SweetHarts (5 Book Box Set)

by Kira Graham

  “Too long! Get your asses in here and explain to me why I have a restaurant on our books, calling me for help about a chef when I explicitly warned Paris that I do not want to be involved in this!” he bellows, his glare turning lava-hot when Paris meanders out of his office looking like shit, his day-old, wrinkled suit, stubble, and unstyled hair all screaming that he slept either in his office or somewhere else that was not his home.

  Since he reeks of someone’s floral perfume, and I know for a fact that that isn’t his scent of choice, I’d lay odds that he’s been bed-hopping, an occurrence that I discussed with Ares when the guy called to fill me in on the week they’d all had.

  “That was before I decided that I don’t care,” he says with a shrug, walking over to the coffee area, where Adonis has his own fancy machine. His movements are brisk and agitated as he makes himself a cup and turns to face us.

  “Paris,” Adonis says, sighing loudly. “I know that this isn’t an easy situation, at all, and I get that it’s awkward, but I can’t run a fucking restaurant as well as this company. You said that you would stay on top of it and consider it a personal investment. So keep it personal, and by that I mean, do your part and get it off my plate.”

  “Can’t,” he murmurs, shrugging nonchalantly and with an apathy that has us all sharing a look of concern. “Don’t care.”

  “Bro—”

  “I said I don’t fucking care, Adonis, and as such, that place can go fucking bankrupt before I pump another dime or moment of my time into it. I don’t want to see her again, and since she’s had to step up and start running Helos by herself, dealing with it would mean that I’d have to talk to her. Not fucking happening,” he says in a hard tone, his eyes so cold that even Adonis goes silent and stares in shock.

  “You know that that can’t happen. That place was a three-mill investment that requires a steady hand. Sin is a great chef, but she isn’t what I’d call management material. Orders have to be maintained, staff members have to be paid, and the damn kitchens have to be completed if the business side is going to go on without a hitch. You took this on willingly, Paris, and promised me that you’d stay on top of it. It’s your deal,” my older brother says quietly, his expression a mask of command that doesn’t seem to touch Paris at all.

  As younger siblings, we all tend to gravitate towards Adonis, and I know from personal experience that disappointing him isn’t something that sits well with any of us. He’s a great older brother, a rock of a man who has provided the foundations upon which we all built our adult lives. He’s our commander-in-chief, in essence, and the one guy I respect as much as our father.

  To see Paris meet his eyes without a shred of guilt, or any emotion at all, isn’t an easy sight, and it’s made harder when my younger brother smiles darkly and practically dares any of us to argue with him.

  “Well, I’m reneging on it, big brother, and I’d go so far as to say that I hope it burns to the ground under her management. Now, if you’ll excuse me, I have work to do, and even though no one else has bothered to notice, it needs doing before the Waters deal is signed this afternoon, or we’re all looking at a PR disaster.”

  He doesn’t stick around long enough for us to argue—just takes his coffee, shoves a hand into his pocket, and strolls out with a whistle that is both jaunty and a dare in and of itself.

  “What the hell?” Adonis roars, exploding from his chair before Ares pushes him back down and shakes his head with a calm but sad expression.

  “Don’t, Addy. He’s hurting right now, and looking for an argument anywhere he can get one. You know P, and you’re familiar with his coping mechanisms. He fucks, he drinks, and he gets into fights when he’s pissed. Don’t give him a fight,” my brother begs, ever the peacemaker, despite his name.

  “The little shit can’t just talk to me that way and then leave! When he asked me to okay the purchase of Helos, the deal was clear. I’m knee-deep in new companies, my girl is still dragging her feet on the wedding that’s supposed to have happened four times by now, and the damn investigators I hired are eating up my money without producing results. I don’t need another responsibility, Ares, and he knows it. I feel bad as hell for him about Sin, and I can be sympathetic enough to give him some time, but I am not allowing Paris to walk away from his responsibilities just because they’re hard for him to deal with. That restaurant is a huge addition to our portfolio, now that he’s proposed franchising the thing. Plans are in place, money has exchanged hands, and Ma is in seventh heaven about consulting on the finer details. It’s too late to pull out now,” he tells us, and we all know that when Adonis says something with such finality, he means it.

  “Maybe we could give him more than a week,” Ares says softly, for the first time seeming to step into the fray for someone, and not just as a neutral party. “Give the guy a break, man. He’s just had his heart ripped out, and we all know how that goes with Paris. He sees something he wants and practically gorges himself on it before he loses interest. Now, I’m not saying that that’s how it would have been with Sinai, but it’s the same principle. His house is filled with photos of her, and he hadn’t been with another woman since he met her.”

  “Well, that ship has sailed,” Chilli snorts, shaking his head with disgust when Ares frowns. “Come on, bro. You saw him—you must have caught a whiff of him. The man smells of perfume, pussy, and booze.”

  “Well, what did you all think that he would do after that episode in Greece? Just crawl back here, curl into a ball, and cry himself back to health? You, Adonis—you bent over backwards to get Cleo, and luckily for you, she wanted you right back. Zeus here practically stalked Rosetta because he thought she’d find it romantic, and luckily for him, she’s just twisted enough to agree to marry his creepy ass. Not so with Paris. The man put all his chips on the table and played a losing hand. Give him a goddamned break, man. He’s hurting, and he’s going to spiral a little before he finds his footing again. It’s normal for us all to try to rebel against the hurt, Adonis; just look at the way you tried to pick up with your old life again after Cleo and you broke up.”

  “We didn’t break up. She needed…” he begins, then goes silent and closes his eyes while cursing. “Fuck. She needed time. Okay, fine, so I get it. He needs time to get over Sin, but running from her isn’t the answer. Right now, he’s hiding behind work, random sex, and booze. I can’t just sit back and let him spiral down, Ares. He needs to pick himself up and keep going. That’s the only way that he’ll get over this. Remember Gail?” he asks, exchanging a look with us all.

  Do I remember Gail fucking Petrako, the girl Paris fell so madly in love with during high school that nothing else mattered? If not for summer make-up classes, he’d have missed graduation, and if not for Chilli, who seems to have the magic touch when it comes to dragging us all out of our own mires, Paris would have self-destructed. Granted, finding the girl that you were madly in love with, in bed with your best friend, is enough to make a guy go crazy. And crazy Paris did go. Partying so wildly that there was a time when our parents were actually considering an intervention.

  But Chilli somehow managed to slap him awake and help him recover enough to go to college and get past the betrayal. That’s the thing with Paris. He’s a sensitive soul, falling in and out of love so fast that, half the time, we don’t pay any attention to his lunacy.

  This thing with Sin, though…it’s the first time that I have ever seen Paris get so deep that he stopped doing the things that are second nature to him. He stopped flirting with other women and sleeping around, he stopped partying so wildly, and he started only doing things that pertained to this mad love that he seemed to have for her.

  I’d call it madness and shrug off what he was feeling, but that would be like saying that his love for Sin meant nothing compared to what I feel for Rosetta, and that I cannot do. Love is love, no matter how unlikely it appears, and Paris, I think, really did love Sin. Enough that her rejection has sent him foundering and trying to heal t
he wound with everything that comes naturally to him.

  Of all my brothers, Paris is the Romeo-esque lover who smiles at all women, loves to flirt, and probably has more notches on his bedpost than even Adonis. He’s a nice guy who enjoys making people happy, and he’s so unashamedly easygoing that people can’t help but love him. He’s our imp, as Ma likes to say. The happy-go-lucky, easily led brother who would take a trip to Timbuktu on a whim.

  He’s also the one who is most easily hurt, because, as eager as he is to jump in feet first, he never seems to see the pitfalls. In this case, those pitfalls were Sin herself.

  “Christ, I hate that bitch so much that I still can’t go to golfing events unless I want to get arrested,” Chilli mutters, prompting a round of agreement—even from Ares, who wouldn’t kill a spider if he could avoid it.

  “Remember how he lost it after she pulled that shit? Ma nearly had hysterics when he almost flunked senior year and then barely got into college. That isn’t Paris, guys. The man is chill to the extreme, but he’s never been an idiot. He lets his emotions rule everything he does—always has—and now, with Sin, he’s letting it drag him down,” Adonis insists, looking to me for support because I am known to use logic above emotion.

  Except when it comes to Rosetta, and then I don’t give a damn what is logical; all I care about is making her happy.

  “Addy is right. Time and support are things that we can give him, but only if they’re going to help instead of feeding into his patterns. He can’t just spiral outward without some restraining hand keeping him stable. He can work himself into the ground, and fuck until his cock falls off, but that won’t fix this. What Paris felt, or feels, for Sin isn’t just some fly-by-night infatuation. It’s the real deal. He won’t rebound unless we give him something to focus on,” I muse, my inner mechanics working and speculating on where we need to go with this.

  “What Adonis is suggesting is that we get him closer to her! Don’t you think that that’ll make things worse?” Ares asks, his face going dark.

  “Not necessarily,” Chilli replies. “Let’s face it, boys, we’re all done for as far as the Sweets are concerned, and even I’m not delusional enough to think otherwise. Adonis is with Cleo, Zeus is with Rosetta, and Paris fell far down the rabbit hole for Sin…”

  “Are you saying that you and I are next?” Ares asks Chilli, his horror-filled expression turning green because, in the grand scheme of things, that would leave the poor bastard with Nefertiti, the warrior queen of the Sweet clan.

  “No,” Chilli laughs, looking a little green himself. “What I’m saying is that we’re in it for life. Maybe Alex and I will become friends again, or maybe Adonis won’t get Cleo to the altar—”

  “Bite your goddamned tongue, asshole! I’m putting my name on that woman, come hell or high water!” Adonis bellows, his face going so red that his eyes bulge out.

  “Calm the hell down; I’m just talking here,” Chilli chuckles, handing Adonis a cup of coffee to keep him distracted. “My point is, we’re the Sweetharts, just like Rosetta calls us, and we’re all in this for life. Paris and Sin can’t escape each other, so, as much as it pains me to say it, Adonis may be right. Perhaps forcing them together will force him to get over it faster, like bouncing back just to prove to her that he’s over her.”

  Now, that is where my mind is, too, and while I admit that I tend to be a little mercenary in my logic, having Adonis and Chilli nodding in agreement gives me hope that I’m thinking about this not with cold logic, but with reasonable logic.

  “Do you think that’s going to work?” Ares asks doubtfully, his own expression filled with worry. “What if it makes him worse?”

  “And what if it doesn’t matter either way?” Adonis asks. “I’ve never seen him in love before—not real, true love, like what I think he feels for Sinai. We don’t know what the right thing is here, and admittedly, I am not ecstatically happy about putting him in her orbit this way. I don’t want her to hurt him even more, but maybe he needs to grow a thicker skin and learn to deal with heartbreak.”

  “I agree. It’s either going to be good for him, or a disaster, but letting him go down that hole again, without trying to help him, isn’t something that I am willing to do. So in that vein, Ares, you’re in charge of liaising with Sin and forcing Paris to work this out. He has to actually do that work when it comes to Helos. Daily reports, money, orders, staff—you name it; I want him on top of it,” Chilli orders, grinning when Adonis snorts and mutters something about mutiny.

  Which would never happen, and not because we love Adonis, which we do, but because I have a life to live that doesn’t include obsessing over business twenty-four seven. Cleo may be okay with having a workaholic as a partner, but Rosetta would cut me if I ever spent more time at work than with her. Whether that goes both ways or not, I can’t say, but I am pretty certain that she’d cut me if I ever tried to interfere with her career, too.

  And that is one of the main reasons that I have made Adonis promise, on pain of death, that he will never let it slip that we tampered with her job at Donald and Donaldson.

  “Not me. Uh-uh. I don’t want to be between those two. Sin isn’t exactly on my Christmas list this year. Hell, I had a meeting across town that took me close to her place, and I damn near went over there to give her a piece of my mind.”

  We all laugh then, poking fun at Ares, because saying things like, “You need to work on your delivery,” and, “Being kinder to each other isn’t a cardinal sin,” isn’t exactly what we’d call giving her a piece of anything. Hell, he’d probably supply the tissues and buy her a pony if she started crying.

  “Man up! And start going to those classes that I signed you up for,” Adonis taunts, his amusement turning to outright mirth when Ares flips him the bird, and then apologizes.

  “I am assertive. I don’t need some shrink to teach me how to get what I want. I do just fine. I just prefer not to yell while doing it. Which is why—”

  “You’re in charge of Paris, Ares. Get used to the idea, and get to work. All of you lazy bastards, get to work. Zeus, we need to talk about Chilli’s plans for the development of the land beside that Native American reservation. You know the history there. Talk to me about the possibility of burial grounds and permits. I don’t want to start construction if we’re going to have to shut it down somewhere down the line.”

  And that’s how my morning starts, I think, as the room clears, and I tell Adonis everything he wants to know. We go over the land rights and histories, and we call in experts that will go out into the field and conduct a survey, compiling the hundreds of pages of data that Adonis seems to need to get hard, before he closes on a deal.

  By the time that lunch comes and goes, I’m so entrenched that I don’t think about lunch plans, or even about what I have scheduled for the day.

  And that night, for those reasons, which I cannot defend, I walk into our apartment and find it empty.

  Chapter Fifteen

  Rosetta

  Sometimes, peace is the road to happiness. Don’t quote me on that, because I will deny it and kick you in the genitalia to prove just how violent I really am. But in this one case, I find myself smiling and laughing my ass off while Tee and Alex argue the plausibility of an alien colonization of our planet.

  “It is totally, utterly within reason to assume that the Sumerians were right, you idiot. In recent times—hell, in last year—we started hearing talk of a planet entering our solar system. That Sitchin guy was right, Tee, and there’s a whole other planet in our solar system that’s coming our way, and those aliens are totally going to come back to Earth to check on our progress,” Sin argues, getting an eye roll from Tee and a shrug from me.

  I’m not really an “aliens are a fact” kinda gal myself, but that doesn’t mean that I am closed off to the possibilities. I watch TV, and I read books, and I like learning about the Mayans—God, don’t ever tell Zeus that, or he’ll start off on one of his snooze-worthy stories about the histo
rical evolution of our planet and the origins of our race. So, that being said, I have my own theories, but they in no way coincide with the existence of what Sin insists are aliens who came to Earth to steal our gold and teach us about technology, and who then headed back to their own planet that somehow, against all the laws of science, travels in some elliptical orbit around our solar system.

  “I hate to break this to you, babe, but if that’s true, then we are destined to disappoint the poor, green-skinned bastards. Just look at what we’ve done thus far. Nuclear weapons, pollution, and industrial degradation that’s led to the stagnation of our civilization,” Tee says matter-of-factly and so pointedly that I gape and give her a grunt of response.

  Not to be a bitch, but Tee isn’t exactly what I would call a bookworm. She flits around swearing, hitting, biting, and just generally playing true to Neanderthal woman form, and now here she is, using the great philosophical question of our time as an argument. Has the human race really evolved and made progress, or are we the same mindless creatures that started as apes? Or so they say.

  “Pfft! That nuclear technology already existed. Don’t you see? We were seeded by aliens, and they return to help us out every now and then. That would explain Roswell—”

  So as not to get embroiled in a three-hour argument about a TV series that I never watched, or a theory that I never believed, I cut this argument short because, come on. As fascinating as it is to speculate about alien life for hours, I live on planet Earth, which basically has me thinking that I don’t give a damn about what E.T. does or doesn’t do.

  “Not to pop your distraction bubble here, ladies, but I don’t want to spend my night arguing about bullshit. We’re here to discuss the problems we have, not ignore them. Sin, get to talking about that character-bashing little speech that you gave Paris, and explain to me, in a reasonable fashion, just what the hell was going on with you,” I tell her, getting right to the point, because if I have to waste another hour listening to these freaks argue, then I will off myself—or them.