“But I had a hard day!” I whined.
“She had to meet the parents!” Amy joked. “Did they like your shorts suit?”
“You wore a shorts suit?” Elsie wrinkled her nose.
“She looked very nineties high society,” Amy countered.
“I guess you can have one small appetizer for surviving that,” Elsie said, handing me a bite-size fried chicken-and-waffle hors d'oeuvre.
“Yum!” I said around the food. “You get five stars and a dick pic for that!”
Amy barked out a laugh, but Elsie frowned. “No more food for you. Why don’t you go down and wait for our clients? We should be offering them a personal touch.”
I paced around in front of the building, wishing I had coffee and another of those fried chicken-and-waffle bites. I was a stress eater, and nothing was more stressful than finding out my dad wasn’t really my dad…except maybe my evil twin sister showing up outside my office.
A blond man driving what looked like a million-dollar black sports car pulled up in front of the historic hotel where our office was located. Memphis Eve hopped out. “Brea,” she stated. “We need to talk.”
“Not here!” I hissed. Mark and Liz and the rest of the wedding party would be here any minute.
But Memphis Eve ignored my protests. “I have two names from Mom. I’m trying to finagle more out of her. You can take Dave.” My twin handed me a manila envelope.
“Take Dave where?”
“You need to steal his DNA,” she said impatiently. “Wilder is helping me hunt down Thomas.”
“I don’t have time to go hunt down some random middle-aged guy,” I protested.
“Now, Brea.” Memphis Eve crossed her arms. “We need to be a team on this.”
“Do we?”
In the distance, a fancy-looking SUV limo was stopped at a red light. Crap! That was probably the Holbrooks.
“Yes, we do. We need to find out who our father is. What if he has a lot of money? You could move out of that hovel, I could take a nice vacation…”
“All right, all right,” I told her, pushing her back toward the sports car and opening the door. “I’ll try to find him.Try,” I warned. “No promises.”
As the sports car roared away, I hastily took a peek at the contents of the envelope. Dave Pratt was short and squat and wore a confused expression like someone had snuck up on him with a flash. His left eye squinted weirdly. My stomach sank. I made that same expression when someone took my picture with a flash unless I had drunk enough to dull my reflexes.What if Dave is my father?
I really needed some wedding cake.
The SUV pulled up. Wes helped Liz out of the car, and then Mark came around the other side and kissed me. His brother and his cousin Grant piled out of the car.
“We brought everyone,” Liz said.
“If there’s free food, I’m there!” Carter announced.
“Are you okay?” Mark whispered to me as we headed to the elevator.
I nodded.
“My parents weren’t too terrible, were they?”
“No, no,” I said, “they were great.”
Mark rubbed my back. “I have something I want to show you after this. Are you free?” he asked.
I nodded. I wasn’t even going to worry about Dave. There was no way I was going to be able to find him. And I didn’t think I wanted to. What would that conversation even look like?
