I put my hand on my neck. “What?”
“You’ve got a bruise—and another one there—” She came up to me and looked closely. “Not a hickey. So you weren’t getting busy with the little coed?”
I threw her a warning look and she dropped the teasing smile. “Okay, I won’t tease. But why are you all bruised up?” She reached over and yanked the collar of my polo shirt aside, stretching it back from my left collarbone. “You’ve got like—Oh, when did you get this?” she said, getting a glimpse of the tattoo.
I’d never minded it before, but since Emilia had mentioned Lindsay’s overly intimate behavior toward me, it now grated. I pulled back from her and readjusted my shirt.
“Are you done? The bruises are from paintball.”
“Yeah, I’ve moved on from the bruises. I didn’t think they were from domestic violence. What’s with the tattoo? Of all the people in the world, I would have never imagined Adam Drake tattooing a woman’s name on his chest—especially when it’s not the woman he’s currently with.”
“So are you interested in the apartment or not? Because if not, I’ll get my realtor to put it up on the market.”
“You aren’t going to tell me who Sabrina is?”
I shifted, giving her an irritated look. “Nope.” I never spoke her name. It had taken everything in me to even get the tattoo, but it had been something I’d had to do at the time. I’d been afraid that I was forgetting her, letting her slip from my memory and my heart. It was a stupid notion, but at the time, it had made sense to me. It was a way to keep a piece of her with me always. I’d never spoken of Bree to anyone—not even my own family. My uncle and cousins knew, of course. But Lindsay had never been privy to what was inside my heart.
Which made it even more remarkable that Emilia had been able to wrest that secret from me with hardly any effort at all. Usually if people asked me who Sabrina was after seeing the tattoo, I evaded the question.
While we’d been sitting in the hot tub on my yacht, Emilia had asked me, too, after having bared her soul to me about a painful experience from her past. And I’d answered her. Simply, shortly. But even that had taken every bit of strength I could muster. Emilia was the first person I could talk about it with. And only in short, vague terms, recounting the pain of my childhood as if it was someone else’s faraway tale. I shook my head to rid it of the thought.
Lindsay looked away, flipping her blond hair over her shoulder. She was clearly annoyed by my secrecy. “I’m sorry. You must be pretty upset.”
“Not at all, but I am hungry and it’s two o’clock, so how about we wrap this up over lunch?”
Lindsay turned and walked slowly to the counter to fetch her bright red purse that matched her long nails. Then, she pivoted toward me. “I talked to Jordan. He told me about—about you and Mia breaking up.”
I set my jaw. I did not want to discuss this with her right now. “It’s okay, Adam. I’m not going to proposition you again. I do have some pride. I’m just worried about you, that’s all. As a friend. You’ve never really been with anyone…well, that I know of, anyway,” she said with a significant gesture in the direction of my chest and the tattoo. “And from what I understand you and Mia were living together. It—well, I’m just sorry, that’s all. You seemed happier than I’ve seen you in a long time. Healthier, too.”
I sighed and gave a pointed jingle of my keychain, which dangled from my fingers.
She scrutinized me with hardening eyes. “Okay, you are going to be a typical guy and refuse to talk about it. But is it really a lost cause?”
I gritted my teeth. “Probably.”
She nodded. “I’m going to give you some unsolicited advice. And you’re going to have to listen until I walk out that door and follow you down to the restaurant. She’s young, Adam. She’s what—twenty-two, twenty-three? That’s the same age I was when you and I hooked up. The last thing on my mind was commitment and a future in a relationship. She wants to be a doctor. I wanted to be an attorney. It was the most important thing to me at that point and no man was going to get in the way of that.”
I let her talk. I listened to what she had to say, but hell if we were going to actually have a conversation about this. This whole encounter had already crossed over into the Twilight Zone. I was expecting Rod Serling to step into the room at any moment to provide a dry narration of the fucked-up history between Lindsay and me.