Her biting laugh turned into a sharp cry. Her hand met the crown of her head. For a second, I allowed guilt to swallow me, because maybe she hadn’t been as drunk as I’d thought she was. Maybe she was actually hurt.
I’d never been nice. Ma said I grew up hating the world because I saw what it was rather than what it could be. But… I’d also never been the asshole to see someone hurt without offering a hand.
Dad would have been pissed if he were here. The knowledge settled inside me, carving ugly marks into my chest, but I didn’t rectify it. I looked up at the ceiling, careful to move my eyes and not my head, knowing Emery could probably see me by now but not very well.
What do you expect me to do, Dad?
I could picture him in front of me, the clearest I’d ever seen him since he’d died. His heavy brows pulled together, crow’s feet rimming the edges of his eyes. The tan came from all those years working in the sun, forgoing sunblock because there was nothing like warmth on naked skin.
He opened his mouth, I edged forward to latch onto his words, and when they neared fruition, Emery spoke, breaking the spell, “I’m not objectifying those women or even judging them for how they earn their money. That’s their situation. Their business.”
Of course, you’re not judging. How could you when your family earned its money through theft?
I became irrationally angry. She could never have known that was the closest I’d felt to Dad since he had died, but still—I hated her more than I ever had in that moment. Even more than I had when she hadn’t shown up for Dad’s funeral, for the man who used to call her his third child.
I curled my fist to the point of white knuckles. My fingers dug into my palms, the pain distracting me from the gaping hole in my chest.
From the fact that, sometimes, I could remember Dad so clearly, and other times, I struggled to recall where on his forehead his mole sat.
From the fact that no matter how hard I fucking tried, I couldn’t hate Emery.
Not all the way, anyway.
Not with the same careless freedom I possessed when hating the rest of the world.
I bit my tongue.
Emery continued, so oblivious, I could have died from disbelief, “But if you’re judging me for being panicked while trapped in this tiny metal box with a jackass, I’m judging you for hiring escorts in the first place and leaving them unsatisfied.” She inched closer and taunted, “Performance anxiety?”
“Never been the type,” I bit out.
“Prove it.”
“What are we? Five? Are you going to dare me next?” I wouldn’t put it past her. Dares were currency for thrill-seekers like her.
The elevator shook. She latched on to my shoulder, her hands flying forward so fast, I knew it was instinct. The lights flickered on, a quick blink like a camera flash. Moments later, the light reintroduced her features to me.
She opened her eyes, blinking rapidly, taking a few seconds to get used to the brightness before she focused two different-colored eyes on me. Realization blossomed across her face until her fingers unlatched from my shoulders.
Déjà vu punched my chest hard.
Emery wore the same deer-in-headlights expression she had four years ago when I’d switched on the lights, and she realized I wasn’t Reed. I watched, unmoving. She stumbled backward, her jaw nearly unhinging from its socket.
The spread of wrappers almost tripped her.
“Easy, Tiger.”
I could tell that was the right thing to say because she narrowed two hate-filled eyes at me, the gray one stormier than the blue. When the elevator doors opened behind her on a random level, she grabbed the clutch I’d pilfered and stumbled out.
My fingers jabbed the button for the penthouse floor before I realized I’d never asked her why the hell she’d taken a catering gig when she didn’t need the money.
I’d grown up as an only child.
Sharing seemed like a simple concept, mostly because it was foreign. I’d never been asked to share. Maybe a chip from a nearly empty bag (Dad did this when Ma wasn’t looking) or my bed on a rare occasion (Ma did this when Dad worked long hours and snored like a tractor). Insignificant sacrifices since my parents worked hard to make me happy, and everything else in my life felt like mine.
Until Reed came along.
The accidental child they couldn’t afford.
When I was eleven and Reed was one, Reed took over my bedroom. He cried so much, he messed up Dad’s sleep (and therefore work) schedule. Ma moved Reed from their room to mine, which left me on the living room couch. A dinky, secondhand thing that previously occupied the waiting area of the Chinese restaurant down the block.
When I was thirteen, Reed caught a bad case of croup and spent three days in the hospital for observation. Every spare dollar for the next five years went to that bill. That Christmas, Dad taught me how to play soccer in the snow with a half-flat ball he found somewhere in the apartment complex. All the other kids sat inside playing their new video games.
When I was fifteen, some asshole punk drew a dick on Reed’s forehead with Sharpie and stole his lunch bag. For the first time, he ran to me for help, and I accepted that sharing my parents wasn’t so bad, because in return, I’d gotten someone who looked at me like I was the solution to life, not a problem.
When I was twenty-five, Reed told me I was dead to him after the cotillion. Ma cried the entire night, then cried again the next morning when she realized he’d meant it.
Dad turned to me, placed his calloused palm on my shoulder, and said, “Life hurts something stupid, kid, but being brothers is a lifetime commitment. He’ll realize that.”
I listened to Dad and waited it out, convinced it was a phase, because from the moment Reed had been born, I’d done everything for him, given him all I could, and loved him more than I did myself.
Seven years later, I was still waiting.
The email sat on my laptop, the words unlikely to change in this lifetime, but I wasn’t opposed to funding time machine research. I’d go back and reverse a lot of things, starting with the cotillion. I told Durga I didn’t feel regret, but I lied, knowing she’d call me out on my bullshit. Someone had to.
Here’s what people who sit around smoking ganja and quoting Gandhi won’t tell you. There’s always that one mistake that changes your life. If you’re lucky, it’s for the better.
Spoiler alert: I’m not lucky, and regret is life’s longest punishment.
I felt it now, reading Ma’s email, wondering how someone who shared my blood could turn into a coxswain, Vineyard Vines-wearing, Niçois salad-ordering, country club-attending, nouveau riche douchebag, who surrounded himself with people named Brock, Chett, and Tripp with two Ps.
From: [email protected]
To: [email protected]
Subject: 4th of July Weekend
Hi, sweetheart!
I was hoping to catch you on your phone, but you didn’t answer and your voicemail inbox is full. (You should really consider hiring an assistant. It’s been like this for months. I’ve been meaning to tell you.)
Your brother says he’ll be spending the weekend in Eastridge with Basil, Chett, Brock, and Tripp for the country club’s fourth of July brunch. I think Reed and Basil are ready to take the next step. Seems like he’s gonna pop the question. I mean, we always knew this was coming, but I’m happy that he’s happy.
You know I love you, and I hate to ask you this, but would you mind not coming that week? We both know he won’t come home to see me unless I assure him you’re not in town, and I haven’t seen him in months.
I ain’t happy about this. It hurts to even ask, but it won’t always be like this, baby. I promise.
Love,
Ma
I couldn’t blame Ma.
Growing up, Reed used to think Ma favored me, so Ma worked extra hard to prove she didn’t. What Reed never got was, Ma didn’t love me more. She’d just loved me longer. Ma had ten extra years to learn how to love me be
st. She’d been figuring out how to love him, which he made infinitely harder by having mood swings that would make teenaged girls seem tame.
I typed out my reply.
One word.
Nash: Sure.
Then, I wired the allowance I sent Reed each month—apparently, he couldn’t take my calls, but he had no problems taking my money—and slammed my laptop shut, discarding it on the pillow next to my head.
Some asshole knocked on my door, but I sunk back into my mattress and closed my eyes. The knocking persisted. I muttered a curse, reached out to the nightstand, blindly fished out the bottle of painkillers, tossed two into my mouth, and swallowed them dry.
Padding barefoot to the door, I yanked it open, knowing I’d throttle whoever it was if they said the wrong thing. I didn’t know why I thought it’d be Emery, but it wasn’t. Disappointment burned my tongue.
A uniformed staff member stood on the other side. He tossed me a loopy grin, his feet shuffling back and forth like he bought a new bong and couldn’t wait to get out of here and try it.
“Mrs. Lowell sent this up for you.” Dudebro held up a folded piece of paper with the Prescott Hotels letterhead sticking out from the flap. “She left this letter for you, too.”
I snatched the letter and let him in. He pushed a cart past me, a smile on his face, too damn chirpy for a Saturday morning. My nudity didn’t faze him. I greeted him in boxer briefs, taking in the food as he unveiled it.
A full breakfast. Eggs, bacon, bagels, coffee, hash browns, and French toast. Beside the silverware, a fruit basket of bananas, strawberries, and Fuji apples had been arranged in a phallic shape, ejaculating into a bowl of Nutella.
The clock in the open-plan kitchen read eight in the morning exactly. This spread hadn’t been to feed me. It’d been to wake me up with an extra side of fuck you.
Delilah Lowell thrived on passive-aggressive bullshit.
Breakfasts screamed wake the fuck up.
Lunches doubled as a reminder not to pile any more lawsuits onto her plate.
Dinners cemented the fact that I’d be flat-out broke and most likely dead if she didn’t exist to put out my fires and occasionally feed me.
I never bothered with dessert. Learned my lesson the first time when she’d brought her rat and asked me to pet sit the monster. (Rosco and I do not and will never get along.)
The alarm on my spare phone set off two horns. I’d set it up last night after carefully sealing the broken phone in a plastic bag in my nightstand. Swiping the screen up, I shut off the noise and noticed the eight missed calls from Delilah.
Pressing the return button, I spared the guy feelings of inadequacy at the sight of my dick and stepped into the en suite bathroom before stripping out of my black Calvin Kleins. The rainfall shower heads shot out water.
I connected the phone to my shower’s Bluetooth speakers.
Delilah answered my call on the second ring with a tsk. Her voice came out in pants like she’d been walking. “Do you ever answer your phone?”
So much tact, this one.
“Eventually.” I dumped shampoo onto my head, wondering if I had any unread messages from Durga. “Is the breakfast from last night’s catering staff?”
The memory of Emery Winthrop against my body drove my line of questioning. Her existence pissed me off. A trust fund princess. A daughter of a thief and (as far as I was concerned) murderer. Someone complicit in his lies. Complicit in Dad’s death.
The worst part wasn’t seeing her last night. It was feeling her against me. I could write our first time off as a mistake, but she was still young. So damn young. She’d been an adult for all of two seconds, and I’d already fucked her.
Remembered it.
Liked it.
My dick hardened. I stroked it twice before telling it to fuck off.
“Nope. I bought it.” Delilah cooed at the naked rat she called a dog. “Did you pee, Rosco? Did you pee? Such a good boy.” Her voice came out louder this time, “From the place down the street. I paid some kid fifty bucks to dress in a uniform and cart breakfast to you. Cute, right?”
And I’d left him alone with a fat wad of cash in my suitcase, designer everything, and my company laptop.
Perfect.
“You are so extra.”
“And you are so fucked.” In the background, the wind whipped around her until I could barely make out her voice. “Why did building security call me this morning to inform me that a man from the Security and Exchanges Commission came here to see you?”
The S.E.C.—high-and-mighty, Paul Blart rent-a-cops who aspired to be the real thing. Unfortunately, the crimes they investigated included the ones I'd committed.
I bit back a curse and tightened my fingers into fists before returning my hands to my head and lathering the shampoo. “Is he still here?”
“I bought you an hour. He’ll be back. Do you need me there?”
“No.”
It was probably a good idea to have the head of my legal department with me because, let’s face it, I’d broken a shit ton of laws this decade, but I knew Delilah. She would demand that I spill everything to her, and that sounded as appealing to me as a blow job from a piranha.
“Nash…” she trailed off, and I could picture her scrunched up nose and crossed arms. That bulging vein on her forehead she claimed she only got around me. Apparently, I was responsible for aging her ten years, too.
“Delilah, if you can’t understand simple words like ‘no,’ you’re in the wrong line of work.” I rinsed the shampoo, watching it swirl down the drain in a Rorschach pattern. It looked like Sisyphus shouldering a boulder.
“You are such an ass.” The words held no bite.
“I’m also your boss.”
“Now that you mention that, I feel incredibly underpaid. You know, I may take the liberty of hiring you an assistant if you’re going to be too stubborn to do it yourself.” Rosco barked in the background, starting a chain reaction where five dozen dogs barked back. The last thing I wanted to hear with a hangover. “I didn’t go to law school to be your twenty-four-seven bitch, Nash.”
“What’s that? I think someone just called my name.”
“You’re in the shower,” she deadpanned.
“Gotta go, D.”
I finished showering, brushed my teeth, dried my hair off with a towel, and tossed on a Stuart Hughes suit, F.P. Journe watch, and a pair of Testonis.
Delilah liked to coat herself in diamonds and designer threads for country club dinners with her husband. She used her looks, her wealth, and her bitchiness to intimidate catty, rich housewives into submission.
For men to intimidate men, you needed to be taller, stronger, smarter. But a show of wealth and a sculpted face didn’t hurt, which was why I filled my closet with overpriced clothes I didn’t need and thanked Ma for my good genetics.
When I re-entered the bedroom of my suite, Rosco sat on my bed, the long strands of black and white hair sprouting from his gargantuan ears and onto my sheets. His bare ass pressed against my pillow, precisely where I liked to lay my head. The only fur he boasted budded from his head and tail, and he looked like a dog like Shawn Spencer looked like a psychic.
Delilah held a slice of French toast to her mouth, swallowing half in one bite like the damned Neanderthal she pretended she wasn’t. Grade-A syrup dropped from her lips to the carpet. Rosco yelped, then dove off the bed and lapped it up.
“The rat better not vomit on my carpet.” I grabbed the toast from her fingers and took a bite. Cold, like everything in this room, including me. “If this were 1690s Salem, you’d hang for witchcraft.”
She rolled her mint-green eyes and licked at the syrup that had smeared onto her cheek. Her tongue waggled across her cheek like one of those inflatable tube men at car dealerships. “I choppered in earlier this morning.” She allowed Rosco to lap at her fingers. I watched on, vowing never to get a pet rat. “Security just let me up.”
“Remind me to fire them.”
“I repeat, I am not your assistant.”
“I repeat, I don’t need you here.”
She ignored me, her favorite pastime and the sole person on my payroll I allowed the privilege. “I looked into the S.E.C. agent. They have a pending investigation into you, Nash. My source wouldn’t say much, which tells me this is serious.” Furrowed brows and a half scowl formed her don’t-bullshit-me face. “What did you do?”
“Delilah—”
“Are you going to tell me what you’ll be investigated for?”
This was what happened when you worked with someone for too long. They got comfortable and thought they could ask questions I didn’t want them asking.
“Do you remember the catering company from last night?” I redirected.
Why the hell was Emery Winthrop working a catering gig, anyway? I understood the modeling part. She had the height and face, but catering? Her family’s net worth dipped into the ten figures. Her trust fund had to be at least eight if not nine figures. She could finance a war and not want for money.
Maybe Virginia had sent her on the heiress equivalent of an apology tour. A few magazine covers, and I was supposed to fucking forget she’d known about her dad’s embezzlement.
“Don’t change the subject.” Delilah tucked a dirty blonde strand of hair back into her French chignon and folded her hands on her lap. She took a seat on the absolute edge of my bed, like she feared she would catch my germs. “I asked around about the lead investigator. Brandon Vu. He’s ambitious. Moved up the ladder fast, looking to be the chair of the S.E.C. If you did something, he’ll find it. You have to tell me everything.”
Like hell I would.
“No. Fika took care of it.” I didn’t elaborate, merely pulled out the bundles of bills from my suitcase and shoved them into the built-in safe I’d had installed yesterday. I thumbed through one of the ten-thousand-dollar stacks and pointed at Delilah with it. “You act like I’m a sketchy person. I’m entirely innocent.”
Devious Lies: A Standalone Enemies-to-Lovers Romance (Cruel Crown Book 1) Page 12