“Relax, she just invited me in for a glass of wine,” he said. He pressed on through the jungle.
“She what?”
Jackson wagged his eyebrows at me. “What’s the matter? You don’t care if I hook up with her, do you? After all, she’s clearly too nice to meet your ‘aesthetic.’ ”
“I don’t care,” I scoffed. “It’s not my business. It’d just make things awkward if I have to throw her out.”
“For breaking your rules,” he clarified.
“Yeah.” I really hated that he’d managed to turn this around on me.
“What did your note say?” he asked.
“Why?”
“Because she was worried you were going to throw her out,” he said. We’d reached a cliff and we were both clicking away at our controllers as our characters scaled the face of it. “You didn’t, did you?”
“No, I just answered her question about the hot tub,” I said. My thumb was starting to cramp as I tried to navigate the terrain.
“What question was that?”
“Whether it’s off limits. It is.”
Jackson shook his head. He reached the top of the cliff and paused to turn and look at me. “For a guy considered to be one of the sharpest businessmen in Phoenix, you are dumber than a bag of dirt.”
“What?” I protested. My character reached the top, finally, and I turned to look at him.
“You have a beautiful woman, living on your property, wanting to use your hot tub and you tell her no,” he said. “That takes a special kind of stupid.”
I opened my mouth and then closed it. He had a valid point, which I didn’t want to admit. Instead, I went on the offensive. “And I’m telling you, the hotter the woman, the crazier she is. It’s a fact.”
He shook his head and resumed playing. “Nick, I say this as your trainer and your friend, you have got to get out of the house. You’re becoming the epitome of everything a woman does not like in a man these days.”
“Bullshit. I never had any trouble before,” I said. “They certainly seem to enjoy my picking up the check.”
He pointed at me again. “That, right there, isn’t cool. Besides, it sounds like you were dating the wrong sort of women.”
“There’s a wrong sort?” I turned my attention back to the game as Jackson led the way into the tomb. I knew better than to be the first man to enter. They were always sacrificed in these games but Jackson was a newbie, so it was his painful life lesson to learn.
“Of course there’s a wrong sort—argh, damn it!” He turned outraged eyes on me. “You knew! You knew that zombie was hiding in the tomb. You knew he was going to lop off my head and you let me go in anyway.”
“Maybe.” I shrugged.
“Yeah, well, now you have to wait for me to respawn before we can continue,” he said.
He tossed his controller onto the coffee table and I did, too, because, frankly, I was much more interested in getting all the intel on my tenant than I was in acquiring virtual nonbankable treasure.
“Just tell me this,” I said. “Do you think she’s going to be a problem?”
He frowned. “In what way? By using your off-limits hot tub? Why exactly is that, by the way? I just don’t get it.”
“Because it’s disruptive,” I said.
“Of what?” he argued. “I’ve been living here for six months, and the only time you use the pool is for exercise, and you only use the hot tub after a hard workout.”
“Which is often. Listen, I never wanted to rent the guest house,” I said. “You know this. I didn’t want anyone around while I recovered, but I owed Miguel a favor, so—”
“Yeah, yeah, I know. You agreed so your debt would be square,” he said. He took a long sip of his beer. “But I really don’t see why—”
There was a knock on the door, interrupting whatever Jackson was going to say.
“Excuse me.”
I whipped my head around half expecting to see Annabelle Martin, the subject of our conversation, standing there, but it wasn’t her. It was Lupita. I was certain the flicker I felt wasn’t disappointment but rather indigestion.
“Hi, Lupita. What is it?” I asked.
“There is someone here to see you, and I . . . I wasn’t sure what to say,” she said. She looked ill at ease, and I knew it was because I hadn’t allowed any visitors inside the house in over nine months. I was like the proverbial wounded animal. I didn’t want anyone to see me weak or in pain.
I wondered if it was Annabelle, coming to argue her case to use the hot tub. I felt my curiosity surge. At a distance, she was lovely, and I found I was eager to see her up close, especially after Jackson’s description of her.
“Who is it?” I asked. I tried to keep my expression neutral in case Annabelle was standing in the hallway behind Lupita.
Nothing prepared me for my housekeeper’s answer, however.
“She says she’s your sister, Lexi.”
My heart stopped, and for a stone-cold second, I was certain I was going to blink out again.
9
“I’m sorry,” I said. “Who did you say was here?”
“Your sister,” Lupita answered but another voice joined hers, and a woman stepped around Lupita and entered the room. “Hi, Nicky, it’s me, Lexi.”
Both Jackson and Lupita had comically slack-jawed expressions of surprise on their faces. I supposed it would have been funny if it wasn’t such a gut punch to see my baby sister, standing in the middle of the room, looking at me expectantly.
I wanted to charge across the floor and scoop her up in a hug just like I used to when she was five and I was ten. But I couldn’t get up. In an instant, my heart rate accelerated, my hands began to tingle, and my left leg went numb. I flailed around on the couch for a second, fighting for breath until coolness prevailed. I rolled my panic into a stretch and then slumped back into a relaxed pose, which likely appeared as a particularly unfriendly greeting to the sibling I hadn’t seen since I had struck out on my own at sixteen, but what could I do? I was freaking out and I couldn’t walk.
Mercifully, my wheelchair was parked in the corner out of sight. It was stupid, but I didn’t want to appear less than, not to her, not to the kid who used to follow me around in pigtails, carrying her favorite stuffed animal, a chicken no less, with a look of hero worship on her face like I made the sun come up every day. No, I couldn’t bear to have her look at me with pity. I’d take hurt and anger over that every damn time.