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She rolled down the window.
    “Ahh, she remembers.”
    “Nobody calls me Miss Priss. You’ve changed!” 
    “So have you.”
    He lifted a brow that said he questioned her taste in clothes and makeup. She’d forgotten how she looked. She scrunched her nose at him and didn’t explain. Let him wonder.
    He bent down so his butt rested on his heels and his face was level with hers.
    “How are you?” she said.
    “I asked you first.”
    “So. I asked you second.” She laughed. This was how they’d bantered as kids. “Right now I’m late. But we’ll catch up when I get home. You did say, earn your keep? You’ll be here?”
    “All summer.” He rose and took a step back from the car.
    She nodded at him. The surprise of finding thirteen-year-old Jake, now a man, back at the house left her short on words.
    “Love the car.” He motioned with a finger. “The hair and clothes? Not so much.”
    She chuckled and started the engine. “Well, who asked you?”
    He laughed. “There’s the Miss Priss I know and love.”
    She waved as she drove toward the street, her mind racing. Jake was back. She could hardly believe it. They’d been three peas in a pod: Herself, Darla and Jake. When he’d left, both she and Darla had cried their eyes out. For whatever reason, he went to live with his mother in another state, out of reach. It felt like a betrayal at the time, never occurring to her young soul that he was in the same position as she and Darla were—children at the mercy of their parents’ disorderly lives.
    Did Harper know Jake was back? He wouldn’t care, but Edward would. She paused at the end of the driveway and watched a couple of cars shoot past.
    Things could get very interesting this summer. Jake was back. Good pal Jake. Hadn’t he turned out well?
    And there was the cop who had given her a ticket and then joined her at the Roxy. Dan-the-Man. Well, maybe Dan-the-Man. He had yet to call.
    She pulled into the street and pressed the accelerator.
    Motorcycle cop. All around stick-in-the-mud. Hottie on the dance floor. Officer Daniel O’Donnell. Yum.
    But hadn’t she decided that he wasn’t going to call? She pushed him from her thoughts and he bounced back again. Stop it! Stay in the present. Pay attention to your driving. She punctuated the thought with a sharp nod. She wouldn’t think about Dan anymore. Nope, not for a second.
    Unless of course, she did.

 
     
     
     
     
     
    Five
     
     
    STILL DRESSED IN her nightgown, Darla sat on her bed with arms wrapped around knees that were up to her chin. She stared out the window at the expansive backyard which included the large motor court at the far end of the mansion. It separated the house from the seven-car garage that contained her father’s fleet of luxury vehicles. Above it stretched Henry’s apartment.
    Lacey had just finished flirting with Jake and driven away. And Jake was now moving about the motor court with that signature swagger Darla would know anywhere. It was a strut that said: Here I come. I’m ready for anything . As a child she’d been captivated by it. He was all grown up now and looked nothing like the boy she once knew. But that strut gave him away.
    “So gorgeous,” Darla sighed. “Hot, Lacey would say.”
    He’d grown tall. His lean, bronzed body had very broad shoulders. She liked his hair. Long and wavy, bouncing with every stride.
    Darla’s heart urged her to go talk to him. But she felt like she was still seven years old and didn’t know what to say.
    What was the big deal? He was an old friend. She wondered why she was the way she was. Lacey had no problem talking to anybody. Lacey was outgoing and fun. Nothing bothered her. Why couldn’t she be more like her sister?
    Darla watched Jake run up the stairs and disappear into his father’s apartment. Almost immediately he reappeared and loped back down. He entered the garage and emerged at the wheel of the Bentley. The garage door closed as he drove out of sight.
    Where