It Had to Be You by Jill Shalvis Page B

sugar and baked apples. He needed that pie. The hell with it. He snatched it. “Yeah. I’m going to help her.” He snagged the other fork out of Mr. Lyons’s pocket. He took a big bite and nearly died and went to heaven. “Sawyer said the cops aren’t done talking to her yet, not until around two.”
    Mr. Lyons blinked. “You were already going to help her,” he said all accusatorially.
    Luke took another big bite. “Yeah.”
    Mr. Lyons narrowed his eyes. “And Roger? You’ll help Roger too?”
    “Yeah, but only because Phillip Schmidt was the idiot who built that monstrosity on northeast bluffs. It blocks access to the beach from that side of the harbor, so he calls the cops on the kids that have to trespass to get to the water.”
    Mr. Lyons smiled. “You’re a good boy. You’re going to be good for Ali. I take her classes, you know, both the ceramics and her floral-design class. They help with my arthritis. She deserves better than to be treated like a common criminal.”
    Luke turned to Edward. “So what’s your interest in this?”
    “Oh, he takes Ali’s classes too,” Mr. Elroy answered for him. “We all do.” He smiled. “We love her.”
    Luke was having some trouble with the image of his tough, stoic, impenetrable grandfather taking ceramics and floral design.
    Not to mention—what the hell was floral design?

Chapter 7
    A li had a recurring nightmare that changed in details, but at the core it was always the same—she was alone.
    Terrifyingly alone.
    Sitting on a chair in some chilly room at the police station, her nightmare had gone live.
    There’d been lots of questions. Had she been angry when Teddy had broken up with her? Angry enough to want to frame him? Because apparently her messages, both the voice mail and the sticky note, indicated a vengeful woman.
    Did she know that if she turned the rest of the money in right now that charges would be reduced, possibly dropped? Because apparently she was holding it hostage somewhere.
    Did she know that the sticky-note message could also be construed as an actual threat? She didn’t know how calling someone an ass who was an actual ass had become threatening, but okay. Fine. Lesson learned.
    She’d said maybe she needed an attorney, and one of the cops brought her to a phone. She stared at it in rare indecision. This was new, being on this side of the phone call. She’d been on the other side, several times, the first being when her mom had been arrested for property damage after she’d taken that bat to her boyfriend’s car. What the cops hadn’t known was that Mimi had been aiming for the guy’s head.
    The second time had been when Mimi had set fire to a different boyfriend’s wardrobe. Her mistake had been in using the bonfire to have a party. Mimi had tried to plead temporary insanity on that one, but no one bought it. There was nothing temporary about Mimi’s rage whenever she got cheated on.
    Both times Ali and Harper had bailed Mimi out using the secret cash stash taped to the bottom of their couch, which was accumulated from her mom’s tips. Over the years, that stash had ebbed and flowed, depending on various needs. Christmas. School field trips. Mimi’s breast augmentation. And then the second surgery to remove the implants after they’d begun to leak.
    Then Harper had taken her turn one year and had gotten arrested for indecent exposure after she’d pulled off to the side of the road to pee in the snow.
    Ali still liked to tease Harper about that one.
    She could call them, either of them. They’d be here in a blink, their tip stash in tow on the chance that she did indeed get arrested. But Ali wasn’t going to call them. She hadn’t been arrested—yet—and even if she had, she wasn’t going to have them spend their hard-earned money on her.
    Besides, neither her mom nor her sister was qualified to offer legal advice, and then there was the embarrassment factor, which on a scale of one to ten, was at an eleven right