by Mary Calmes
“Good.”
She exhaled sharply, clearly a bit more shaken than she wanted me to see. “I mean, I don’t think he would have done anything, but—thank you for being my knight. I needed one, and they’ve been few and far between here lately.”
“Not a problem,” I said, smiling, changing her grip on my hand so we were shaking. “Kelly Seaton.”
“Olivia Lassiter,” she answered, beaming at me, taking my hand in both of hers. “It’s a pleasure to meet you, Kelly. You have to come have lunch with me and my family.”
Lassiter? “I—”
“My whole family is here visiting,” she continued excitedly. “We never have time to get together anymore, but my brother is moving here to become a partner at a law firm, and I just got accepted to graduate school at Cornell and—”
“Sounds like a real celebration,” I said, extricating myself from her, needing to get out of there. “I don’t want to intrude.”
“You’re not intruding,” she assured me, grabbing me again, making sure I couldn’t get free without prying at her fingers. “You saved me—you’re wonderful.”
“I appreciate—”
“Come and have lunch with my family,” she insisted, trying to tug me after her.
Lassiter… holy crap…. “I wish I had time, but I have trees to check on and my boyfriend is expecting me for dinner so I can’t eat a big lunch so I should just go.”
“Boyfriend?”
Oh yes, the easy out. “Yeah, I’m gay, so I—”
“Serious boyfriend?”
What? “I’m sorry?” She was the strangest girl.
Her eyes opened wide like I was the one who was odd. “It’s a simple question: is the boyfriend serious or not?”
“I—he’s more a friend than… why?”
“I have a super hot brother.”
Yes. I knew that. “Who’s about to become a partner at a law firm here in town,” I reminded her. “And I’m sure he doesn’t need any distractions or—”
“No,” she said quickly. “He could use a distraction.”
I had my out. “Actually, I have never been a one night stand guy myself,” I said flatly, pulling out of her grip. “But thanks for thinking I was trashy.”
“Oh no,” she blurted, “that’s not what I meant at all.”
“I’ll see you around,” I said, turning and jogging down the street, back on track to get to checking on the Italian cypresses.
“That’s not what I meant!” she yelled after me.
I waved a hand in the air to let her know there were no hard feelings.
“My brother needs saving, is all!”
That was not my job. He’d have to do that all on his own. I learned that lesson the hard way. I was no one’s knight in shining armor, and the days when I was looking for one were long over. I could ride to my own damn rescue.
Chapter Two
YES, SOMETIMES it took me a minute to put two and two together, but as I stood in the shower that evening, washing off the dirt and sweat and grime of the day, it hit me.
“Holy shit!”
I was fuming by the time I threw open Annalise Renaldi’s front door. I froze, confused, because a man I had never seen before was standing there.
“Hello,” I greeted the stranger.
He was older—I was guessing midfifties—and he looked startled. “Are you another son?”
I was at a loss.
“Yes!” came a yell from the kitchen. “That’s my adopted one—that’s Kelly!”
“Oh,” the man said, smiling, offering me his hand. “I’m Emmett Cheong.”
I shook his hand, because what the hell else was I supposed to do? “Pleasure?” I couldn’t help but make it into a question, because learning the man’s name didn’t dispel the stranger in the house thing. Who in heaven’s name was he?
“Annie and I are seeing each other.”
Annie? Seeing? And didn’t using that word instead of just saying “dating” mean something important? I opened my mouth and closed it just as fast.
“Kel!” Coz bellowed, and because he sounded a bit off, his voice too high, scratchy, slightly frantic, I smiled fast and bolted.
The kitchen was a huge space with one of those islands copper pots hung over and a fridge just for wine, and more open cabinets and shelves than any one person should ever be able to fill. But Annalise Renaldi tried, and to that end: roosters. So many roosters, made out of everything from brass to wrought iron to ceramic to stained glass. They were supposed to be lucky, but dear God, they were everywhere.
“So she’s dating,” Coz muttered, then drained his wine glass as I reached him. “Did you know she was dating?”
“Nuh-uh,” I said, glancing over at Mia. She had the same dark eyes and ochre skin as her mother and brother. “You?”
She inhaled deeply. “Nope.”
My attention was back on Coz.
“Dating,” he repeated.
I had nothing.
Mia poured Coz another glass before taking a swig straight from the bottle.
“Oh, Kelly,” Annalise said cheerfully as she sauntered by on her way to the oven. “Have a glass of wine, dear.”
I leaned sideways as I was trained to do, and she kissed my cheek before grabbing a pot holder and a slotted spoon and opening the door to check on the sausage and peppers. It was funny; people always thought when they met her that the sweet Southern lady would make fried chicken for dinner, but she’d spent most of her life married to an Italian man, and because she loved him, she’d learned to cook all his favorites. Slowly, insidiously, Sicilian cuisine became what she was best at and known for.
“So,” I choked out as Mia put a glass down in front of me and poured from the same bottle she was quickly draining. “Dating, huh?”
“Yes,” Annalise sighed as Emmett came into the room. “Isn’t it wonderful?”
I coughed, took a big gulp of wine, and let Mia top me off before she finished up the bottle. “We need another one,” she announced, walking out of the kitchen toward the wine cellar at the back of the house. “I’ll get it.”
“I need vodka,” Coz whispered, emptying his wine glass for the second time in less than two minutes before passing it to me on his way out.
“I think we surprised them,” Emmett informed Annalise as I chugalugged my Chianti.
“Yes,” she said with a chuckle. “It seems so.”
“How—” I gasped. “—did you guys meet?”
“Well, darling, Emmett and I met at a—”
“Wait!” Mia yelled as she rushed back into the room. She carried another bottle of wine with her, and she moved to her mother’s side, facing me. After grabbing the opener off the counter, she told her mother to proceed.
“Whatever is wrong with you?” Annalise asked her daughter.
“Oh, no, nothing,” Mia said with a belch. “I just want to see Kel’s face when you tell this part again.”
Annalise scowled at her, the very expression she had passed on to her son, the one I saw in my sleep. “As I was saying,” she said, turning to me, “Emmett and I met at a tantric sex education class a year ago, because I didn’t feel that just because Agosto passed on, that he wouldn’t want me to explore my sexuality anymore.”
I actually felt the air leave my body.
“Oh yeah, there it is, that’s the same face I made.” Mia snickered as she peeled the foil from around the top of the bottle and let it drop to the floor before putting the bottle between her legs to go to work on it with the corkscrew.
Annalise remained unfazed. “What began as a purely physical exploration—”
“I found vodka and bourbon,” Coz practically shouted as he walked back into the kitchen.
“—deepened beyond merely extended orgasms—”
“Get ice,” he demanded as Mia popped the cork out of the second bottle of Chianti and took a long pull without letting it breathe.
“—and so it became important to me that Emmett meet y’
all, all my children, since clearly we were progressing from a robust physical relationship that included experimentation and shared fulfillment to—”
“Ice!” he barked at me, and I put down the empty wine glass he’d left with me not even a couple of minutes earlier. “Now!”
I darted quickly around the kitchen, first to the cabinet for the glasses, then to the refrigerator to push the lever on the icemaker, at the same time retaining supportive eye contact with his mother. I loved her, so I was practicing my active listening, even though I was pretty sure I was about ready to pass out.
“—a journey that we’re taking together of mutual love and renewal,” she finished, beaming at me.
“Here,” I muttered, shoving two tumblers full of ice at Coz.
“So, of course, I felt like it was time to let y’all in on our relationship.”
Coz poured fast, splashing a bit of the pricey Belvedere, which was a shame, but truthfully I had no time to lament—I needed the alcohol in my system.
“He’s also my gynecologist,” she added cheerfully. “He says I have the vagina of a forty-year-old woman.”
The vodka went down the wrong pipe, and for a long moment, I really thought I was going to die.
Coz thumped my back as I did my very best Gollum impersonation and tried to bring up a lung.
“Oh, honey, are you all right?”
“Same”—I rasped—“hole.”
She nodded kindly, then went flitting around the kitchen, pulling first a Greek salad out of the fridge and then a pecan pie out of the oven.
Once I straightened up, Coz threw back the rest of his drink and poured us each another double as Mia took a gulp from the wine bottle.
“Did you want to let the second bottle of wine breathe?” Emmett asked her.
“Maybe later,” Mia answered, pouring him a glass before taking yet another healthy swallow. “Sorry about that, I swear I’m germ-free.”
“Oh, so am I,” he said kindly, gazing over at Annalise. “And just so you know, your mother and I both got tested so we could have safe sex.”
It was Coz’s turn to choke.
“So, uhm,” Mia began, but then she glanced over at me, her eyes scrunched up, begging.
I knew what she wanted to know, because I did too.
“No,” Coz said hoarsely, his voice burned from the alcohol. “No-no.”
“So,” I choked out, “since it was a class where you met and all, did you guys have sex in front of other people?”
Coz’s whine was loud.
“Well, yes, sweetheart, of course.”
“Pass me the bourbon,” Mia demanded loudly, gesturing at me.
“You want ice?”
“No, just—pour.”
But Annalise finally realized the three of us were well on our way to alcohol poisoning and made us sit down at the table.
Coz needed brain bleach first.
“I’M CONFUSED,” Mia said as she served herself a third plate of sausage and peppers, much to her mother’s delight.
“Save some for the rest of us,” I groused, which earned me a pat on the back from Annalise as she poured me another glass of wine. We’d finished the Chianti and moved on to Shiraz with our food. I took two more pieces of bread from the bowl Coz held out for me.
“There’s enough here to feed a small army,” Mia volleyed, her voice louder than usual from all the liquor sloshing around in her system. “I don’t think you’re gonna starve.”
“Well, some of us actually work outside in the sun and don’t sit on our asses all day long.”
“Oh? So because I don’t toil all day, I don’t get to eat?”
I shrugged and Coz said, “Yeah.”
She flipped us off one after the other.
“Children,” Annalise admonished. “No more!” After we all went quiet, she turned to me. “Now, angel, tell us about this blast from your past that you ran into today.”
“What?”
“Coz said you had an event happen today.”
It was nowhere near the excitement of tantric lovemaking in front of a roomful of people. “Yeah, I—wait.”
“Tell me what happened,” she insisted.
But I remembered my epiphany as I turned from Annalise to Mia.
“What?” she asked as I glared at her, feeling betrayed for no logical reason. If I was right, she had no idea what she’d done. “Why are you lookin’ at me like that?”
“Your friend from college, the one you went to Harvard with… what was his last name?”
“Oh.” She closed one eye, concentrating. We were all loaded. “Uh, Lassiter. Why?”
“Crap, I knew it,” I grumbled, dropping my face down onto my folded arms.
“Oh, that’s the guy,” Coz trumpeted, just as drunk as me and Mia. “Your guy, the guy, who ditched you and left you crying in your beignets…. Lassiter. He’s Mia’s new partner.”
I sighed loudly. Had the beignet thing really needed to be added?
“What?” Mia asked as I lifted my head so I could meet her gaze. “Oh… the guy, the one, that was Britton? Holy shit, what a small world!”
She knew the story just as well as her brother did; it was one of the first things Coz had––much to my horror––shared with her. It had been the whole “Guess what, Mia, Kelly gets shafted by guys too” declaration. He’d wanted us to bond, and we had, just not over that. Mia and I were close because she was the big sister I had always wanted, the one who loved you unconditionally and would annihilate anyone who tried to hurt you. I was counting on it now.
“Could you, pretty please, ditch him?” I begged. “For me?”
“Who are we speaking of, sugar?” Annalise asked.
I made a noise of disgust as I leaned my head on my fist and regarded the matriarch of our family. Did I have to confess that I knew him in the Biblical sense?
“He’s the lawyer who’s going to be sharing my practice, Mom,” Mia answered. “We’ve been friends since law school and”—her gaze shifted back to me—“I’ll tell him it’s not going to work out.”
I sat there staring at her, awestruck, as she reached across the table and took my hand. That she would make that sacrifice for me… but of course she would. She was my sister.
“Are you actually gonna do that? Is that the kind of man you are?” Coz sounded disappointed.
I groaned as he smacked the back of my head.
“Cosimo!” Annalise scolded, rubbing where he’d hit me.
But he was right, and even drunk, I knew that. “No,” I sighed. “No, Mia, don’t do that.”
“I will.”
“I know, but you shouldn’t. Coz is right, that’s crap.”
“You’re sure?” She was hedging. “I don’t want you pissed off at me later.”
“Yeah, I’m sure.”
She nodded.
“Am I missing something? I thought you told me your new partner was married,” Annalise chimed in. “Whyever did I think that?”
“I told you he was divorced,” Mia explained. “And I guess from what he said, it not only messed up his home life, because he and his wife’s family were so tight, but his practice as well. His wife’s father is the managing partner at his law firm.”
“Ah,” Annalise reasoned. “That explains his need to move.”
“Yes, it does.”
“How long was he married?” Coz wanted to know.
“Five years or so,” she said, visibly searching her memory, slower than usual as she had to do it through the alcohol. “It’s only been like a year or so that he’s been divorced.”
“Did you know his wife?”
“Trudy,” Mia said with a shiver. “Sadly, yes. She was always scary, I never liked her. None of us did. You could see her claws underneath the kitten exterior.”
I nodded.
“And boy, is it lucky his father made him sign a prenup, or he would have had nothing to invest in another business.”
“So the Lassiters are—”
/> “Rich,” Mia finished. “Yeah. The filthy kind. They’re old country club, ‘would you like to buy a horse farm and some diamonds’ money.”
Perfect.
“So why’d he choose here?” Coz prodded as Mia poured him and me another glass of wine.
Mia shrugged. “He wanted to get away from Manhattan where he was practicing and just start over. I mean, I got the feeling that there was more to it than that, but I didn’t want to pry.”
“Okay,” Coz said brightly before turning to his mother. “So, I’m drunk enough to talk about you now.”
One of Annalise’s thick, perfectly shaped eyebrows lifted as she regarded her son. “And what is it we’re discussing?”
“This,” he grumbled, pointing at her and then Emmett and making a circling motion that meant everything.
“What else is there to talk about, my darling?”
“So,” he began, taking a fortifying breath. “How long have you and Emmett here been shackin’ up?”
“Six months,” she answered smoothly. “But as I said, it started as merely sex but has blossomed from there.”
Mia whimpered and thumped her head down on the table.
Annalise started chuckling, and Emmett—who was actually a very handsome man, now that I was looking at him—joined her.
“Did I not call it? I told you they would all come apart at the seams.”
“You did,” he agreed, “though it might have been a bit of your delivery.”
“Whatever do you mean?”
“You’re very blunt, my dear.”
“But they’re used to that, for goodness’ sake.”
The way he was looking at her… I liked. And from Mia’s soft grunt, I was thinking she might too.
“I mean, I know everything there is to know about their sex lives.”
“Oh dear God,” Coz moaned, letting his head fall all the way back.
“Who’s having what and with whom.”
“It’s like a horror movie,” Mia groaned softly. “And it won’t stop.”
“These two,” she said, indicating me and Coz, “are gay. Mia’s straight, though experimentation with a woman might be a good thing.”