waitress // lrh

02 // innocence

// luke //

He finally persuaded Cate to come out to the parking lot with him.

She clearly didn't trust the older, unfamiliar, gruff-looking man, but when Harper saw them walking out to the parking lot together and just smiled at the two, she figured he was alright. He still terrified her, though.

6 foot something of Australian man, with something in his sharp gaze that made her want to shrink into nothing, he made Cate absolutely frightened. And for a good reason, too, she thought.

What were the marks on his face from? Did he get in a fight? Probably, if you looked as moody as he did all the time. Likely he pissed someone off just by glancing his way, and it rubbed them the wrong way.

But it wasn't like Cate to make assumptions.

She didn't want to be afraid of him, but currently that was all that she felt. Her brain kept making up wild stories about this man she didn't even know the name of, who she was following like a lost puppy into the hot summer sun to look around a parking lot for a brother who wasn't even there. If Cate was any other person, they would have been plotting about how they'd terrorize their sibling the second they got home after being forced into such an awful situation, but Cate was Cate. She thought that Calum must've had a perfectly good reason to be half an hour late to pick her up and not even text her.

"You see his car anywhere, Hood?"

The roughness of voice didn't help her fear either.

The use of her last name to address her made her feel like he was talking to someone else, someone who deserved to be talked to like a head coach of a sports team, not a timid little girl who still drank milk in her coffee and read poetry for fun.

Glancing over the rows and rows of parked cars, the sun in her eyes, Cate realized she was much too short to see anything about the cars other than the color.

There were a lot of silver and grey cars. And Calum's car was somewhere in between silver and grey.

"No," she told him, "but I'm short."

In all honesty, he could have gone in and got his phone to call the guy, but the part of this girl he had no memory of ever meeting before that didn't make him impatient was the part that made him nearly smirk in amusement. And something in him wanted to see more of that part.

"Tell me what it looks like, then,"

"Um, it's silvery-grey," she mumbled. "It's a sedan. That's all I know."

"That's it?" he asked, slightly astonished.

She just nodded sheepishly.

Sighing, he realized that he spotted at least four silvery grey sedans immediately, all at completely different parts of the lot. Just because Calum and he were mates didn't mean he knew what his car looked like either.

"Babe, there's a lot of silver-grey sedans here. Would you recognize it if you saw it?

She shivered again, despite the heat.

Babe.

Cate shrugged in response to his question.

"Do you want to try standing on a bench or something? It'd probably take a while to walk around the lot."

She looked hesitant to do so. "Uh-"

He quirked an eyebrow.

"Sure," she squeaked.

There was a bench across the porte cochere, across from the automatic hotel doors, facing away from the parking lot. It was about a foot or two off the ground, so it would make the girl's line a vision a little higher.