It Had to Be You Read Online Free PDF Page B

in reality was only a few minutes, with Edward continuing to angle for an invite in, turning on the charm full power.
    But Ali held her own, laughing and keeping things light, while remaining utterly firm. And in another minute, the front door shut, and she was back.
    Luke looked at her. “You deal pot to the geriatric crowd?”
    She stared at him and then laughed. She laughed so hard she had to put her hands on her knees and double over. Finally she straightened and swiped at her eyes. “Oh my God, I needed that.” She got herself under control with what appeared to be some effort. “No, I don’t deal pot. I teach a weekly ceramics class at the senior center.” She shook her head at him. “You are such a cop.”
    Guilty. “A detective.”
    “So I heard.”
    The damn reporter.
    “A lucky cop too,” she went on.
    His life was such complete shit that he had no idea what she could possibly be talking about. “Lucky?”
    “With your neighbors,” she said. “Growing up, my neighbors were career arsonists and loan sharks.” She shrugged. “The arsonist was nice enough, but if I left my dolls out, he’d set their hair on fire.”
    “And the loan shark?”
    “He wasn’t crazy about little kids,” she said. “He used to tell me and my sister that he was going to sneak into our place one night and sell us on the white slave market, and then retire off his portion of the profit.”
    Jesus. “How old were you?”
    “I don’t know, twelve maybe. He never got the chance. When my mom found out what he’d said, she threw a lamp at his head. That straightened him out pretty quick.”
    Luke wasn’t into civilians taking matters into their own hands, but in this case, the vigilante justice worked for him. “ Good. And thanks for your help.”
    She smiled. “I figured you didn’t want to socialize.”
    “No.”
    “So maybe it’s fate that I’m here.”
    Fate? He’d call it bad luck. “I don’t put much stock in fate.” He believed in making his own path—even if that way was to fuck up a few times before he got it right. He never blamed something as intangible as fate for his screwups.
    He blamed himself.
    She stared at him for a moment, her eyes soft, as if maybe she felt sorry for him, of all things. “That’s okay,” she said. “I believe enough for the both of us.”
    Well, hell.
    He tried to shake it all off, but his eyes were gritty from the exhaustion. “I’m hitting the sack.” He walked away and took the stairs down to the basement.
    It’d been years since he’d been down here, but not much had changed. The walls were a midnight blue with the galaxy painted on the ceiling. Pluto was still a planet. The door was covered in late ’90s radio station stickers, a virtual time capsule to Luke’s teenagehood.
    Not that there was a lot to the time capsule. His parents, both doctors, had never put much stock in sentiment. They believed in higher education, hard work, and harder, tough love. And the cause, always the cause.
    Right now that meant being in Haiti. Back then, it’d been Doctors Without Borders, which had left Luke and his older sister, Sara, more often in the care of their grandma up here in Lucky Harbor than at home in San Francisco.
    Which had worked for Luke.
    He’d had a lot of good times in Lucky Harbor, the best times of his life. His first climb. His first ski. His first boat race. His first jump off the pier. His first kiss. And given that Candy Jenson, a senior to his freshman, had also taken his virginity, he’d had just about every possible first here.
    Good memories.
    At least until several years later, on one particularly stupid night when he’d been with the girl of his dreams. They’d parked up at Pigeon Point to “stargaze,” aka have sex, in her daddy’s truck. They’d been doing just that when his sister had called him. Twenty years old to his eighteen, Sara hadn’t bothered with Luke all that often, but that night she’d been drinking and had needed a