have any dirt on my face, and I prayed there was a tube of mascara floating around somewhere in my purse. No, he’d already seen me, so that would be odd if I showed up with a different face in 10 minutes. Damn.
Rason and I made small talk as we waited in line and then he walked with me toward my car. We said our goodbyes and he shut my car door before he walked over and got into a black Jeep that was a few spots away.
I followed him the few blocks to Martha’s Diner, one of my favorite places to have breakfast for dinner. I never seemed to make it before I opened the store, but I went as often as I could in the evenings to get my pancake fix.
Rason parked and walked over and opened my door while I searched in the bag for the books I’d found for him. I put them in a stack and held them against my chest as I stood up. Rason reached out and took them from me with a smile, glancing down at the one on top before he shut my car door for me.
“How much do I owe you?”
“Look them over and make sure they’re what you need. If there are some you don’t want, just give them back to me and we’ll settle up then.”
“Okay,” he agreed as he pulled the door to the diner open for me. Rason motioned toward a booth by the windows. Once we were there, he waited for me to sit down before he sat across from me. “So let me explain what’s been going on first.”
I chuckled. “You really don’t have to do that - I believe you. I had an appointment on Monday and was off Tuesday afternoon.”
“Still, I think I should tell you what’s going on. It’s probably a good thing you brought your own car because you might want to run away from this mess as fast as you can.”
“Now I’m intrigued. Do tell.”
The waitress came by and took our orders.
“Okay, here goes. I met Robin when I took my friend Eli to the emergency room for stitches After he cut his leg at work. She was nice, funny, the whole package. Or so I thought. We went out a couple of times before I started so see some red flags. I ignored them and now I’m kicking myself.”
“Red flags?”
“If I didn’t answer the phone quickly enough when she called, she’d grill me about where I was and who was there.”
“That’s a really big red flag. Especially if you’ve only gone out a few times.”
“Well, I ignored it. We talked on the phone a lot more than we actually spent time together, but I saw her several more times over the next few weeks. When we’d known each other a month, I mentioned that my mom’s birthday was coming up and I’d be going to see my parents that weekend.”
“Was she rude to your parents?”
“No, I didn’t invite her.”
I nodded slowly. “And that went well?”
“That went so far south that it passed the geese that were looking for a warmer location.”
“She wanted to meet my parents, and she even bought a gift for mom. I told her I wasn’t taking her to meet them, and by her reaction to that, I knew I wouldn’t ever introduce her to them. When I told her I also wasn’t going to give my mom the gift she’d bought because it was inappropriate, she lost her freaking mind.”
“A couple of questions.” I put my hand up to pause his story. “If you knew she’d never meet your parents, then why did you continue seeing her? Also, why would she think it was normal for you to take a gift to a woman she’d never met? And what was the gift? How was it inappropriate?”
“The first time I tried to break it off with her, she cried and swore she had been acting irrationally because the doctor had changed one of her prescriptions. The next time I mentioned that we should see other people, she said that she’d just been feeling very vulnerable and she was afraid that I wouldn’t like her if she acted like her true self. She insisted that she’d been clingy because she thought I’d like that.” He shook his head for a second and then took a sip of his iced tea. “I know, I know. Warning signs all over the place. So I told her that we