by Pippa Grant
Madison just said Joy Sausages in front of our new billionaire boss. Someday, I’ll laugh at that. Today, however, is not that day.
“And bratwurst,” Chase adds.
No.
He.
Did.
Not.
If I hadn’t already seen the inside of a jail cell courtesy of this man—and a bratwurst, and no, I don’t want to talk about it—I’d have my hands wrapped around his neck right now.
His smirk grows like he knows it. Damn him, that’s the same smirk he wore last year on People’s Sexiest Man of the Year cover. Which I only know because I work for a grocery store and we might be Crunchy, but People still sells, and I might’ve had that weird moment of realizing the man who took my virginity and crushed my soul was somehow the hottest rich man on the planet.
How often does that happen?
And because he’s a dick, I couldn’t even enjoy the moment.
“Definitely bratwurst.” He nods to the group. “Appeal to sports fans.”
Sports fans? Is he fucking kidding?
“We sell the best organic turkey bratwurst,” Madison says.
Chase smiles at her. “Good to know, Ms…?”
“Madison.” Her voice is breathy and her teeth are glowing like she’s been overusing vegan tooth whitener again. “Madison O’Connor. The Joy Choy campaign was my idea.”
“Was it now?” Chase’s gaze slides to me. A good boss would give credit where credit is due. “I love it. Good work. Add the bratwurst.”
For the love of Pete. If I’d told him it was her idea, he’d think I was throwing her under the bus. Or the Bratwurst Wagon.
Which I hadn’t thought about in at least four months, jackass.
He waves like he’s the king of fucking England. “Carry on. I look forward to working with each and every one of you.”
Except you, Ambrosia May Berger.
The feeling is mutual, Chases Tail Jett.
Maybe I’ll put off looking for that new job.
Last time, Chase won. He got my cherry, he got my pride, and he got to see me tossed in the slammer.
Now, his billions might stack the odds against me, but this is my home. My city. My job.
And this time, victory will be mine.
2
Chase Jett (The Dick)
Ambrosia May Berger.
Holy fucking shit.
Ten years, and she hasn’t changed a bit. Tight body, perky breasts, wavy hair, luscious lips, fuck me written in every hot little glare.
I’d be happy to oblige her request, but there are a few things no amount of money can replace.
Like my dick if she slices it off.
And then there’s my self-respect. It gets a vote in what my junk does these days. While I’ve had a hard time—hard, that’s almost as good as joy sausages—with the joystick in my pants since I left the marketing department, my brain is kicking in with emergency killjoy procedures.
Which is why I’ve just excused myself from the Crunchy executives to take a private phone call, which couldn’t have come at a better time.
“Hey.” I kick back in my new chair and take in the view of the city from my twentieth-floor office. “How’s my favorite lady?”
“Chase! Honey, tell me you didn’t buy a grocery store.”
“Guilty as charged. You’ll never have to pay for your organic, free-range chicken again.” Not that I’ve been able to convince her to buy it in the last decade, but at least she’s off canned baloney. “How’s the Mediterranean?”
My mother rattles off all the things she’s seen and done on this leg of her round-the-world tour. I count three inhales in five minutes, and I smile.
Good to hear her smile. She’d yelled at me for going overboard for her birthday present, but there’s no one else I owe as much to.
Also, talking to my mother is killing this unwelcome hard-on.
And only partially because she’s my mother. She’s also the only other person in the world who fully understands the complication that is Ambrosia May Berger. Not that I’ll ruin Mom’s trip by mentioning Bro. Or Sia as she apparently goes by now.
See-uh. I don’t like it. Doesn’t fit her or sound anything like her real name. Makes her seem city-ish.
“What else are you buying while I’m gone?” Mom asks.
I extricate my dick from my brain and refocus. “I hear there’s a whole town for sale in South Dakota,” I tell her. “Big enough for a castle with a moat.”
“Oh, stop.“ She laughs, but I know she’d love it. She always had a stack of romance novels that she borrowed from the library sitting by her bed. She also worked her ass off in the baloney factory for years to feed and clothe me. After everything my father put her through, she deserves an easy, carefree retirement.
I wasn’t exactly innocent in the causes of her life difficulties either.
She blamed the Berger twins.
I like to think it’s their sister’s fault. Hell, I’d just liked to think about their sister period. Until she tried to throw me under the bus on the worst day of my life.
Bus. I snort dryly to myself. A bus would’ve been normal. But this was Ambrosia May Berger.
She went with normal like forks went with electrical outlets.
“We’re docking in Mykonos next week for three days,” Mom tells me.
Ah, the elusive Mother Hint peeks its head out. “Greece? Hmm. I suppose I could buy a country instead. I’ll fly over and check it out. How’s Tuesday?”
She laughs again. “Oh, honey, you’d have to be a trillionaire to buy Greece.”
“Challenge accepted.”
This is what matters. Family. Home. Good food. And buying small countries.
Not Ambrosia May Berger.
3
Ambrosia
The bastard sent bratwurst to the entire building for lunch.
I saved mine. I cut it up in little pieces, tossed the carnage in one of the glass storage jars Crunchy provides for employees to borrow in an effort to save the world, and took it home.
Tomorrow I’ll come to my senses and realize that just because Chase Jett once hid raw chicken gizzards in my dollhouse and is now taunting me with the lowest moment of my life doesn’t mean I should break into his Upper East Side brownstone and hide decaying chunks of bratwurst in his curtain rods.
Yes, I Googled him and I know where he lives. It’s not stalking. Just wanted to make sure we wouldn’t be on the same subway home or shopping at the same neighborhood Crunchy.
My upstairs neighbors are at it again. Squeaky-squeaky-squeeeeeeeak.
“Woo pig sooie,” I call to the ceiling.
Hogzilla’s mating squeal is my answer.
I feed Dolphin, my goldfish, and water Gabby, my aloe plant on the fire escape, before grabbing my keyboard for band practice. I might be headed for the unemployment office tomorrow, but that’s no excuse to miss rehearsals. A girl needs a career backup plan.
Parker and I play in a boy band cover band at a bar on 23rd and 7th most Saturday nights. Okay, fine. It’s a juice bar, but that’s by choice. Anyway, Parker has mad guitar skills. I can carry a tune and plunk out a little more than Chopsticks.
We picked up Eloise at a yoga class. None of us know what she does for her day job, but she can bang the hell out of a set of drums. Willow is our lead vocalist. She does an uncanny Justin Timberlake, and I don’t care what those other boy band cover bands offer her—or if her stepfather, who’s literally the king of a tiny Viking nation, ever demands that she leave New York to move to her step-home country—I will fight to the death to keep her.
She’s ours. Don’t even think about it, man. I will cut you. With my mad sarcasm skills, because that’s pretty much all I have after the great knife-and-superglue incident in high school—thanks again, Chase Jett—but you get the point.
I arrive at Parker’s building and head to the basement, but my three musicians-in-crime aren’t set up to practice.
Unless you use the wor
d practice lightly, in which case we might be preparing for Oktoberfest. In May. With whisky.
I take one look at the three of them huddled around a bottle of Crown in the middle of the laundry room, and my chest squeezes. “Hey, guys. What’s up?”
It’s Willow, I’m certain. She’s a slender, sparkly-eyed, dark-haired optimist engaged to a socially- and royally-acceptable day trader who works too much and has too many cats. If he weren’t the sweetest man on the entire planet—weird for a day-trading cat lover, I know, but it’s Martin—we might’ve staged an intervention long before he gave her a ring, and not just because it took him seven years to propose. Still, wedding planning has been something akin to mud wrestling a giraffe in a lava pit, and only partially because she’s having the wedding in her stepfather’s kingdom.
They turn as one to glare at me, and I realize it’s not Willow and her wedding plans prompting the alcohol. Nor is Eloise having issues with a new boyfriend, nor is Parker freaking out that she’s going to be fired.
Parker gives me the wide-eyeball I am furious with you sit down right now you have so much explaining to do can I borrow that dress I LOVE it finger point of doom. “Sit.”
“You’re not from Philadelphia,” Willow says.
“Pittsburgh,” Eloise corrects.
See? No one can keep those Pennsylvania P-cities straight. Or spell Pennsylvania right the first time. It’s the perfect cover. Or, it was until today.
Thanks, Google. And thanks, grocery store-buying Dick.
“There either.” Parker shoves her phone in my face, and before I can make out the teensy-tiny words—I get the joy of a challenge, but I think she could’ve picked a better character-building challenge than tiny-print-reading—the shrieking starts.
“You were arrested naked in the Bratwurst Wagon in Hottie McBillionaire’s Minnesota hometown!” is basically the gist of it.
And it’s all true.
Also, incomplete, but I don’t think my friends will appreciate that at the moment.
“Did you know him?” Willow demands.
“More important, did you sleep with him?” Eloise has this three-pack-a-day voice that she says runs in her mother’s family, and she carries a lighter because it’s easier than repeating Sorry, I don’t smoke fourteen times a day.
“Shut up.” Parker’s getting more shrill than Willow when she does her Jordan Knight impersonation. “Friends tell each other things. Things like this.”
I reach for the Crown and take a hit straight from the bottle. “Yes, yes, and I’m only sorry I got caught,” I reply in answer to their questions.
Parker sucks in a horrified breath.
Eloise perks up though. “Go on.”
“Can I keep this?” I wave the bottle at them.
“In Royal Veritas,” Willow says.
My mother was a Greek philosophy professor at the University of Minnesota extension down the road—if you think Ambrosia May is bad, my twin brothers are Zeus November and Ares February. While I could pick a Greek god out of a lineup, Latin is lost on me.
“In Crown Royal, there is truth,” Eloise translates. “And we want the whole truth.”
Outside of work hours, my band is my family. If I could’ve had sisters, I would’ve picked these three. Given my brothers, picking sisters was safer than leaving it to the luck of the freakish genetic combinations my parents were capable of making. But the point is, I know about Eloise’s sixth toe, Willow’s fear of butterflies, and Parker’s obsession with Tarzan.
We’re as tight as if we’re actually blood sisters, and I owe them the truth.
“Yes, I was arrested for grand theft Bratwurst Wagon when I was eighteen,” I confess to their expectant faces.
“That is so fucking cool,” Eloise whispers in her deep rasp.
“My little stunt, as my parents called it, got me expelled from Vassar before I even started.”
I glug off the bottle again while the three of them wince together. I love my job, I love living in the city, I love my friends, but Vassar would’ve been the difference between low-level management at a small-organic-potatoes grocery store and a full marketing gig at Whole Foods.
“The naked part?” Eloise prompts.
“Ritualistic virginity shedding with my brothers’ best friend.” I go for a casual shrug and miss the mark by my whole body. It wasn’t casual then. It was—I don’t know what it was.
Fierce. Angry. Competitive.
Un-fucking-believably hot. Dirty. Wicked.
Double-orgasmic.
Transcendent.
And just plain wrong.
“Doesn’t everyone want to do it in the Bratwurst Wagon?” I ask to their slack-jawed response.
“Must be a Minnesota thing,” Parker says darkly.
I obviously have some work to do to get off my friends’ shit lists. Crown Royal, give me strength.
“I didn’t plan it.” I grab my phone and open the Dick List. Right there on top is his name. Chase. Dick Number One. Parker’s added two dicks to the list. Eloise has seven. Willow doesn’t like to call people dicks, so we added her landlord and three stepbrothers for her. “Once he hid all my Barbies’ clothes and told me they were prostitutes damned to Hell. I was, like, seven. He ripped every other page out of my copy of The Secret Garden. Every time he’d come over, he’d be like, Hey, Bro, got something for you and then he’d pull a dead mosquito out of his pocket and hand it to me one wing and leg at a time. And that was all before puberty.”
“He sounds disturbed,” Willow murmurs.
My mom had told me once that we didn’t know what went on behind closed doors, and we should all be thankful that a boy like Chase had such good influences as my brothers.
That should tell you something right there.
Or she had a momentary lapse in reality. These were the same brothers who had convinced me that I’d die if I didn’t eat a teaspoon of boogers every day and who donated to the cause.
“I don’t know what his deal was, but when he gave me a case of canned baloney for my twelfth birthday, I was done. I started pranking him back. After six years of war, the Bratwurst Wagon came to town for the baloney festival, and I knew if I didn’t do something first, he would. I was going to leave a trail of sausages from the Bratwurst Wagon to his house, but he was already there, armed with spray paint.”
“I think I see where this is going,” Eloise says.
“The two of us breaking into the Bratwurst Wagon, having mad angry sex on the floor under the sausages, and then trying to Bonnie and Clyde our way out of trouble? Yeah, that pretty much sums it up.”
As much as I wanted to relive out loud anyway.
Hey, Bro. I can’t decide if I should draw a picture of you, or if I should just write Bro Likes To Eat Me on this giant wrinkled sausage, he’d said when I’d caught him with the spray paint.
I’d told him to fuck off. He’d told me to fuck him. I’d said he couldn’t handle me. He’d said I should put my mouth where his dick was.
And somehow we’d discovered the Bratwurst Wagon was open, with the keys in the ignition, and flinging insults at each other was weirdly erotic, and then we’d gone at each other like—well, like my upstairs neighbors, though I prefer to think I was more lioness than Miss Piggy.
I’d felt supercharged. Electrified. More alive than alive.
And somewhere in the hazy midst of lust and fury, right between me telling him he had a crooked dick and him shoving it so deep inside me I couldn’t tell where he ended and I began—or if he’d get stuck in there, I was a virgin, I didn’t know—I saw the oddest craving in his eyes.
Like he wanted to stay there. With me. All night.
Say something nice. Lick a soft trail up my neck instead of sinking his teeth into my tender skin. Trace his name on my belly.
His barriers had gone up so fast I was sure I’d imagined it, but what if I hadn’t?
And that’s when the flash of red and blue lights had come through the front window of the Brat
wurst Wagon.
“He wasn’t mentioned in the article we found on you,” Parker says.
“We saw the lights, he said Go, and while I went for the keys, he went for the back door.”
Willow sucks in a grin. “That’s a rather impressive misunderstanding.”
“Or one hell of a setup.”
“Aw, Sia, you really think he set you up?”
“I told the cops he was with me, but he denied everything. Which left me the crazy naked chick leading the police on a thirty-mile-an-hour Bratwurst Wagon chase around Wishberry Lake at two in the morning.”
Parker’s nose is flaring, lips twitching. Willow’s not even trying to suppress her laughter. And yeah—ten years later, I can see how it might be funny to someone who didn’t end up sleeping on a concrete jail floor and then pled guilty to public indecency and destruction of property to get the grand theft auto charge dropped, only to get a phone call rescinding my enrollment to my dream college while being crowned the new laughingstock of my hometown. The hometown I still haven’t been back to.
My family comes to me for the holidays. They don’t even ask me to go home.
Maybe it’s still not funny.
Only Eloise isn’t laughing. “How does a guy go from being a grade-A dick to a billionaire buying out organic grocery stores?” she asks.
“Don’t know, don’t care.” I take another swig of whisky.
“You remember when Frenemy Crush was huge on Facebook?” Parker asks.
Cold dread washes over me. “That matching game that uses your six least favorite Facebook friends’ profile pictures for game pieces that you explode with flaming darts and volcanic blasts?” I whisper.
“Yeah, that one.”
“I fucking loved that game,” Eloise growls.
“At my mom’s wedding, I saw the princes playing it using the profile pictures of the heads of other countries,” Willow says.
“Mr. Jett built it,” Parker tells us.
“The Dick,” I correct.
“The Dick.” She nods. “Anyway, he made a killing on the game, invested his profits in some tech startups that paid off big-time, and now he’s diversifying. Healthcare, energy, transportation. He even owns a small publishing company.”