Hunter glared at him. “You know how I feel about the Holbrooks. I’m going to take it as a personal affront if you two lose this cybersecurity contract to them.”
“Lucky for you,” Garrett said, “I have a solution. Weston will make one of those women he’s been sleeping with his girlfriend. He will bring her to the upcoming events with Chuck and his wife. He will pretend he’s in love. About six months after we win the contract, they will quietly break up. At that point, Harris & Schultz will see how well ThinkX is working for them, and Chuck won’t even mind that Weston has gone back to being a philandering idiot.”
“Why is it on me?” Weston countered. “Why can’t Blade do it?”
My brothers all roared in laughter.
“Blade can’t get a girlfriend, let alone pretend to be in love with some girl he’s never even met,” Archer retorted.
“You have twenty-four hours,” Greg said to Weston. “Make one of those gold diggers’ dreams come true.”
3
Avery
Ifelt a little bad leaving Blade alone that evening. Too bad there wasn’t bitch-be-gone spray I could squirt around his office to keep the Beckys at bay, like how you spray coyote pee to keep raccoons out of your trash can.
As I trudged to my sister’s building from the subway, I wished I had some to spray at Cassie. I knew she, my father, and my stepmother would be ecstatic if I never attended another family event. The only reason I still went was out of spite.
Like me, my mother had loved fake relationships. My father was married to my stepmother when he cheated on her with my mother. Why? I’m not sure. My mother was an actual factual crackhead. I guessed my father liked slumming it in the trailer park. But he wasn’t that happy when my mother got pregnant and even less happy when she decided to keep the baby.
After five years of my father fighting child support payments to her, the judge finally awarded my mom hundreds of thousands of dollars of back payments, much to my father’s annoyance. And much to my dismay, my mother had proceeded to put all of it up her nose. The last time I had seen her, she was attacking one of the police officers who had been called because of a child neglect allegation. The amount of cocaine she had in the trailer had put her in jail for decades and put me in my father’s house, where I was a daily reminder of his bad decisions.
The only bright spot in my childhood had been my grandmother. I spent a large percentage of my time with her in Harrogate and her crazy senior citizen friends. Along with irritating my father, I came to family functions to see my grandmother, Dottie. Also, she kept hard liquor in her purse.
The doorman let me into the swanky high-rise residential tower on the Upper West Side. In addition to giving Cassie this condo, my father had also secured her fiancé, Trevor, a job at Holbrook Enterprises. Meanwhile, I had had to lie my way into a crappy assistant’s position at ThinkX—not that I was bitter or anything.
Cassie opened the door when I knocked.
“We didn’t think you were going to make it. You always work late,” she said, looking down her nose at me.
“You really shouldn’t have come,” my father said, not even bothering to greet me.
I reached up to brush the hair out of my face with the hand that had the large, ugly watch on its adjacent wrist. My father, Chad, made a sour face.
“I told my boss I had a family thing. He was fine with it,” I replied.
“You should be working late. You have to show that you are serious about the position,” Chad said.
“The fact that I didn’t have anyone give me the job and I had to earn it myself really helps make that case,” I said, making a beeline for the bar cart. Dottie, my father’s mother, was already there, mixing a gin and tonic.
“Make mine a double?” I said, giving her a kiss on the cheek.
“You shouldn’t drink so much,” my stepmother, Ensley, chastised, though she was clearly into her third or fourth cocktail. “Don’t you have to go back to work?”
“I’m so glad that you all really don’t want me here.”
“We just don’t want you to lose your job,” my father said with a frown. “I’m not supporting your lifestyle. Don’t think you’re going to turn into your mother and mooch off of me.”
“When have I ever mooched off of you?” I said through gritted teeth. “I’m up to my eyeballs in student loan debt, and I rent a bed in a room that I share with two other people.”
“It’s not his fault that you made a terrible decision and studied hospitality,” Trevor, my half sister’s fiancé, said. “You should have studied computer programming like me and Chad.” He slapped my father on the shoulder.
Fucking frat boys.I took a long sip of my drink.
“We’re going to score that Harris & Schultz contract for Holbrook Enterprises, then there will be a big bonus coming our way,” Trevor bragged.
“Ooh, I hope so!” Cassie squealed. “I want to redecorate the cottage in Harrogate.”
