The Promise of Paradise - By Allie Boniface Page 0,23

both hands to her face and wept.

Chapter Nine

Ash balanced a grocery bag in the crook of each arm and propped open the front door. She blew her bangs off her forehead. Where was the mild summer the weatherman had promised back in May? Each day in Paradise, she’d woken to nothing but humid temperatures that hovered around ninety. No rain, no relief, just heat and heaviness pouring down from above. At only noon on a Saturday, she’d already soaked through a T-shirt on her way back from the store.

“Ugh.” She let the bags slide to the floor and checked her mailbox. She’d worked well past midnight last night, thanks to a lively crowd that kept the band playing long after regular closing. She really couldn’t complain, though, not with a pocket full of tips that totaled well over a hundred dollars.

Someone giggled.

Ash closed the rusted door to her mailbox and spun around. She frowned. No one on the porch. No gaggle of pre-teen girls walking along the sidewalk. She heard it again: a giggle, definitely feminine. Turning in a slow circle, she eyed Eddie’s door.

“Woman stays the night, things get complicated…”

She swallowed. Looked as though Eddie had set himself up for some complications after all. She negotiated the paper bags back into her arms, wanting to get upstairs as quickly as she could. Sure, her housemate was entitled to entertain whoever he wanted, whenever he wanted, but that didn’t mean she had any interest in seeing who it might be. They hadn’t spoken since that night in the bar, and she’d done her best to keep it that way. What would she say to him, anyway?

Ash turned away, but not quickly enough. Eddie’s door opened, and a petite blonde stepped into the foyer. Eddie followed. At their feet trotted the kitten, batting at the blonde’s heels.

“Y’all are too much,” she said, with a nudge at Eddie’s chest. “I don’t believe a single thing you say.” The words floated on the air, laced with a southern accent. Her mouth crinkled up at the edges as she laughed. Eddie scooped up the kitten and, with a rough pet across the top of its head, steered it back inside his apartment. The moment he shut his door, though, it began to cry, in plaintive little mews that broke Ash’s heart.

She stared at a patch of wall behind Eddie’s head, one knee propped under a grocery bag that had begun to seep something sticky.

“Oh, hi,” the blonde said. “I didn’t see you standing there.”

Ash felt her grip loosening. “Hi.”

“I’m Savannah,” she added.

Ash fought back a smile. Savannah? Did people really name their children such things? Yet somehow it fit this model-thin woman standing in the entryway, smelling like Eddie’s soap and flushed with morning lovemaking. Her fingers threw long, thin shadows on the walls as she adjusted her ponytail, like anemone waving in ocean breezes. Ash looked down at her own knotty knuckles and wondered if Eddie noticed hands as much as she did.

“Ash,” she said after a minute. “I live upstairs.”

“Oh.” The blonde’s eyes widened. “You’re the lawyer, right?”

Ash shot Eddie a look. He’d told his bed bunny about her? While something about that pleased her, down deep where she didn’t dare analyze it, she didn’t need too many people knowing about her past. Least of all someone who probably chattered to half of Paradise on a daily basis. Ash should have known better. She should have kept it all to herself, every last detail. It was just safer that way.

“Well, sort of. I haven’t passed the bar exam yet.”

Savannah shook her head. “Wow. I couldn’t even make it through two semesters at JC. Too boring.”

Ash’s back began to ache. She glanced at Eddie. Say something. Don’t just stand there. But he didn’t. Not to her, anyway. He just put his arm around Savannah’s waist after a minute and led her out into the morning.

Ash watched them go, and jealousy sparked a hot stone in her stomach. That’s what he likes? A ditzy bottle-blonde who barely made it out of high school? She slid to a seat, knees rubbery. Raspberry jelly had leaked through one bag, gluing her shorts to her legs. She rubbed her temples and told herself not to care.

She'd barely had a half-dozen conversations with him. He wasn't her type, anyway. He spent two years in college. She went to Harvard. He spent his life in Paradise, and she was using it as a place to hide out. He dated