course.”
She dropped her gaze to her coffee. “Only two of our staff lived on site.”
“Well, then. I stand corrected.” He looked around the tiny living room, recalled the tiny kitchen and tiny bedroom. “So what’s this place?”
“It’s...” She glanced up, hesitated, then looked down into her coffee again. “I own the shop downstairs. A boutique. Women’s designer fashions.”
He nodded. “Ah. So this apartment came with the place, huh?”
“Something like that.”
“Easier to bring me here than to someplace where you might have to explain my presence, huh?”
For the first time, it occurred to him that Ava might be married. Hell, why wouldn’t she be? She’d had every guy at Emerson panting after her. His gaze fell to the hands wrapped around her coffee mug. No rings. Anywhere. Another interesting tidbit. She’d always worn jewelry in high school. Diamond earrings, ruby and sapphire rings—they were her parents’ birthstones, he’d once heard her tell a friend—and an emerald necklace that set off her eyes beautifully.
Before he had a chance to decide whether her ringless state meant she wasn’t married or she just removed her jewelry at night, she said, “Well, you’re not exactly an easy person to explain, are you, Peyton?”
He decided not to speculate on the remark and instead asked about her status point-blank. “Husband wouldn’t approve?”
Down went her gaze again. “I’m not married.”
“But you still have someone waiting for you at home that you’d have to explain me to, is that it?”
The fact that she didn’t respond bothered Peyton a lot more than it should have. He told himself to move along, to just get the condensed version of last night’s events and call a cab. He told himself there was nothing about Ava he wanted to know, nothing she could say that would affect his life now. He told himself to remember how bad things were between them in high school for years, not how good things were that one night.
He told himself all those things. But, as was so often the case, he didn’t listen to a single word he said.
* * *
Ava did her best to reassure herself that she wasn’t lying to Peyton. Lies of omission weren’t really lies, were they? And what was she supposed to do? No way had she wanted him to see the postage stamp-size apartment she called home. She was supposed to be a massive success by now. She was supposed to have a posh address in the Gold Coast, a closet full of designer clothes and drawers full of designer jewelry. Well, okay, she did have those last two. But they belonged to the shop, not her. She could barely afford to rent them herself.
People believed what they wanted to believe, anyway. Even sitting in her crappy apartment, Peyton assumed she was the same dazzling—if vain, shallow and snotty—Gold Coast heiress who’d had everyone wrapped around her finger in high school. He thought she still lived in a place like the massive Georgian townhouse on Division Street where she grew up, and she still drove a car like the cream-colored Mercedes convertible she’d received for her sixteenth birthday.
He obviously hadn’t heard how the Brenners of the Gold Coast had been reduced to a state of poverty and hardship that rivaled the one he’d escaped on the South Side. He didn’t know her father was still doing time in a federal prison for tax evasion, embezzlement and a string of other charges, because he’d had to support a drug-and-call-girl habit. He didn’t know her mother had passed away in a mental hospital after too many years of trying to cope with the anguish and ostracism brought on by her husband’s betrayal. He didn’t know how, before that, Colette Brenner had left Ava’s father and taken her to Milwaukee to finish high school, or that Ava had done so in a school much like Emerson—except that she had been the poor scholarship student looked down on by the ruling class of rich kids, the same way she had looked down on Peyton and his crowd at Emerson.
Sometimes karma was a really mean schoolgirl.
But that was all the more reason she didn’t want Peyton to know the truth now. She’d barely made a dent in her karmic debt. Spending her senior year of high school walking in the shoes of the students she’d treated so shabbily for years—being treated so shabbily herself—she had learned a major life lesson. It was only one reason she’d opened Talk of the Town: so that women who hadn’t had the same advantages in life that she’d taken for granted could have the chance to walk in the designer shoes of high society, if only for a little while.
It was something she was sure Peyton would understand—if it came from anyone but Ava. If he found out what she’d gone through her senior year of high school, he’d mock her mercilessly. Not that she didn’t deserve it. But a person liked to have a little warning before she found herself in a situation like that. A person needed a little time to put on her protective armor. Especially a person who knew what a formidable force Peyton Moss could be.
“There’s no one waiting for me at home,” she said softly in response to his question.
Or anywhere else, for that matter. No one in her former circle of friends had wanted anything to do with her once she started living below the poverty line, and she’d stepped on too many toes outside that circle for anyone there to ever want to speak to her. Peyton would be no exception.
When she looked up again, he was studying her with a scrutiny that made her uncomfortable. But all he said was, “So what did happen last night?”
“You were in Basilio’s when I got there. I heard shouting in the bar and saw Dennis—he’s the bartender,” she added parenthetically, “talking to you. He suggested, um, that you might want a cup of coffee instead of another drink.”
Instead of asking about the conversation, Peyton asked, “You know the bartender by name?”
“Sure. And Basilio, the owner, and Marcus, the waiter who helped me get you to the car. I eat at that restaurant a lot.” It was the only one in the neighborhood she could afford when it came to entertaining potential clients and vendors. Not that she would admit that to Peyton.
He nodded. “Of course you eat there a lot. Why cook for yourself when you can pay someone else do it?”
Ava ignored the comment. Peyton really was going to believe whatever he wanted about her. It didn’t occur to him that sixteen years could mature a person and make her less shallow and more compassionate. Sixteen years evidently hadn’t matured him, if he was still so ready to think the worst of her.
“Anyway,” she continued, “you took exception to Dennis’s suggestion that you’d had too much to drink—and you had had too much to drink, Peyton—and you got a little...belligerent.”
“Belligerent?” he snapped. “I never get belligerent.”
Somehow Ava refrained from comment.
He seemed to realize what she was thinking, because he amended, “Anymore. It’s been a long time since I was belligerent with anyone.”
Yeah, probably about sixteen years. Once he graduated from Emerson, all the targets of his belligerence—especially Ava Brenner—would have been out of his life.
“Basilio was going to throw you out, but I...I mean, when I realized you were someone I knew...I...” She expelled a
