by Alina Jacobs
“I can’t believe he’s finally brought a girl home,” his mother said, enveloping me in a hug. “And such a nice girl too. I can tell you like to eat!” She slapped me on the hip.
See, I told myself as a plate of lasagna slid in front of me, this can’t be all that bad. It’s certainly not the worst date you’ve been on. It’s not as great as a date with Hunter, but hey, anything that includes lasagna can’t be all that bad, right?
But before I could take the bite of lasagna, my date announced, “Guess what, everyone. Meg is so great that you know what she insisted on doing when I told her I was bringing her here?” He grinned manically. “She said, ‘I want to sing for your family.’”
My fork clattered to the plate. “Sing?”
“Wonderful!” his mother boomed.
“Sing! Sing!” his family chanted, and my date hauled me to my feet.
“I don’t know how to sing,” I seethed at him.
He winked at me and mouthed prank.
I warbled out a horrific rendition of “Tomorrow” from the Annie movie, the one that had started me down the dark path of wanting a billionaire to come and save me.
His family roared with laughter when it was over. My date wiped his eyes.
“See Meg? You and I are meant to be!”
Face burning, I stabbed at my lasagna, though my stomach was too clenched to enjoy it.
And I would rather be anywhere than here.
16
Hunter
“There’s the big bad billionaire.”
Karen looked just as I’d remembered her—same dyed blond hair, same high street fashion.
“You don’t look like you’ve changed a bit,” the lawyer purred, sashaying into my campaign headquarters, or at least an attempt was made. She, like many women from Manhattan, was quite thin and didn’t have much in the trunk. Not like Meg.
“Same muscular build,” she continued, “same broad shoulders, same expensive suit.” She let her hands drift down my suit jacket lapels, trailing her fingers down my arm to my wrist. “Same watch, same hands.”
I wanted to draw away from her, but part of convincing Meg to finally be with me once and for all was making her believe that there was something between Karen and me.
“You know,” Karen said, “I had just assumed that you and Meg had moved back to your small hometown to be small-town sweethearts together. I would have thought you would have had a bunch of kids by now. Imagine my surprise when I saw you front and center on the tabloids with that underwear model.”
“Yes,” I said, trying to sound unaffected by her vision of my ideal future with Meg. “Unfortunately, while the models and socialites are pretty arm candy, you cannot have an intellectual conversation with them about anything, really, let alone about the specifics of law.”
Karen smirked. “Good thing I’m here to help.” She grabbed my arm. “I heard about your campaign to be mayor,” she said as we walked onto the sidewalk. “And I do have a few suggestions. Maybe we can discuss them over dinner?”
“I was hoping you’d say that,” I said with a small smile as I opened the passenger door of my sports car for her. “You see, I have a proposition for you.”
The restaurant was busy when we arrived.
“Twenty-minute wait,” the hostess said. I peered at her.
“Hi, Minnie.”
Meg’s younger sister shot me a dirty look. “For lying, cheating scumbags, the wait is forty minutes.”
I blew out a breath.
“I guess we can talk here,” I told Karen as Minnie seated other patrons.
“Do you have any interest in becoming my campaign manager? It would just be for the next few weeks until the election was over,” I asked.
“I’d be glad to!” Karen said.
“I don’t know if you’d be able to do it around your other job.”
“I’m in between jobs at the moment,” she admitted.
“You’re not at Harrington Thurlow anymore?”
“No, I’ve been looking for a change of pace, actually. I was thinking about applying for a corporate lawyer position in Seattle.”
“I don’t know if you’d like Seattle,” I said with a frown. My traitorous half brothers lived there. Salinger and his ilk never even showed up for Christmas, let alone helped at all with our younger brothers. “It rains all the time, and it’s gloomy.”
“With all that blond hair and gray eyes,” Karen teased, pressing her palm lightly against my chest, “you’d fit right in, I would think!” She held eye contact for a beat too long for someone only wanting a job as a campaign manager. “Anyway,” she said, taking out her notepad, “I did have some ideas now that I’m officially your campaign manager. First off, we have to plan several splashy campaign events. It’s good for fundraising and building support.”
“I don’t need fundraising,” I told her.
“Oh, you billionaires!” she said with a laugh.
I glanced over at the hostess station. Minnie was seating a couple who had clearly arrived after Karen and me.
I shifted my weight. “What kinds of events were you thinking?”
“Definitely parties, maybe with bonfires?” Karen suggested. “It’s a small town, right? People here are simpleminded and easy to impress.”
That irked me a bit. This is all part of your grand plan. Another part of my scheme was Meg seeing me with Karen. I needed to plan it perfectly. Maybe I should unveil Karen at a debate? Or should Karen and I casually walk past Meg’s office the next day?
Another crowd of people walked in.
“How many in your party?” Minnie chirped.
“I’m just here for pickup,” a familiar voice said.
“As I live and breathe,” Karen said loudly, a sharp smile on her face. “If it isn’t Meghan, my little employee.”
Meg whirled around and looked wildly between the two of us. Karen snuck an arm around my waist.
“Buying takeout for one?” Karen asked meanly.
17
Meghan
“You don’t have money to spend on more takeout,” I chastised myself.
I had snuck out of Jake’s—or James or whatever his name was—house while his family was in the middle of a loud argument about whether seafood was meat or not. I had scarfed down my lasagna, needing the cheese and carbs to steady my nerves.
My date texted me as I was walking down the sidewalk back into town. I deleted it. The humiliation of singing in front of all those people played through my head.
“Never ever going on another date again, ever,” I promised myself. I was still in my pumps. My feet hurt. “Just make it back to Main Street. We’ll go to the seafood place on Seventh. They have popcorn shrimp and those mini hush puppies.”
It had started to drizzle when I arrived, bedraggled, sweaty, and red-faced, at the restaurant. The smell of creamy sauce and fried breadcrumbs hit me when I walked in. I fanned myself as I waited for Minnie to walk back to the hostess station. She had an angry look on her face.
I hope she’s not mad at me.
Then I heard it—the voice that had made me miserable for the long two years of my career as an attorney in Manhattan. It belonged to the worst supervisor in the world—Karen. She had had me publicly fired and humiliated, and the experience still haunted my nightmares.
She cannot be here. My vision swam as I stared at her. Over the past few years, I had imagined the next time I would see her. I was going to one, be way thinner, and two, have a better outfit on and expensive shoes and have gotten a blowout. We were going to meet coincidentally at some fancy party. Karen was going to be in a cat-hair-covered knockoff designer dress, and I was going to be wearing a showstopping gown. The deepest, darkest secret of my fantasies? Hunter was going to be on my arm with his six-foot-five frame and piercing gray eyes. We were going to make a stunning couple, and Karen was going to explode with jealousy. She had always been furious when Hunter and I were dating. He would send me gifts and flowers to the office, much to
Karen’s annoyance.
But now? Here, at the Harrogate fried-seafood restaurant? This was not how I wanted to see Karen. And I especially did not want to see her with Hunter.
His face was unreadable as Karen wrapped her arms around him like tentacles. Her hands scooted under his jacket to trail her fingernails along the buttons of his shirt.
You didn’t even want him anyway. Well, mostly. You only want him a little bit. But I certainly didn’t want him with her.
“Hunter just made me his new campaign manager,” Karen said smugly. “I think we’re going to be seeing a lot more of each other.” She sniffed a laugh. “It’s funny. You look exactly the same. Same lint-covered clothes, and your hair is still a frizzy mess. The only thing missing is you don’t have food all over yourself.”
“Your fried shrimp and hush puppies,” the cook said, coming over with a takeout box.
“I threw in some calamari because I know you like it!” he added. “And there’s extra napkins.” He saluted me. “You have my vote for mayor. Your job program helped land me this gig, and I’m telling all my friends to vote for you too!”
I took the carton with a mumbled thanks.
“You didn’t want a salad to go with that?” Karen asked snidely.
I felt like I was a fresh law school grad again and not the ideally soon-to-be mayor of Harrogate. Get it together. I was setting a terrible example for Minnie.
But my little sister was nonplussed. She just turned up her nose at Karen.
“Actually,” she said. “The wait is now an hour. If you all want to go to another restaurant, we totally understand.”
“How is this my life?” I shrieked as I walked back to the campaign office to pick up my car.
Kate: Fucking Karen!
Kate: I can’t believe Hunter hired her.
Allie: He’s doing it to fuck with you.
Allie: Don’t let them get in your head. Kate is a way better manager than Miss Thirsty Unemployed Lawyer.
Kate: Yeah, she worked at my dad’s old firm. As I recall, he thought highly of her. And my father is an awful, terrible person, ergo, so is Karen.
Allie: Focus on the debate tomorrow night. Go for the jugular. Clearly, Hunter is.
Meg: I don’t know if I can be that terrible.
Kate: You don’t have to be a cunt, just be a bitch!
Allie: Call him out on all his shitty things he’s done, and hammer him any time he makes a grandiose statement.
Meg: I think I’m going to need a lot more practice tomorrow.
I nervously snuck a few pieces of shrimp out of the takeout bag. I was anxious about the debate. I had done public speaking, yes, but that was at town halls or just out and around Harrogate. That had been low stakes. This was a real, big, grown-up political debate. It was going to be televised. What if I looked stupid? What if I—
I blinked, not believing what I was seeing. My car, which I had parked in front of the campaign office, was being towed down the street!
“Hey!” I screamed, starting to run. “Hey!” Gasping for breath, I cut across the park, trying to catch up with the tow truck that was stealing my car.
“That’s my car! That’s my car!”
The driver slowed down and stopped as I huffed up to him. I had lost my shoes in the grass, and I hobbled over the rough concrete sidewalk to his open window.
“That’s my car!” I gasped, out of breath. Really should have ordered a salad. “I am a city official. I can park there.”
“It’s not the parking, Deputy Mayor,” he said, looking embarrassed and uncomfortable. “Your car is being repossessed for unpaid bills.”
“But… but…” I said in shock. “Barry gave me that car! He said… he said it was somehow paid for by the city…” I sucked in another breath then remembered the state of the finances. “That freaking lying—”
“I’m sorry,” the tow truck operator said. “I just work for the towing company; the bank sends us to repo the cars.”
“Of course they do,” I said in shock.
“You can take your stuff out if you want,” he offered.
He helped me pop the trunk so I could take out a trash bag of dirty laundry and some of my paperwork.
“Thanks,” I said, trying not to cry.
He patted me awkwardly on the shoulder. “Good luck at the debate tomorrow.”
I trudged back across the park to the campaign office, hunting for my shoes in the dark. I could only find one. My feet were dirty and grass stained as I hobbled down the street to my apartment.
I wiped away furious tears as I unlocked the door. “Why is my life so unfair?”
18
Hunter
“You’re going to kill at this debate,” Karen said happily after our prep session in the conference room. She had also somehow managed to dig up a lot of dirt on Meg.
“Her car was repossessed?” I asked, flipping through the dossier.
“Just last night,” she said with a snort. “You definitely need to bring that up.”
“Yes, because nothing says you care about a woman like rubbing her uncle’s illegal dealings in her face,” Garrett interjected.
“I thought you weren’t going to be helping?” I reminded him snidely.
“I’m not,” Garrett said. “I’m here to be entertained by your epic failure.”
“Way to be a supportive family member.”
Garrett went back to his tablet. I wasn’t sure what he was doing; Garrett always had some scheme or other going on. He was supposed to be working on how to finally break up our father, Leif’s, polygamist cult and free our sisters. Knowing Garrett, he was probably fixated on some inane problem, however.
Last week, he had been insistent that the only restaurant in Harrogate where he would eat seafood was not, in fact, serving shrimp from the Georgia coast as advertised but was instead serving shrimp from the Gulf of Mexico. He had co-opted Svensson PharmaTech lab rats to figure this out for him.
“If you’re not helping, you need to leave and stop coming in here and stealing the food that is for my employees.”
“What employees?” Garrett scoffed, not looking up from his tablet. “You literally have a fast-food worker here on his second shift.” He pointed at Calvin, who was covered in batter and bits of fried chicken. The toddlers were fighting over which one got to lick the grease off his shoes.
“Meanwhile,” Garrett continued, “Meghan has the Holbrooks working for her.”
“They’re no match for you, Hunter,” Karen cooed.
That did get Garrett to look up. He gave me a cold look. “Tell your campaign manager to go fetch some coffee. I would speak with you in private.”
“He can’t just tell me what to do,” Karen insisted. “I don’t work for you, Garrett.”
Garrett unfolded himself from the chair he had claimed as his own. “Correction,” he said in a clipped tone, “I control the purse strings, and especially after Hunter wrote a fifty-thousand-dollar check to the Intimate Pickle, thereby unleashing an LSD epidemic on Main Street, I now am solely in charge of the money. I decide how much is allocated to this campaign, I sign your paycheck, and I determine if whatever inane event you and Hunter have concocted will be funded. I am the financial god of this office. And I will speak to my brother alone. Now. You can either fetch coffee or spin in circles outside on the sidewalk while you contemplate the meaninglessness of your existence.”
Karen looked to me for backup. As if I was going to cross Garrett when he was in a state.
She huffed, grabbed her purse, and stomped out.
Garrett snapped his tablet cover closed. “That,” he said once the door had slammed shut, “is not working for me.”
I ran a hand through my hair.
“None of this,” he continued, “is working for me.”
“Greg wanted to do this mayor campaign,” I reminded him.
Garrett’s lip curled. “Since when do you let Greg yank your leash?”
“We need to push our
latest development through. Besides, you’re the one who is always complaining about how Meg is ruining the city and passing stupid laws. Remember the straws?”
“Yes,” he said impatiently, “but you aren’t supposed to be the mayor. You are supposed to be the consort to the mayor.”
“Mayors don’t have consorts.”
“This is a small town.”
“That is irrelevant.”
“You’re supposed to engage in pillow talk with Meg and make her think my ideas are her ideas.” Garrett gestured between us. “We need a degree of separation. If you just get up there and start pulling levers and breaking things, then there are too many eyeballs on my plans.”
“And what do you want me to do?” I sighed, finally deciding enough had been enough and breaking up the brawl that was going on in the corner among the triplets over Calvin’s shoes.
“You need to declare a family emergency and drop out,” Garrett insisted.
I glared at him. “I’m not going to quit. Then I’ll be branded a loser. People will just say I’m afraid of debating Meg. It will ruin my reputation.”
“I didn’t mean now,” Garrett said. “You have to wait until after the first round of elections. Ida cannot win. Can you imagine if she were mayor? It would be bedlam.”
We both stared off into the distance, envisioning the giant penis balloon apocalypse that would be Ida’s mayoral tenure.
I shook my head. “I’m not bowing out.”
“Then you’ll be publicly defeated.”
I laughed. “There’s no way Meg wins this thing.”
“She’s gunning for her pound of flesh,” Garrett said flatly, “especially because you brought that here.” He pointed out the window to Karen, who was on the phone.
I smirked at him. “All part of my plan.”