Reese picked her wineglass up and twirled it absently. “Then what makes you think you have any right to speak on mine?”
She’d walked into this house, so sure that she was going to drop the charade she’d spent the afternoon orchestrating with Sydney, but now, with adrenaline coursing through her veins, it felt like the best idea she’d had in a long time.
“Are you dating her just to get a rise out of me?” Self-involved as always, but hey, a broken clock was right twice a day.
On her best days, she didn’t hate Grant, but she still couldn’t muster up a modicum of respect for him. Especially right now.
“My relationship with Sydney is none of your business.” Stick to the party line, and she’d get through this.
In spite of the chaos surrounding her, as Grant looked ready to blow a gasket, Reese found herself smiling.
Today had been… surprising. Sydney was funny and interesting, and she’d been through a hell of a lot the last year, hopefully only to come out stronger on the other side.
Reese had always believed that karma came around eventually, but she was realizing that people like Grant, who were insulated from the unjustness of the world—not that she wasn’t aware of her own privilege—didn’t suffer consequences unless people imposed them.
Now here she was, dropped into a fortuitous situation, almost divine in its invention while Grant, led by his own assumptions, was stuck in a hell of his own making.
Maybe that was true karma, and who was Reese to stop whatever was coming next?
Grant moved to stand up. “I cannot believe you think that you can?—”
She felt her father’s strong hands pound against the table before she heard them. “That’s enough.”
Silence cut through the dining room.
Reese was ready for the dressing-down of her life until she realized that her father was looking directly at Grant.
“You are lucky that Brynn Fitzpatrick accepted your marriageproposal. And you’re even luckier that Sydney made no waves last year.” He looked at Reese then. “If your sister’s future is with Sydney, it’s irrelevant to you.”
Reese held her breath until her father looked back at Grant, who was sitting down again, visibly seething in his chair.
“Your future is with Brynn. Her family is coming tomorrow for a small get-together, and you will be the fiancé that I know you can be. Anything less will not be tolerated. You are the one who mixed business with pleasure where the Fitzpatrick family is concerned, and now it’s your business to make her the happiest woman on earth. And you will not do anything to disrupt their investment in The Devereux Group. ” The silence was deafening. “Do I make myself clear?”
Grant cleared his throat before looking down at his empty plate. “Understood.”
Their father cut into a scallop before continuing, seemingly intent on continuing his monologue. “Sydney was a good match for you. Her publicity was good for the company, and being attached to her worked at the time. Marrying Brynn is a better match,” Tripp said, nodding toward Grant.
She hated her brother’s smarmy grin at the praise he got for acting like a dog.
“Are you kidding me?” Reese couldn’t hide the bite in her words. Her father was fine with Grant being a philandering asshole as long as he, and The Devereux Group, came out better at the end of it.
Tripp pointed his knife at Reese. “You’ll bring Sydney tomorrow. We’ve hardly spent enough time with her over the years, what with her busy travel schedule. She’s retired from tennis now, I think I heard?”
Reese wiped her mouth with a linen napkin. A date to a wedding was one thing, but forced attendance at a myriad of Devereux family events wasn’t the outcome either of them had been searching for when this particular wheel had started spinning.
Karma really was working in mysterious ways.
Reese nodded. “I’ll see if she’s available.”
“Perfect,” Tripp said, smiling broadly before he turned his focus to Grant. “You will be cordial as the son of the host. I will not hear a single negative word out of your mouth about your sister or her girlfriend.”
He didn’t ask if Grant understood this time. In their father’s eyes, it was a requirement, not a request.
“Anyway,” Sharon said in a voice that was artificially high, trying to course-correct from whatever turn their dinner had taken, “hors d'oeuvres will be served on the patio at three p.m. sharp, and the dress code is coastal cocktail.”
Of coursethe dress code was ‘coastal cocktail.’ As if her family wasn’t already pretentious enough. It wasn’t like they were the Rockefellers. The Devereux family owned fifteen properties in the New England region, though they’d never expanded outside of the area. Whether that was intentional or not, Reese didn’t know, given that she had never been privy to that type of business information.
The reality was, for her pride in her father’s accomplishments with The Devereux Group, he’d been given his start by Grant Devereux II, who’d made his millions as an investment banker. Failure would have been unlikely, if not downright impressive.
