Shards of anxiety shot through him as he indulged that fear. The fear of being irrelevant, unimportant, invisible.
His phone let out another buzz. Duke tugged it from his pocket, anxious for an escape from the thoughts in his head. It was Grandma again, but this time she was calling, not texting.
“I’ll be right back.” Quickly, Duke strode out of the room and headed straight for the stairwell. “Hello?”
“She’s in town, you know,” Grandma said on the other end of the line. “She got in yesterday and came straight to the boutique to cancel the order on her dress. You should hear what that guy did to her. Awful.”
Chances were she’d done a lot worse to him, but Duke didn’t say so. Instead, he took the stairs like it was part of his workout routine, grateful to blow off the steam boiling beneath the surface. “You’re talking about Sylvia Sampson?”
“Yes, Sylvia, who else?” she said. “She asked about you. Said it would do her a lot of good to be seen with you on her arm right now, after what happened to her. And I think it’d boost your image as well.”
Duke rounded the landing and headed down the next flight. “It’d help my image to take Sylvia…”
“The Sampsons hold a lot of clout in LA. And they don’t come much prettier than her.”
Duke rounded the final landing before gripping the banister and heading back up. “She’s not really my type, Grandma. In fact, she’s kind of a brat.”
“It’s one night,” Grandma urged. “You’ll be announcing together already. Why not make it a date?”
“Because I don’t want to give her the wrong idea, that’s why.”
“She only wants it for her image,” Grandma specified. “She’s fresh off a breakup, for crying out loud.”
Man, she wasn’t going to let up, was she? “Fine,” he finally said. “I’ll think about it.”
“That’s my sweet grandson. Mark the last weekend of June for the gala, will you? That’s about two months from now.”
Duke had reached the seventeenth floor—Slipper Magazine’sfloor—but rather than go back to the greenroom, he headed up to the rooftop instead. Something was getting under his skin. Something beyond the obvious irritations vying for his attention.
“You know who Veritå is?” he asked.
“Is that who’s interviewing you for your feature withSlipper?”
“Yeah.”
“Wow.”
When she left it there, Duke prodded. “Wow, what? Is that good or bad?”
“No, it’s good. It’sreallygood actually. She’s just…well, I’d say honest at all costs. She should help people see you clearly, and that’s wonderful because you are an incredible guy.”
An incredible guy, huh? Duke didn’t feel incredible. He felt irrelevant. Each of his siblings seemed to be in newlywed bliss and the public was eating it up with a spoon. Gushing over every lame thing the couples did together.
Oh, looks like James is still treating his culinary princess like a queen,beside some picture of the two out for dinner. OrBetzy and Sawyer caught test-driving a new million-dollar machine. Will the two get a matching pair—His and Hers?
Why did anyone care? But they did. They cared more than they did about what he was doing.
“Duke?” came Grandma’s voice through the line. “You still there?”
“Yeah, I’m here. But I should probably get back to the meeting. It’s about to start.”
“Okay. Good luck. Oh, and tell Veritå I’m a fan, will you? I’ve got a good feeling about this.”
“Will do,” Duke said before disconnecting the line. Grandma had a good feeling about it, did she? He sucked in a breath as he looked over the landscape. At least one of them did.
Chapter 3
Aspark of anticipation flittered through Viv as the elevator glided up to the seventeenth floor. She was about to meet her new subject.
