Read The Dirty Secret for Free Online

before I was supposed to meet her for dinner.” And when they rescheduled, a site tour had run three hours late. The woman hadn’t answered his pathetically apologetic voice mail. He’d felt like an asshole and hadn’t asked anyone else out since.
    He waved at the approaching taxi. The driver was an older guy and seemed safe enough.
    “Come with me,” Starla said, pulling on his tie. Killian opened the door for her. She puffed her bottom lip out in a dramatic pout, then laughed and got inside. He closed the door and tapped the top of the car.
    “Man, you’re a fool,” Bengt said after the cab drove off. “What happens at happy hour stays at happy hour.”
    “You need that tattooed on your ass in Latin.”
    “Listen, I’m gonna stick around.” Bengt jerked his thumb back over his shoulder to the building where a girl with tattoos—one of the two who had danced with Seth—waited in the doorway, smoking a cigarette. “Can you get a ride home with Deb or something?”
    “I’m going to walk back to the office. By the time I finish picking up the latest red lines on the addendum, I’ll be okay to drive.” Half his job consisted of correcting the boss’s plans, redrawing the twenty-first-century standardizations the old man refused to learn. The addition to the courthouse had more red X s than his freshman English Lit papers.
    “Can you even plot a straight line right now?”
    “Can’t be worse than the wiggly ass shit you draw sober.”
    Bengt flipped him off. Killian walked down the street, goofy because the prettiest girl in the place had flirted with him. She was the wrong girl, though, with her lipstick smile, and his thoughts strayed again to the other woman. The one with the naked lips who in a whole conversation never once started a sentence with I .

Chapter Three
    Calla Loo
    “A light night, Tess?” the manager asked, cashing out Vessa’s small bills for twenties.
    “The drink orders tripped me up a few times,” she admitted. Four in fact, and a deep dish with no onions wound up a thin with extra. Her head was filled with paint chips and faucet knobs and the vintage medicine cabinet she’d stripped down to the original wood that morning.
    “I could use you on lunch tomorrow if you can change that appointment of yours,” the supervisor said. “We’re down two servers.”
    She shook her head. “Sorry.” She could have used the money, but fifteen hours from now, she was meeting the architect with the raven hair at his house. “Would you like me to come in as soon as it’s over?”
    “If you can get here before the after-school rush, I’ll bump you from training pay to full server’s wage.”
    From the restaurant Vessa went straight to the hardware store, arriving twenty minutes before it closed. The smell of Italian sausage stuck to her clothes like a meat lover’s cologne, but thankfully the store was empty of patrons. A lonely stock boy loaded buckets onto shelves in the joint compound and spackle section.
    “Hey, pizza girl, do you deliver?” he called down the aisle.
    Vessa looked down at her clothes. In her rush to get to the hardware store before it closed, she’d forgotten to take off her work apron. She gave the boy her best polite waitress face. “Why, do you need a midwife?”
    “I ain’t looking to get married,” he said, backing away, holding a putty knife like a shield to ward her off.
    “Well, then maybe you can help me find some plaster of Paris instead?”
    As the stock clerk scanned the shelves, a teenage boy walked by. He wore the green vest of the garden department, carrying several pots in his arms, each with drooping flowers. He paused, clearing his throat. “Are you finding everything you need?” he asked her, fixing his older coworker with a beady glare.
    The saucy stock boy handed her a carton of plaster mix.
    “Right on,” the gardener said coolly, and the clerk scuttled off, pushing his hand truck of buckets.
    Vessa untied her apron and followed