Free The Promise of Paradise by Allie Boniface Page A

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 a
different woman each week. She was trying to get over a three-year
relationship. He fixed cars, and she— what, Ash? What exactly are
you going to do with yourself now that you’ve decided that a
hundred-thousand dollar degree isn’t going to work out the way
you’d planned?
    As if on cue, her cell
began to ring.
    Ash pulled the phone
out of her pocket and checked the screen. Her oldest sister.
Terrific.
    “Hello?”
    “Ashton? Where are
you?” Jessica Kirk-Malloy’s voice, no-nonsense and demanding an
answer, spat through the receiver.
    “What do you mean,
where am I?”
    “Don’t play stupid.
I know you moved out of your apartment. I saw Colin last week.” She
paused, and the edges of her words softened a little. “I didn’t
know you two broke up. Sorry.”
    Like you really
care. “Yeah, well, things weren’t working out.”
    “Mm hmm.” Jess
paused. “So what happened? Dad knows you turned down the job at
Deacon and Mathers, by the way. He’s furious. You know he went to
school with Bill Mathers, right?”
    Of course she knew. It
was all he’d talked about after they offered her the position. It
was the other, unspoken, reason Ash hadn’t felt right about taking
it. She wanted to prove herself after law school, make it on her own.
Finding out her father had pulled strings had soured her on the whole
deal.
    “Mom says you’ve
been avoiding her calls.”
    “I haven’t been
avoiding them. She just calls when I’m sleeping. Or working.”
    “So you can’t call
her back?”
    “And say what?” Ash
exploded. “How’s life on the home front? Is Dad ready for the
hearing? Tell me, Jess, did he call in another favor to