Blame It on the Bachelor

by Karen Kendall

  She drew back her arm and slapped him, hard, without flinching. Then she turned and walked away, her shoulders shaking.

  Will’s dad met her halfway down the hall to the kitchen, her white cardigan sweater and her purse in his hands. He looked at Devon with pure hatred in his eyes.

  This wasn’t the guy who’d taught him and Will how to play backgammon. Not the guy who’d cheered them on in Little League. Not the guy who’d picked them up, no questions asked, when at age fifteen they’d called him at 2:00 a.m. for a ride home from an area of town they had no business being in. And that, after sneaking out.

  “You,” the stranger who looked like Will’s dad said. “You’re the reason he’s dead! Get the hell out of here. Get off my property.”

  Devon felt his face crumple and his lungs collapse. “I’m so sorry,” he whispered. “So sorry.”

  “Yeah, you are.”

  I loved him, too, Dev wanted to say. I loved him, too.

  But it clearly wasn’t the time or the place. Dev hunched his shoulders and turned away. Took the three steps off the porch and into his new reality…which now included not one iota of ambition to be a big rock star.

  Was it true? Was he the reason that Will was dead? After all, Dev had brought Will into the band, into the lifestyle that had killed him. Dev didn’t know. He didn’t know much of anything anymore.

  He walked to the car, still idling, and slid into the driver’s seat. Something in his pocket jabbed at him as he sat. He shoved his hand toward it and closed his fingers around hard plastic. Dev pulled out the pink Sharpie, recalled what he’d been doing with it when Will had fallen off the stage and threw up out the window of the Camaro.

  DEV CLICKED OFF the TV and bowed his head. His fingers played Will’s bass line from the Vice song of their own accord as tears rolled down his face and dropped onto his T-shirt. Had he really told Kylie that her tits made up for her personality?

  He had a hell of a nerve. Because the thing was…what made up for his own personality? What made up for who he’d been? Was there anything that could make things right?

  He doubted it.

  As Dev poured his fourth double shot of Patrón, his damned cell phone rang. He glanced at the caller ID as he hoisted the glass, and then put it down again.

  Ciara, his sister. He may as well talk to her now, instead of tomorrow with a hangover.

  “Yeah.”

  “How was the wedding?” Ciara had once had a crush on Mark.

  “I’m fine, sis, thanks for asking.”

  “What did Kendra’s dress look like?”

  Dev rolled his eyes heavenward. “I don’t know…white. With lacy stuff.”

  “Dev! Describe. Long sleeves? Short sleeves? Big and poofy, or sleek and sophisticated?”

  “Uh. Short, poofy sleeves. Skinny waist, big skirt.”

  “What was the neckline like? Did she have a train?”

  “A what?” He sighed, trying to remember.

  “Did it drag in the back?”

  “Yup. And the neckline was a V. Does that help?”

  “Did she look pretty?”

  “Yes. Kind of scrawny, but nice.”

  “Scrawny,” she repeated thoughtfully. Ciara, like their mother, was well-endowed, and she was clearly relishing that Kendra was not. Women!

  “Did Mark look happy?”

  “No, Ciara. He looked like he was on his way to a funeral. Of course he looked happy.” Dev blew out an exasperated breath. “Get over it,” he added with typical brotherly brusqueness.

  “Have you been drinking? Because your voice is kind of thick.”

  Dev glared at the phone and did the fourth double-shot. “Your head is thick.”

  “Answer the question.”

  “Maybe.” Dev plucked the strings of the Rickenbacker.

  “Liquor?”

  “Get off my ass, Ciara.”

  “Playing guitar and drinking Patrón, I’ll bet. Which means you’re depressed.”

  “You’ve got me confused with someone else, sis.”

  “Promise me you’ll put away the Patrón, or I’m coming over. And I’ll go get Aidan.”

  Their brother. “No.”

  “Or Mami. I’ll bring Mami. I will, Devon. I’ve done it before.”

  How could he forget their mini-intervention, during some of his darkest days after Will’s death? His excitable, nosy Cuban mother, his dour, sarcastic Irish father, saintly Aidan and bossy sister Bettina—they’d all, with Ciara, announced their concern that if Dev didn’t put the brakes on he’d end up like Will.

  “Jesus, Ciara. I’ve had three drinks, all right?” Dev automatically subtracted one.

  “Alone. And if you’re admitting to three, they’re doubles and you’ve probably had five.”

  “Four,” he amended.

  “So stop.”

  He was still sober enough to know she was right. Damn it. “Okay. Okay. Enough.”

  “Yes, enough.”

  “Fine!” Dev growled. “I hear you. Now bugger off,” he said in a perfect imitation of their father’s Irish accent.

  “I love you, too. I’m calling in an hour, and if you don’t answer the phone, I’ll be in your face within fifteen minutes.”

  Dev hit the end button and grimaced. But a corner of his mouth rebelled and tugged up. Ciara was a pain in the ass. But it was always good to know someone cared.

  10

  KYLIE WAS STILL several miles beyond furious at Devon and pacing her apartment Sunday when the phone rang. If it had been anyone other than her niece Melinda, Mark’s little sister, she wouldn’t have answered it. But she adored Mel, so she picked up. “Hello?”

  “Do you have a minute? Can I come over?” The girl’s voice held trouble.

  “Sure, if you don’t mind my crankiness and Potsy’s Seaside Delite cat food.”

  “I don’t care. Why are you cranky?”

  “It’s not even worth going into, sweetie. Forget it.”

  Melinda arrived ten minutes later. She looked hungover and agitated, her dark hair scraped back into a messy ponytail and her blue eyes puffy and shadowed. “I hate my mother!” she blurted.

  Kylie chuckled and folded Mel’s plump body into her arms, giving her a big hug. “A lot of people do, honey.” She felt compelled to defend her older sister, though. “She’s all right, deep down. Just a little anal. She means well.”

  Mel emitted something close to a growl. “How does she mean well when she says horrible things to me?”

  “First things first. Coffee? Tea? Wine? Chainsaw?”

  Mel brightened at the last item.

  “Kidding on the chainsaw,” Kylie said hastily.

  “Coffee, please.” Mel followed Kylie into the kitchen. “Oh, God, what is that horrible smell?”

  “Kitty food. I warned you. Potsy gets wet food for Sunday breakfast. He’s spoiled.”

  “Ugh. Where is the little monster?”

  “Sleeping it off somewhere—probably under my bed.” Kylie poured them both coffee, doctoring the brew with milk and sugar.

  They curled up on the rattan sofa in Kylie’s living room, which was done in soft creams and beiges, with seashell accents everywhere.

  Mel gulped half her coffee before saying another word.

  “So what did Jocelyn say to you?” Kylie prompted.

  “Basically that if I don’t lose weight I’ll never ‘get’ a man. And that I’m rude, ungrateful, horrible, et cetera.”

  Kylie sighed. “Start at the beginning.”

  “Okay…” Mel’s cheeks pinkened. “Look, I had a really rough week. This jerk with a major account of mine, Franco Gutierrez, put the moves on me. Then when I declined his generous offer of sex in my bakery, he threatened me, called me a gorda, and said that I should be grateful he’d even think about doing me.”

  Men. Disgusting pigs. “Unbelievable.” Kylie closed her eyes for a moment.

  “So that’s how my week started. I then got stressed about having to be around Mom at
the wedding yesterday—you know how she drops her little comments.”

  “Mel, honey, they come from a place of love.”

  “Right,” her niece said bitterly. “And Mark? He also thinks that if I lose twenty pounds my life will be perfect.”

  Kylie sighed. Sometimes she wanted to smack both her sister and her nephew.

  “Anyway,” Mel continued. “I drank a whole bottle of champagne by myself on the beach.”

  “Okay…”

  “Then I kind of hooked up with Pete Dale,” Mel mumbled.

  “At the wedding?”

  “Yeah.” Mel’s cheeks were flaming, now. “It just…happened.”

  Kylie thought about Dev and felt her own face heat. “Yeah. Sometimes it does.”

  “I’m not embarrassed about it,” Mel insisted, though she clearly was.

  “Why should you be? You’re a consenting adult.” Kylie reminded herself that she was, too. A now borderline-homicidal consenting adult. And she wasn’t embarrassed, either. Nope. She sure wasn’t.

  Mel took an aggressive gulp of her coffee then set the cup forcefully on the table in front of them. “But Mom started needling me, and reminding me that Pete is an ‘eligible bachelor,’ and wanting me to throw myself at him. So I finally lost my temper with her and told her I’d already slept with him, thank you very much.”

  “Ah. And I’m sure that went over well.”

  “She basically called me a pathetic slut.”

  Kylie winced. “Oh, honey.”

  “And I was so mad I said some things, too. So now I’m an ungrateful brat. And worst of all—”

  “Dear God, there’s more?”

  “Worst of all, Pete is trying to pretend it wasn’t a booty call, probably because of Mark. He can’t use then blow off his good friend’s sister.”

  “Whoa, whoa, whoa. There’s another possibility, you know, Melinda. He likes you and wants to go out with you.”

  “Right,” Mel said. “I don’t think so.”

  “Why not?”

  “He’s just being Pete. Mr. Nice Guy.”

  “Nice guys are few and far between,” Kylie said fervently. “I should know. My last hook-up actually told me that my tits made up for my personality.”

  Mel’s jaw hung open in outrage for a good few seconds before she snapped her mouth closed again. “What a—a…”

  “Loser? Asshole?”

  “Um, yeah. Both. Who was it?” Melinda demanded. “I’ll go kill him for you. Didn’t you just offer me a chainsaw?”

  But Kylie was far too mortified to admit that she’d sunk so low as to have sex with Devon, let alone allow him say such a thing to her. She shook her head. “Nobody. Literally a pathetic nobody who thinks he’s a hotshot. I won’t even dignify his name by saying it.”

  “Do I know him?”

  “No,” Kylie lied. “He’s someone I used to wash Jack-ass out of my hair for good.” There. Saying the words aloud gave them more power. And she reminded herself that she had indeed used Dev, and not vice versa. Which gave his own nasty words less power.

  She gave Melinda the best advice she could, did her best to bolster the poor girl’s ego and told her to give Pete a chance—the chance that she, ironically, hadn’t given Dev.

  “But the bottom line, Melinda, is that today, we women have to take care of ourselves. Men aren’t going to do it for us.”

  As the words came out of her mouth, she thought of Dev’s surprising sweetness in the face of her emotional breakdown at the wedding. Oh, honey. Oh, my poor little psycho…whatever this is all about, it’s gonna be okay.

  Dev had, in the face of all the odds, taken care of her. He’d seen her to her hotel room. He hadn’t even tried to take advantage of her. Huh.

  McKee, in fact, had treated her a lot better than the nice, stable, future Ward Cleaver she’d carefully chosen for a spouse.

  Not s’posed to be nice, she’d wailed at Dev. S’posed to be a dick! She cringed thinking about it.

  And he had, of course, reverted to her expectations later. The jerk.

  So why did she feel so confused?

  Kylie told herself sternly that she wasn’t in the least confused. She was simply embarrassed. She didn’t have emotional breakdowns in front of people. She’d dealt with the loss of both her mother and father at an early age, and life went on. There was no sense getting dramatic or messy about loss. It didn’t change anything. Besides, Jack hadn’t died. He’d merely knocked off her rose-colored glasses and stepped on them.

  MONDAY FOUND KYLIE sitting at her desk in the loan department of the massive steel-and-glass Sol Trust bank building. The industrial air-conditioning vent directly above froze her neck solid and did a great job of cooling her café con leche within approximately ninety seconds of setting it down.

  It helped her focus on her goals and banish the ugly emotions of the weekend. Goal: a perfect performance review. Goal: along with it, promotion to the next rung on the ladder for her, assistant vice president and group manager of her division. Goal: to be highly visible and seen as a shoo-in for eventual regional vice president of small business loans.

  Around her buzzed the chatter of coworkers, talking to clients on the phone and to each other about the weekend.

  Candace, the office gossip, had dirt on a married male manager she’d seen in a bar with a woman who was not his wife.

  Alta, their resident earth mother, had brought in a coffee cake to share.

  Face-time Gerald, who got to the office at 7:00 a.m. to be seen by upper management and read news online, schmoozed with a client and offered to put together a foursome for golf.

  Kylie tried to tune them out and focus on the paperwork in front of her, burning the numbers into her consciousness.

  “Good morning, Kylie,” said Priscilla Prentiss, her boss, from behind a huge stack of manila file folders.

  “Good morning,” Kylie replied, getting to her feet. “Here, let me take those for you. They look heavy.”

  Priscilla was hugely pregnant and the red dress she was wearing made her look like a giant strawberry. She was frankly adorable, even at fifty pounds over her usual lithe one hundred and twenty. Pregnancy was cruel to some women, but it became Priscilla. Her skin glowed, her dark hair shone and she smiled all the time, which Kylie found a little unnerving since her pre-pregnancy personality hadn’t been nearly so sunny.

  Kylie hefted the stack of files into her own arms.

  “Thank you,” her boss said. “Those are yours for the next three months. I saw my doctor yesterday, and he wants me on bed rest until the cesarean on Thursday. So I’m leaving a few days earlier than I thought.”

  “No problem.” Kylie looked at the stack, refrained from gulping audibly and lowered the files onto her desk.

  “I sent you an email with some dates to be aware of and other pertinent information. I know it’s a lot to ask, but if you can familiarize yourself with all the loans in the next day or two, I’d appreciate it. That way, if you have any questions, you can ask me before I’m unavailable. There are a couple of businesses that need an in-person checkup soon—this week if possible. There are pink sticky notes on those folders.”

  “Sure. Of course.” Inward groan. “So how are you feeling?”

  “Great!” Priscilla already had a little boy, so she’d been through the drill before. Apparently she wasn’t too nervous. “Well, I’ve got a lot to wrap up. Thanks for stepping up to the plate on this, Kylie.”

  “No problem,” she said again, even though the truth was that the plate had stepped up to her. “Let us know how everything goes, okay? We’ll be thinking about you!”

  “I sure will.” And the giant, adorable strawberry returned to her office.

  Kylie stared at the mountain of files. Well, she had offered to help out while Priscilla was on maternity leave. Although she’d expected to maybe split the job with one or two other people, not be saddled with everything by herself.

  She sighed, feeling once again small and mean that s
he couldn’t be happy for her boss and not mind all the extra work. But it would have been nice if the stork had brought a temp worker as well as a baby.

  She took a sip of her lukewarm coffee and continued with her work, checking to see that all the documentation was there for this particular loan and tracking down the relevant pieces when they weren’t. This part of her job wasn’t very exciting. She much preferred meeting with customers, doing due diligence on their businesses and assessing the risks of the loans. But paperwork was part of the process.

  Kylie worked steadily until lunch, then walked across the street to a deli and got a chicken salad sandwich to go. She was headed into the office when she spied Milty Goldman, the president of the bank, getting out of his silver Mercedes coupe.

  Goldman was the very model of a senior bank executive: trim from playing squash, tan from playing golf, square-jawed, silver-haired and dark-suited with impeccably manicured hands.

  “Ms. Kent, isn’t it?” he greeted her. “Kylie.”

  She was pleased that he remembered her from the occasional meeting and company function they’d both attended. “Yes, sir. How are you, Mr. Goldman?”

  “Fine, fine. And you?”

  “Very well, thank you.”

  He nodded, then turned and reached into the backseat of the Mercedes for his leather computer bag. “I heard about your initiative to streamline the process for small business loans. That was very innovative of you.”

  “Th-thank you,” Kylie said, taken aback.

  “Keep up the good work.” Milty flashed a smile at her as he shut the car door.

  “Yes, sir.” Flattered, she practically floated to her desk where the stacks didn’t seem quite so daunting. They were still substantial and she knew the more she did in the office, the less she’d have to take home.

  She unwrapped the sandwich and took a bite as she flipped through the information in the top file. The business loan had been made to a small family-run nail salon, and they’d used the money to finish the commercial space, as well as to purchase equipment like special pedicure chairs, manicure stations and a washer and dryer to keep the salon towels clean. Everything was in order.