I licked my lips. Blade’s eyes followed the motions.
“Guess we’d better get going,” I said, pushing open the car door.
My family was gathered on the large front porch of my sister’s house. It wasn’t as big as the Broughton estate and not anywhere close to the size of the Svensson estate, but it was still a sizable cottage. I was jealous, especially of her porch.
Usually I was the one having to hide my barely contained envy around my sister, but as I stepped out of Blade’s fancy sports car, the door swinging up like the Batmobile instead of out like a normal car, I felt a rush of petty happiness as Cassie glared in our direction. Blade, dare I say, swaggered around the side of the car. He paused by me to put his hand on my waist and slide it around the curve of my back.
“I believe your rule was that we perform for an audience,” he murmured. Then he dipped his head and kissed me. It was a movie star kiss—I melted against him, and his hard muscles pressed against my body. I moaned as his tongue pushed into my mouth. His hands traveled lightly up my back, then he stepped back, a self-satisfied smirk on his face.
I hastily smoothed my clothes, then Blade wrapped a strong arm around my waist and guided me up the wide steps.
“I see why you want to marry him,” my grandmother, Dottie, said. “A man kisses you like that, you better put a ring on it.”
“She’s just faking it!” Cassie shrieked. “It’s like when you brought that band nerd to my graduation and told everyone you two were moving to Paris.”
“You don’t know!” I shot back. “Wewereplanning on moving to Paris, and then he dumped me for an Irish foreign exchange student. I was heartbroken.”
It was all lies. He had been my lab partner and didn’t want to graduate from college without having touched a boob. In exchange for not having to suffer through yet another family gathering where people asked me why I hadn’t found a husband in college, I had brought him. At the end of the party, I let him press his hand against my fully clothed boob for one minute. After the time was up, he was so overwrought that he puked all over my shoes.
“Why don’t we go inside,” my stepmother, Ensley, slurred, already halfway through what looked to be her second martini of the morning. “Avery is prone to hysterics.”
“For you,” Blade said, holding out an expensive bottle of wine to my sister. “This is an ’82 first-growth Bordeaux.”
I smirked at the blank looks on Trevor’s and Cassie’s faces. “Blade’s a bit of a connoisseur,” I told them.
“You should see this new trash can we got,” Trevor said as I followed them inside. “It was two hundred fifty dollars,” he bragged to Blade.
My boss looked politely disinterested.
I mimed shooting myself in the head with a finger gun. I wasn’t proud of my behavior, but whenever I was around my family, it was as if I became that unloved twelve-year-old who overcompensated for the fact that she clearly wasn’t wanted.
“Where did you meet Avery?” Cassie asked Blade.
“She is my assistant,” he said smoothly.
“So you work a lot, and Avery was there throwing herself at you, is that the story?” Cassie said, crossing her arms.
“Something like that,” Blade replied, face carefully neutral.
“What exactly did you like about her?” Cassie countered. My family all watched him.
“She has an irreverent personality.”
“What’s her favorite color?” Cassie interrogated. “Her favorite food?” Blade glanced at me. “How many children does she want? What’s she afraid of? What’s her dream job? Where does she want to go most in the world?”
“You don’t know any of those things about me!” I yelled at her. “He could sit there and lie, and you wouldn’t know the difference!”
“Girls!” my father ordered.
I glared at him.
“None of us interrogated Trevor when you scraped him out of the basement of a fraternity house,” I said hotly.
“Because they knew it was real,” Cassie said smugly. “Admit it: you are blackmailing or lying to this man so that you can get the house!”
“Avery,” my grandmother warned, “if I find out this is a ruse, you will not only not have the house, but you will receive nothing as inheritance.”
“Like I was going to inherit anything anyway,” I snapped at them, turning on my family. “You all never liked me. You—”
