Avery takes his time looking over at me. “I suppose I would be concerned. If I were single…”
“What the fuck are you talking about?” I bark.
“Zoe and I have been going pretty strong,” he leans back against the table, crossing his feet at the ankles. Looking Avery in the eyes has always felt like rubbing sandpaper across my skin. We look alike, obviously. We’re twins. While we are fraternal twins, people often mistake us for identical. If I am being honest, I can see it. We have the same eyes. The same lips, though his is usually stretched into a cocky, jokerlike grin and I tend to keep mine at a flat line. His face is more slender too, sharper. My jaw is more square. And his hairline is receding, though somehow he’s evaded the gray. Dye, probably. Avery is a pretty boy. And on that note–
“I wouldn’t go proposing to a girl just because you’ve fucked her more times than the other girls you’re fucking.”
“That’s funny,” Avery says without laughing. “But I’m not fucking anyone else. Currently. Zoe and I have been more or less monogamous for a few months now.”
“More or less?”
Avery offers a nonchalant shrug. “What happens in Vegas, right? Either way, I might propose.”
That earns a smile and a nod from me. But it’s not a happy one. More like I am trying to keep myself from breaking my hand on his pretty face. “This is a joke to you, isn’t it?”
That seems to get him because his grin wavers in a twitch. “Being the CEO of Hardin Records when we modify our father’s mansion to a one-man nursing home is hardly a joke. The prerequisites are a bit of a turn-off but not enough to make me back down. Zoe’s hot, she’s committed, and it makes sense.”
“It makes sense to you to tie the knot with a woman you hardly know in a shitty attempt to get ahead of me?” I ask, standing in front of him, looking down at him.
But Avery stands up, squares his shoulders and we are eye level. “I don’t have to get married to get ahead of you, brother.”
I almost laugh at that.
But before I can say anything, my phone buzzes. It’s the secretary.
My new hire is here.
I give Avery a hard glare before dismissing myself. I’m not backing down, and this sure as fuck isn’t over.
But I don’t feel like bloodying up a new shirt.
And I have shit to do.
Chapter 8
Amanda
“Are you ready to start your new job?” My best friend Iris’s smile comes through the phone.
“I still have to get dressed,” I say, pulling the towel tighter around me.
“You’re not dressed yet?” she asks as a car honks at me. The guy driving winks and waves. “It sounds like you’re outside.”
“I am,” I sigh.
“I’m not sure I understand.”
“My alarm didn’t go off. And I was rushing to get ready, so I plugged in my curling iron before I got in the shower. To save time, you know? And then I smelled smoke, and I peeked out the curtain and the towel was touching the iron, and it may or may not have started a mini fire in my apartment.”
“Oh no…”
“Oh yeah. By the time I doused it, the alarms were going off and they evacuated the whole building and I’m outside. In a towel. On the street. Getting cat-called.”
On cue, I guy whistles at me. I flip him off. Unfortunately, the towel I grabbed was regular sized and not one of my luxurious sheet towels that I love and would very much prefer right nowgiven the fact regular towels do a shitty job covering both my boobs and my ass at the same time.
Note to self: Only buy sheet towels. You never know when you might almost burn a building down and have to talk to a cop, two firefighters and a very angry property manager in a regular sized towel.
They finally clear us to go back inside, and I march towards the door. People actually clap but I doubt it’s to thank me for their morning dose of vitamin D.
