CHAPTER 1
LANDON
Everything sucked.
That was all I could think as I stared over the kitchen island into the living room. Most of the apartments I’d looked at in California had been open concept, and I suspected it was nice and airy and comfortable when you really lived in a place. Yes, it was mostly to disguise the fact that even the expensive places were tiny, but someday, I could stand in the kitchen chopping chocolate for hot cocoa, and talk to my guests in the living room at the same time.
It would be lovely.
It would.
It was just that right now, it sucked.
The living room was full of boxes, and I didn’t have any chocolate or guests. Even worse, I was eating off a paper plate, because the moving company had mislaid the box that held my china.
My grandmother’s china, that she’d specifically left to me in her will, as much as that had annoyed my brother.
My dead grandmother, the only member of my family who hadn’t betrayed me.
Just thinking of the old-fashioned blue toile pattern with the willow trees and the... fuck, I wanted to cry.
But I didn’t have time for that. I needed to eat my eggs off my fucking paper plate, and then get to my new job. I’d timed the walk from my apartment to the Crescent office building, and I wasn’t cutting it close yet, but it was my first day. I couldn’t be late.
I needed this job.
It was my fresh start.
My only shot at a life that didn’t include my fiancé, who had slept with my brother and decided he was a better catch than me. My brother, who’d asked the asshole to marry him right in front of me. And maybe worst of all, my parents, who had told me that what was done was done, and I needed to get over it already, because it “wasn’t right” to tear the family apart over something so small.
Something so small as complete betrayal, right.
When a headhunter had brazenly emailed me at the software company I had worked for, something had snapped to attention in my head. Not just a job opportunity for a better, higher ranking, much higher paid job than the one I had, but a job opportunity all the way in California.
There was no better way to escape my Boston family, was there?
So I’d talked to him, when I’d never agreed to talk to someone about another job before. Unlike my family, I was built loyal. I’d gotten my job right out of college and stuck with that company despite it all, until then.
When I skated through two interviews and Crescent had offered me the job, I had packed my things, hired a mover, and left without telling a single member of my family what I was doing.
I hoped they fucking choked on it.
But that was the past, and all the way across the country. Now was my first day as the head of IT at Crescent.
I pulled my brand-new cell phone, with its shiny new phone number, out of my pocket to check the time. I had to give up on the eggs.
That was fine; eating was making me queasy anyway. I’d never been the best with people, and right now, meeting new people sounded like torture. Meeting a whole office of new coworkers?
I’d met my former fiancé, Geoff, at the office. Yeah, he’d worked in sales while I was in IT, but that didn’t change anything.
Last time I’d made a friend at work, I’d lost everything.
Well, not everything. The other people in IT back in Boston had been incredibly sympathetic about the mess, and I’d kind of considered them friends.
I tossed the paper plate half full of scrambled eggs into the trash can and headed for the door. Halfway there, I stumbled over one of my boxes, knocking down a stack of my old journals and came up muttering curses to myself. Then I wasted precious minutes gathering them up when I should have just thrown them away before moving. Who wanted cat poetry? It was too damned easy to imagine Geoff laughing at me for both the tripping and the poems. I wasn’t the world’s most graceful guy, and he’d always found that uproariously funny.
I thought house cats were always supposed to land on their feet. How come you land on your ass so often?
In retrospect, it was a lot easier to see that he was a jackass and I was better off without him.
