All I wanted was six hours of sleep before digging into the inconsistencies that everyone else in Razzle Dazzle’s corporate real estate division overlooked to figure out why we seem to have a small leak in our bank accounts.
Instead, I have a modern flower child with the world’s most obnoxious dog making a mess of my house while my mother’s on her way here to convince me to marry a Wall Street heiress who needs a husband who won’t mind when she flies off to visit her secret lover in Cambodia.
Suppose it could be worse.
She could be bringing Paisley Windsor too. Mom’s convinced Paisley’s a misunderstood socialite who needs a little consistency in her life, and that with the right paperwork, she, too, would make me a good wife.
Anything to avoid a repeat of my early twenties when I believed in love.
“Does your eye always twitch like that?” Begonia asks. She’s flitted into the living room, where she’s gathering scattered clothing and paint rags, slowly but steadily erasing the evidence that she was ever here. “You seem like you’re under an unhealthy level of stress. Way more than I’d expect for you finding an unexpected guest in your house. Is everything okay?”
I open my mouth to ask what a healthy level of stress would be when finding a squatter in my house, but before the words can form on my tongue, the back door swings open again, and her dog trots in, carrying a wooden statue in its jaw.
“Marshmallow!”
He drops the statue, sits back on his haunches, and regards her with a faux innocence that’s utterly diabolical while I process the rest of what I’m seeing. “What the fuck?”
Begonia falls to her knees and grabs the small wooden statue. It’s roughly eighteen inches high, and rubbing its head as she’s doing will not fix what that dog has done. “Just needs a little polish and freshening,” she says brightly.
“Maurice Bellitano carved that.”
She goes pale. “The Maurice Bellitano?”
“That’s my grandfather. Your dog chewed off the head of Maurice Bellitano’s carving of my grandfather.”
“Oh, god,” she whispers.
We both stare at the statue in her hands.
While my grandfather was more rotund than the slender statue, the high-waisted suit pants, the suspenders, and the loafers are undeniably him.
The head used to be as well, but now there are gnaw marks in my grandfather’s eyeballs, his nose is gone, and the scally cap he always wore is missing half its brim.
I shift my attention to Begonia.
Her expression leaves zero doubt that she knows exactly who Maurice Bellitano was, and exactly how priceless that piece of wood in her hands is. “Oh, no no no…”
And now my head is going to explode.
When my mother sees this—
Wait.
Wait.
I look at my phone again.
Then at Begonia, a squatting divorcée with her poorly-disciplined dog and her glowing hair and her disaster all over my entire house.
An idea takes hold at the root of my brain.
It’s a terrible idea.
Worse than terrible.
The consequences, the repercussions—if this backfires, it could do far more harm than good, and cause more problems than the situation I’d like to extract myself from.
But if it works, it could give me exactly what I’ve wanted and needed for months.
Years, even.
“Do. Not. Move,” I order. “Do not think. Do not breathe. Do not move. Do you understand?”
She’s kneeling on the floor, one hand on her dog’s collar, the other gripping my grandfather’s chewed head, staring at me with wide-eyed fear again. “My brain and my instincts are very much at odds over understanding right now, if I’m being perfectly honest.”
“And for the love of god, do not talk.”
I need to think.
And I need to do it quickly.
6
Begonia
I’m duck-walking around the room, gathering more of my belongings and writing the inscription for my tombstone in my head—here lies Begonia Fairchild, who had only just begun to find herself when her dog inadvertently destroyed her childhood idol’s brother’s prized and priceless wooden carving of his grandfather—when Hayes Rutherford, whom to this point I had assumed to be a completely sane, if not slightly out-of-touch-with-the-common-people kind of guy, returns to the living room after a short phone call that he was speaking too softly for me to overhear, and announces, “Congratulations, Begonia. You’re now my girlfriend.”
I blink at him, rub my ears—are they full of wax?—and then blink at him again as his words filter from my ears to every other part of my body, some of which should not be listening to this. “I’m sorry, what?”