Ava grinned at the thought. She wasn’t even sure what had prompted her to bring the ticket along in the first place. As much as she enjoyed pushing people’s buttons to get at what made them tick, this move had been risky, even for her. But she’d done plenty of Googling to see just how bad an unpaid ticket was.
And in the end, she hadn’t been able to resist needling him. She too-well remembered all that righteous indignation three years ago. Getting under the skin of what had to be the most upstanding cop on the planet was a delicious prospect.
And he’d let her walk away, so she must have at least been partially right about being able to get away with it.
Then again, Luc probably didn’t know that the unpaid ticket was no one-off fluke. Her eyes flitted to the back pocket of the passenger seat, which was bulging with small bits of paper. At least half of which were likely parking tickets for this very van.
Mihail watched the direction of her gaze before giving a little smirk, correctly reading her mind. “Freedom of the press, baby.”
Welllll…
As Officer Moretti had so sanctimoniously informed her during their heated altercation three years ago, freedom of the press didn’t exactly dignify breaking traffic laws…repeatedly.
But such explanations would go unheeded by Mihail. He’d been in the U.S. for almost twenty years, and a citizen for over half that thanks to a tumultuous marriage to a Queens-born bartender, but he was known to be a bit innovative with his interpretation of things like the Constitution and the law.
“Where to now, babe?” Mihail asked, flicking his cigarette to the pavement.
Ava put the cap back on her water bottle and rolled her shoulders. “Let’s head back to the station.”
Mihail’s eyebrows lifted. “You never want to go back to the station.”
Ava pulled down the visor and looked at the mirror there, checking for lipstick on her teeth. Yup. There it was. A rosy smear across her perfectly straight (thanks, orthodontics), perfectly white (thanks, network-sponsored whitening sessions) teeth.
She snapped the visor back up in irritation. She kept waiting for the day that looking perfectly put together became effortless. She’d been waiting a long-ass time.
“Yeah, well, it’s not like I want to go back to the station,” she griped to Mihail. “But this story is the big-time. I knew when they gave it to me that it would mean more face time with the higher-ups.”
“So you think this is it?” he asked.
“Hmm?” she asked, distracted.
He lifted an eyebrow. “You know, it. The story.”
“It better be,” she muttered.
Mihail gave her a look, and she knew he was dying to start their usual argument. But for once he managed to bite his tongue, and instead of picking a fight, he pulled out one of his ever-present gummy worms from the bag in the middle console. He chewed grumpily.
Ava’s relentless quest to be a CBC anchorwoman was the one area where she and Mihail didn’t see eye to eye. It was cliché, and she knew it. The small-town Midwest girl dreaming of the bright lights and fame in the big city.
But she’d been chasing the dream since she’d moved to New York at twenty-two.
She wasn’t going to stop now.
Even if a little part of her sometimes whispered that it wasn’t her dream.
Ava started to bite her fingernail, then jerked her hand away when she realized it would chip the manicure she could never seem to keep looking fresh for more than twelve hours.
“Have you called your parents yet?” Mihail asked.
“Not yet. Tonight, maybe.”
“I’m sure they’ll be excited.”
“Don’t,” she snapped, catching his emphasis and knowing what it implied. Mihail had only met her parents once (disaster), but he’d heard enough phone calls over the course of his and Ava’s friendship to have formed a strong opinion on her family.
To his way of thinking, it wasn’t Ava’s dream that had her chasing the anchor chair. He thought it was her parents’ dream. With maybe a dash of pressure from her talk-show-host sister and foreign-correspondent brother.
Maybe he was a little bit right. A little bit.