Problematic Summer Romance (Not in Love, #2)(5)
“Oh, right. Is it your first time here?”
She nods. “This is going to let my nerd show more than I’m usually willing to this early in a relationship, but…” She slides a book out of her faux-leather purse. The spine is bumpy, cracked in a well-read kind of way. It’s one of those old-school travel guides people used before we carried the internet in our pockets. I count dozens of tabs curling out of the pages. Taormina, the title says.
My upper lip curls up. “That is grossly nerdy. Please tell me you didn’t annotate it.”
“Oh.” She blinks, taken aback. Her face slips into a confused hurt, then masks up again. “Um, no. Just wrote a handful of comments.”
“Good. Because that would be very…” I pull something out of my backpack. “Cringe.”
It’s the same guidebook. Same publisher, same title. A little worse for wear, given that I prefer dog-earing to tabbing, but yellow Post-its full of comments—Botanical garden, Rue would love; Hike if possible; Check if open—stick out in every direction. Avery studies it, then looks up with a grin just as the car comes to a stop in front of a villa. I spy two men outside, and my stomach lurches.
“Did we just become best friends?” she asks, grinning.
That’s exactly what I’m afraid of.
Chapter 3
My brother is waiting for us at a table on a stone patio, sitting in the shadow cast by a wooden trellis covered in bright pink bougainvillea; one hand over his eyes, head thrown back in laughter. Across from him is Conor Harkness, still in the middle of narrating whatever is giving Eli all this merriment.
It’s a good thing. That I’m getting this over with now, on minute one of the vacation. Once I’m past the first interaction with Conor, the tone will have been set, and the rest will be smooth sailing. I’m sure it’s what he wants, too: A mutual and tacit agreement to polite indifference. The pretense that our entire relationship is linchpinned by Eli.
“Unbelievable,” Avery says, still in the back of the car.
“What?”
“Hark, wearing something that is not business casual. The apocalypse is being harbinged.” She opens the door and exits. Tiny follows her, trampling over me to run into the arms of the one human for whom he’d bury us all in a ditch. I slip out just in time to watch him tackle my brother with all the unbridled violence of his love.
“It’s been less than forty-eight hours since you last saw him,” I mutter to myself, not quite able to bite back a smile. “Show some dignity, Tiny.”
Then, over the hypnotic buzz of the cicadas, I hear an unfamiliar voice. “—don’t think it’s unreasonable to expect that if my office sends in a CIM, the principal will have their team run processes and put together a deck. Am I wrong, Hark?” The words rise from a phone set on speaker, face up in the middle of the table.
“Is he talking to…?” Avery whispers at Eli, who manages to nod through Tiny’s vigorous licks.
“He sure is.”
She grins. “Poor Molnar. Is he alive? Should we start digging a hole?”
“Not yet, but I am worried about his mental health.”
“You are wrong,” Conor says, staring at the phone like it’s a feral child taking a piss in his lawn. His expression is a special blend of exhaustion and disgust that only old-money people can successfully pull off. His profile, which once awed me enough to force me to educate myself about the anatomy of the zygomatic bone and its relationship to the maxilla, is identical to when I last saw him. He must have shaved not too long ago. This morning, maybe. “But wrong, Tomas, I can forgive. The issue is how profoundly tedious this has been.”
Eli winces, amused. Avery’s smile widens.
“I’m not going to ask my VPs or my quants to waste a week running ad hoc analyses and throwing together a goddamn macaroni craft project for you to put on your fridge,” Conor continues. “If you want to pretend that you’re playing the capital aggregation game, do it on your time. We know at a glance that the equity check won’t hit our threshold.”
“That’s not how it works, Hark.”
“That’s how we work. Our investing process is rigorous, and we’re not backsolving a PnL so that your daughter’s boyfriend can get a cash influx for a startup that’ll never gain enough market share to be sustainable.”
“As a partner, I get a say—”
“Not with a conflict of interest of this size. Not with no one else backing the deal. Not as a limited partner. We have these things called words, and they have meanings.”
Eli and Avery exchange silent laughter, and I glance away, taking in the view. Which is so breathtaking, Conor’s Irish-accented financespeak fades into a remote corner of my brain.
Villa Fedra, where the wedding party will be staying, was built on top of a hill. Like most historical homes in Taormina, it perches on the cliffside—according to my travel guide, as defense from pirate attacks, and to make the most of the breeze in the sweltering Sicilian summers. Knowing that, I always expected the landscape to be somewhat craggy. I had not, however, imagined how steep the overlook would be. The abrupt plunge of the rocky cliff into narrow white beaches, and the never-ending stretch of the sea.
Ionian, as I now know.