Page 83 of Twisted Knight

“Good. Great. So long as you acknowledge that.”

“It’s hard to be angry at someone when they’re drinking a chocolate milkshake,” I say as she sucks on the straw. After the events of the bathroom, the action has my imagination going into overdrive.

She swallows her sip, sets the shake down on the table, and plays with the straw wrapper, clearly lost in her own thoughts and oblivious to mine.

“This place has been here forever,” she murmurs.

“Yeah?” I pretend not to know.

She nods and looks around the diner. It hasn’t changed much from what I can remember. The booths’ upholsteries have been redone, the counters changed out for some type of stone, the light fixtures upgraded, but for the most part, the feel is the same. A ’50s diner in the twenty-first century.

“Yeah. It’s a big hangout for high schoolers after football games. Or at least it used to be.”

“You came here?” I ask, wondering if she was one of the spoiled kids who would trash the place and make my mom stay here for hours after closing trying to clean it all up.

“In the summer usually. With my sister.” Something glances through her eyes but it’s gone just as quickly as it’s there. “But it was typically my sister—Cassie—and Rhett who’d come here.”

“You’re not a fan of football games?”

She gives me a pseudo shrug. “When you go to an all-girls school a few hundred miles away, it doesn’t bode well for hometown football games.”

“What do you mean an all-girls school?”

“Just what I said.”

I stare at her and question my sanity. But I saw her with my own eyes at the country club when I was working there. I listened to my mom complain about the Rothschild kids after games and the havoc they wreaked in this very diner.

“You didn’t go to high school here?”

She gives a slow shake of her head and a partial chuckle. “No, and I was okay with that.”

“But…” I say the word and then wish I could take it back when her eyebrows furrow. I saw her here with my own eyes.

“While all the other girls were ecstatic about their debuts, I was busy trying to figure out how to sabotage mine. My twin—Cassie—was everything my parents expected in a daughter. I refused to be any of it.” She shrugs and I’m surprised by her complete indifference in disappointing her parents. “I begged to go away to school. Anything other than the weekend social events, the pageant participation, and the expectations to be a cheerleader.”

“And your parents let you?”

“I went to Gilmore. It’s prestigious and I sold them on how it would make me more well-rounded—or in their eyes, it might tame me to make me more attractive to marry off someday.” She rolls her eyes.

“Clearly the taming part worked,” I tease, at which she snorts.

“You’re lucky I’m tired or you just might have a kick to your shin right now.”

I laugh and for the first time a smile widens on her lips.

I stare at her unapologetically.

She’s beautiful even with a scowl, but hell if a smile doesn’t make her radiant. “Good thing you’re tired then.” I take a sip of my own milkshake. “So your parents sent you there and not your sister?”

“They wanted to, but she fought them tooth and nail. Sold them as hard on staying here as I did on getting away.” She stares back at the straw wrapper she’s fiddling with. “We were that odd pair of twins that got along, but who were completely different in every aspect. Did I want her to go to school with me? No. Besides, she liked being the only daughter here. And she liked pretending to be me even more when she thought she was doing something she shouldn’t be doing.”

“She what?” I ask as thoughts start colliding and truths I should have seen come crashing into me.

“Just what I said. She used to pretend to be me. Whenever she wanted to rebel a little and step out of the perfect role, she’d say she was me, that I’d come home for a visit and…”

“Caused trouble.”

“Yep.” Her smile is bittersweet. “It only served to prove even more why I wanted my own identity away from Westmore and the Rothschild name.”