“I mean, yes, I’m responsible for getting her fired, but nothing happened in the van. She actually shot me down.”
Nick folded his arms across his chest. “Then why are you paying her ten thousand dollars every time she attends an event with you?”
“What the fuck?” Avery jumped to his feet as a tidal wave of anger rolled through him. “You accessed my accounts?”
“No, I accessed hers,” he said as if that made it better, “and there’re three deposits for ten K that align with your dates. It’sall on the drive, along with a background check and a family and criminal history.”
Criminal history?
“She’s clean, by the way.”
“I could have told you that.”
“But now you know for sure.”
Avery drove his fingers through his hair and began to pace. “This is fucked up.”
“No more fucked up than what you’re doing,” Spencer snapped. “When I told you to find a girl to throw Mom off the scent, I didn’t mean hire one.”
“I’m trying to help her build her fucking business.”
“Which is honorable, but—”
“Don’t fucking patronize me.” He spun to face his brothers, pointing the flash drive at them. “Since you know so much, I guess you know she lives in a shit neighborhood, in a shit apartment that was broken into the night she got fired. She drives a shit car. And she still said no when I first offered to pay her. I don’t know what happened to change her mind, but I’m sure it was something equally shitty. As for the money, she asked for ten thousand for five weeks.” He jammed a thumb in his chest. “I’m the one who changed that, so fuck off. It’s my fucking money.”
Spencer and Marcus looked at each other.
“So you’re not just having fun with her?” Spencer asked. “Or using her to deter Mom?
“What?”
“You actually like her.” Marcus’ brows rose in disbelief.
“Well, yeah. She’s smart, funny, talented, pretty.”And sexy as fuck. “What’s not to like?”
And what the fuck does me liking her have to do with anything?
“No, I mean youlike her-like her.”
Wait, what? And what are we, ten?
“If that’s the case,” Spencer jumped in, “why would you fuck it up?”
Marcus swiped a few screens on his phone and handed it to Avery. “It’s all over social media.”
Avery looked down at the screen, and a blast of dread froze the air in his chest, its icy fingers seeping outward and chilling him to the bone. The image staring back at him was damning. It was taken the night before at Pulse when he was talking to Blaze. The girl between them had just offered to fuck him. Her hand sat on his leg. His hand covered hers. The whole scene reeked of intimacy.
The lead on the story was just one more loose pebble in the crumbling cliff he clung to.Is the Fairy Tale Over?: Guess Cinderella’s Shoe Didn’t Fit.
Fuck, fuck, fuck.
“Melody is ready to rip you a new one,” Spencer said.
“Charlotte, too,” Marcus added. “And I swear if Jo bails on her because you can’t keep your dick—”
“I gotta go,” he breathed. He needed to get ahead of this before Jo saw it. Yet his feet were frozen to the floor.
“You’re not going anywhere,” Nick countered. “We have to figure out how we’re going to spin this.”
