She raised her chin at my sneering tone. She had spunk, anyway. I’d give her that.

“I hate high school,” she said sullenly. “Everyone there is such a phony. Randy said he’d help me get my GED online—”

“Oh, right. And then what? Online college?”

“Randy says—”

“Oh, listen to yourself,” I snapped. “Randy says this, Randy says that. Don’t you have a mind of your own? Or do you just automatically do whatever Randy says?”

“Yes,” Hannah said. She was crying openly now. And not from fear or frustration.

“Yes, you have a mind of your own? Or yes, you automatically do what Randy says?”

“I can see why my brother broke up with you,” Hannah said with sudden venom. “You’re really mean!”

“Oh,” I said, smiling. “You think this is mean? I haven’t even gotten STARTED yet. Get your stuff. Now. We’re leaving.”

She stared at me, dumbfounded. “What?”

“Get your stuff,” I said. “I’m taking you back to your brother’s house. And then I’m calling your mother, and we’re all going to have a little talk about what is REALLY going on back at her house. And I’m betting she’s going to say none of her exes ever hit on you. And guess what? I believe her.”

Hannah looked about as shocked as a person who has grown totally used to getting her own way could look, upon suddenly finding things not going her way.

“I—I’m not going anywhere,” she cried. “You try to drag me out of here and Randy—Randy will kill you!”

“Hannah,” I said. “Let me tell you something. I just spent a year working with U.S. Marines, whose only job was to track down and detain men who’d trained at terrorist death camps. Compared to that, some twenty-seven-year-old pimp named Randy who doesn’t even own his apartment is NOTHING to me. Do you understand? NOTHING.”

Hannah’s lower lip quivered. Her gaze darted around the apartment, as if she were looking for something to throw at me. I regarded her calmly, however, from the front doorway, which I was guarding in case the ever-fabulous Randy happened to come in unexpectedly.

“Randy’s not a pimp” was all she could come up with.

“Not yet,” I said. “Give him time. I’m sure, with the love of a girl like you behind him, he’ll live up to his potential.”

“I—I HATE you!” Hannah screamed at me. “You are such a BITCH! My brother is so WRONG about you! He goes on about you like you’re some kind of PRINCESS. Did you know he keeps a SCRAPBOOK about you? Yeah, he does. Every time anything about you appears in the paper or some magazine, he clips it out and SAVES it. He’s got like ten thousand pictures of you—God, he never even misses an episode of that STUPID TV show about you. He even made ME sit and watch it. All he ever talks about is how great and brave and smart and funny you are. I wasdying to meet you someday, even though you totally ripped out his heart and stomped on it. And now I finally do meet you, and I find out you’re nothing but a huge, giant, überbitch!”

I could only blink at her, stunned not so much by her outburst—okay, not at ALL stunned by the outburst—but by its content. Rob keepsscrapbooks about me? Rob watches the TV show about me? Rob thinks I’m brave and smart and funny? She thinks I broke ROB’S heart?

Boy, had she ever gotten THAT one wrong.

Could she possibly have been telling the truth? Could any of that stuff be even remotely—

“I HATE YOU!”

I ducked just as the lamp whizzed past my head.

Good thing, too, since the thing was made of brass, and ended up denting the cheap drywall, instead of my skull.

I straightened and glared at her with narrowed eyes.

“Okay,” I said, “that’s it. You don’t get to pack your stuff. You’re coming with me now, just as you are.”

And I reached out and grabbed her by her ear.

Sure, it’s an age-old technique, used by mothers worldwide to control fractious offspring.

But did you know the U.S. Marines use it occasionally as well, to quell a recalcitrant suspect? They do, actually.

Because it not only works, but it doesn’t leave a mark. On the victim, I mean.

Oh, yeah. I learned a lot of useful stuff like that while I was overseas.

Hannah balked at first over being dragged by her ear from her boyfriend’s cushy apartment to my motorcycle. But, as I explained to her, it was either that or I called the cops, and Randy got an extra-nice surprise when he got home from work that night, in the form of an arrest for statutory rape.

She finally gave in, but not exactly what you’d call graciously. I was strapping my helmet on her—I didn’t have a spare, so I was going to have to risk my precious cranium to transport the little brat home—when she stiffened.

I knew without even glancing over my shoulder what she was looking at.

“Where is he?” I asked evenly. “And don’t get any ideas about calling him over here. I can dial nine-one-one faster than anybody you’ve ever seen.”

“He’s getting out of his car,” Hannah said, her gaze devouring the object of her affections the way Ruth devours éclairs—or would if she went off her no-flour-or-sugar diet. “He’s going to be really upset when he sees I’m gone.”

“Yeah, well,” I said, “I bet five dollars you never hear from him again.”

“Are you kidding?” Hannah shook her head. “He’ll go to the ends of the earth looking for me if he has to. He told me. We’re soul mates.”

Straddling the bike, I glanced in the direction she was staring, and saw a tall, skinny guy getting out of a Trans Am.

Seriously. Why do they always drive a Trans Am?

But instead of heading for Apartment 2T, old Randy headed straight for Apartment 1S. Hannah and I watched in silence as he thumped once on the door. It opened and a dark-haired girl, who looked even younger than Hannah, peered up at him. He leaned down and pressed a kiss on her that appeared to make her knees melt, since he had to drag her back into the apartment, as her legs apparently failed to work properly anymore.

Behind me, Hannah made a faint noise, like a kitten who has only just woken from a long, deep sleep.

“Huh,” I said, gunning the engine. “Looks like Randy’s got more than one soul mate, doesn’t it?”

Then I got us out of there just as fast as I could. Without going over the speed limit, of course.

Eight

Rob was on the phone when I tugged open the screen door and then pulled a very humbled Hannah into his living room.

His jaw dropped when he saw us. Then, remembering himself, he said into the phone, “Gwen? Yeah. She just walked in. I don’t know. No, she looks fine. Yeah.” He held the phone out towards Hannah. “Your mother wants to talk to you, Han.”

Hannah’s face crumpled. Then she turned and ran dramatically up the stairs, weeping the whole way. A second later, we heard a bedroom door slam.

Rob looked at me. I rolled my eyes. He said into the phone, “Gwen? Yeah. She’s a little…upset. Let me go talk to her. Then I’ll call you back. Yeah. Bye.”

Then he hung up and stared at me some more.

“She’s in love,” I said, nodding my head in the direction Hannah’s sobs were floating from.

“But she’s all right?” he asked in a tight voice.

“Physically,” I said. “I think a little visit to the ob-gyn might be in order.”

His legs seemed to give out from beneath him. He sagged onto a chair at the dining room table.

“Thank you, Jess,” he said faintly, speaking not to me, but to the carved wooden fruit bowl in the center of the table.

I shrugged. Gratitude makes me uneasy.

Particularly when it comes from someone who looks as fine as Rob does in a pair of jeans. It was so unfair that he should be so hot and at the same time so unattainable.

Unless any of that stuff Hannah had told me back at the apartment complex was true.

But how could it possibly—

To keep my mind from straying into this dangerous territory, I looked around Rob’s place. It had been totally redone since I’d last been there. The chintz his mom had loved so much was long gone and replaced with masculine-looking—but still nice—olive-greens and browns. The flowered couch was nowhere to be seen, replaced by a brown suede one. The old nineteen-inch Sony was now a sleek plasma screen, mounted to the wall above a dark wood bookcase filled with CDs and DVDs.

Whatever else Rob might have been through since I last saw him, he wasn’t hurting for cash. He’d converted his mother’s place into a bona fide bachelor pad.

“You got any soda or something?” I asked. Because thinking about all the girls he might have been entertaining in said bachelor pad had left me feeling a little weak.

“In the fridge,” he said. He still hadn’t taken his eyes off the fruit bowl. There were three red apples and a banana ripening in it. If I wasn’t mistaken, Rob Wilkins appeared to be in shock.

I went into the kitchen. It, too, had been totally remodeled, the old white farmhouse cupboards replaced by sleek unpainted cherry wood. The lucite counter was gone and a black granite one gleamed in its place. The appliances were all new, too, and were stainless steel instead of white.

I found two Cokes in the fridge and brought one out to him before taking a seat in a chair across the table from his. I figured, judging from the way he couldn’t stop staring at that fruit bowl, his electrolytes had sunk as low as mine. Or something.

“Where’d you get the money for all this?” I asked, popping open my Coke can and nodding towards the plasma screen. My mom would have killed me if she’d heard me—it’s totally impolite to ask someone how they got the money to pay for something. But I figured Rob wouldn’t care.

He didn’t.

“Dentists,” he said. And looked away from the fruit bowl long enough to open his own soda can.