“I’m not that stupid,” I say to Alessia. “I bought a disguise. A thick mustache, a cap I kept low over my eyes, and—look—this jacket makes me look like a linebacker. A short one. But it does the job.
“And I even bought a pair of men’s trainers—look how big they are too. I had to stuff them with an entire box of tissues, by the way. They’ll have footage of me in their penthouse, but they won’t know it’s me. See? I covered everything.”
“They’ll know it was you, trust me. They’re too smart to be fooled.”
“They won’t,” I insist.
We dump the contents onto my bed and stare at the heap.
“Well, what are we going to do about this?” She uses her hand to draw an imaginary circle around the trappings on my bed. Oh, and Alessia is all in it with me now.
I’ve known Alessia since I was ten years old. We met at a prestigious boarding school in Switzerland, of all places.
Obviously, my parents could not afford to send my brother and me to such schools. We’re well off but by no means that kind of rich.
But both Troy and I inherited a ‘scholarship’ from our grandmother, mine for an all-girls’ school, Troy’s for an all-boys’ school.
It was the only way we could afford to attend schools like that. And there I met Alessia Hagen. Best friends from day one.
As to how she became our maid, that’s another story altogether, and it comes with a secret so huge, I’m the only person who knows it.
And of course, she doesn’t clean our house—well, not physically. She pretends to clean a lot of houses for stinking rich people. What she really does is get a cleaning company to do her work for her at a fraction of what she charges her clients. According to her website, “Choose Alessia for a royal cleaning treatment because you deserve the best” is a huge selling point.
It’s a temporary gig while she figures things out. She’s thinking about being a librarian next, so she can sit all day long and read.Not that she doesn’t do that now, but she wants to do it for the ambiance.
“I don’t know what we’re going to do...Yet. But it’ll come to me. Just give me a second.”
Chapter Three
Clover
An unsettling heat travels up my spine, and I feel as if I’m on fire as everything sinks in. I pull off the thick, extra-large hoodie and chuck it onto my vanity chair.
I have no idea why I did what I did. I thought I was totally over them. Completely, one hundred percent over them, and that silly masquerade ball where everything went to crap. They didn’t even try to let me down gently—they just said nope straight up—not happening.
They reminded me to my face that I was Troy’s baby sister, as if I’d forget that little fact. Also, all that happened while I sat in a chair in lingerie I had bought specifically for laying myself bare.
Well, laying myself bare was supposed to follow after they saw me in my see-through bra and panties. They did not want to see any more of me, clearly. That was a year ago, and I avoided them like the plague for the last three hundred and eighty-nine days.
“I was over them,” I say, angry at myself and adding a dramatic sob as I feel a good old-fashioned meltdown coming on, my second one of the day.
“Oh, it wasn’t just their disgustingly handsome faces that sent me down this spiral. There were pictures—picture-perfect pictures—of the most beautiful women in the world draped on their arms. The article went crazy, fangirling the heck out of them and the beautiful woman who seemed to have captured their hearts.” I could not help the sneer in my voice.
“So it appears, blah blah and blah blah and blah blah were the ones who captured their hearts. Surely it must be love because they were all seen together a total of nine times each. Nine times, Alessia,” I cry. “By billionaire standards, they’re practically married,” I wail.
“I was never going to compete with those women. Look at me? I stepped in cow crap last month, at Finlay’s farm. I can still smell it; it lives in my nostrils like some phantom ghost.”
Yes, being in vet school and doing rotations now is not all that glamorous, but I love my job, so there’s that. I’m never going to be beautiful or sophisticated enough to appear in a magazine, let alone on the arm of a billionaire, let alone three billionaires, because this girl decided she loves—no, I meanlusts—all three of them.
Double crap.
“I hate them so much. Why did they have to be so... so... I hate them. And I can’t explain this,” I say, pointing to the heap on my bed.
I wish I had never known them. Except I knew them all my life.
Even though they were my brother’s best friends, I rarely saw them, what with us being away at school. But then I did see them, properly, possibly for the first time when I was eighteen.
I think every person with a pulse had a crush on them, so I was hardly unique. They’re tall, gorgeous—I mean, obscenely gorgeous, obviously. The few times I met them, I couldn’t construct a single coherent sentence when they said my name.
