse up a notch. I didn’t know what she had planned, but I was sure it would be exciting. An adventure.
“So we’ll tell him you’re coming to spend the night at my place,” Piper said easily. “He can’t object to a sleepover, can he?”
I snorted. If the sleepover was at Piper’s, yes, he could. He didn’t trust her as far as he could throw her. “I’m grounded,” I reminded her.
She wrinkled her nose. “True. Hmm. Give me a couple of days, I’ll come up with a better excuse.”
“A better lie, you mean.”
She grinned at me. “Your point being…?”
I sank a little lower in my seat and crossed my arms. It wasn’t like I had any problem with lying to my dad. If he had his way, my entire life would consist of doing chores, going to school, and studying. If I had a dollar for every time I’d told him I was studying when I was actually reading a romance novel or messing around online, I’d have enough to buy that car I wanted so badly. But this was a whole different level of lying—and there was more risk I’d get caught at it.
“Seriously, Becket, what’s the worst that can happen? Your dad can yell at you and ground you for longer, but is that such a terrible risk to take?”
Once again, she had a point. One problem with my dad’s No Privileges policy was that he didn’t have much in the way of privileges to take away for punishment.
“What the hell,” I decided. “You only live once, right? If you can come up with a cover my dad can swallow, then you’re on.”
Piper grinned and offered me an awkward high five, thankfully keeping her eyes on the road and one hand on the steering wheel. “I love a good challenge,” she said. “Now, tell me how you managed to get yourself grounded.”
Thinking about what had happened last night put a damper on my momentary defiance high. I wished I could just convince myself it was some kind of nightmare, but every time I tried to sell myself a logical explanation, I kept getting stuck on Bob. All well and good to come up with reasons why I might have been seeing things or misinterpreted what I saw, but there was no question that Bob had seen something freaky, too.
I told Piper the cat story. She laughed her ass off, and I knew she was going to give me a hard time about it for the foreseeable future. But at least she didn’t think I was crazy.
CHAPTER THREE
Jimmy shivered and pulled his flimsy jacket tighter around him as he hurried down the quiet street. He should have worn his heavy coat, but he hadn’t wanted to deal with it during dinner, and it had never occurred to him that he wouldn’t be going home until the ass end of morning. He’d never gotten lucky on a blind date before and certainly hadn’t been expecting it tonight. Winter had eased up a bit and it was above freezing, but only by a degree or two. He turned up the collar of his shirt and buried his hands in his pants pockets, but that didn’t help much.
He was shivering, and his feet felt like lumps of ice, but there was still a warm, contented glow in his belly. It had been the best damn blind date ever. The sex alone had been out of this world, but the connection he’d felt with Maria went so much deeper than that. He didn’t generally think of himself as the romantic type, but he couldn’t help thinking that tonight he may very well have