“One minute, please,” Jonas calls to me.
Margie inhales sharply and keeps walking out the door.
“Yeah, boss?” I say.
“Are there…s-n-a-c-k-s down here?”
I shake my head. “Mostly s-o-a-p and l-o-t-i-o-n.”
“Ah. Then we’ve gone the wrong way. Thank you.”
I nod and head out the door.
Margot’s already halfway to the gondola. I catch up with her as she reaches the platform.
Once we’re inside a car, she takes a seat and sags, her head hanging over her knees.
And then she starts laughing.
Which is, unfortunately, fucking beautiful.
16
REVENGE IS HOT
Rhys
Margot’sstill laughing when my radio squawks to life again. “O’Malley, how far out are you with Margie? This laundry room is a disaster.”
“On the gondola down,” I report.
“My sister would love you,” Margot says when I’ve clipped my radio back to my hip.
“Thought she already took one of your exes. You want to give me to her too?”
She cracks up again, and something cracks in my chest.
Something that I don’t want to crack. Something I’d prefer to keep hard and impenetrable around my heart.
I haven’t been able to laugh about anything related to my stepbrother stealing my bride, but here Margot is, weeks after her sister started dating her ex, light and happy about it.
I want that.
Icravethat.
Maybe not the part where I’m happy for them, but the part where I can be happy for me.
And the part where I feel whole enough to enjoy being in a little gondola car on a lift with a woman who lights up every room she walks into and who’s kind to strangers. She has secrets, but she keeps showing me sides of her that are so far from the cutthroat businesswoman heiress she’s rumored to be that I’m starting to reconsider my entire worldview.
“Apologies,” she says, eyes sparkling and smile wide. “I don’t mean to make light of the horror that is a sibling hooking up with an ex.”
I shrug like my entire world isn’t having an earthquake just below the surface of my skin. I can’t be around this woman and not want to kiss her. “If you’re fine with it…”
“At the risk of being that person who protests too much, I repeat—I’m happy for them.”
My face says a few things for me, and her joyful laughter rings through the gondola car.
I watch the trees move beneath us as we make the short trek down the mountainside, soaking in the sounds of happiness.
