The Stepbrother (Red's Tavern 5)

Maybe even guys I could flirt with to get my mind off of him.

I took a deep breath, stretching my arms above my head in the passenger seat.

“And with civilization comes cell service,” I said, looking down at my phone. “Now I wait for the avalanche.”

“Avalanche?”

“All of the missed calls and texts,” I said.

“Well, if all of the highways are like this, we’ll have an hour before we’re downtown, anyway,” Fox said. “You’ll have plenty of time to respond to your adoring fans.”

I sat and looked down at my phone, waiting for all of the notifications to start pouring in.

To my surprise, instead I heard Fox’s phone beeping and vibrating like crazy in the center console tray, as all of his notifications came in. Cocoa was in the back, and she moseyed up to the front, cocking her head curiously at all of the sounds.

“It’s okay, girl,” I said, giving her a neck scratch. “My phone’s going to make a bunch of those sounds, too.”

But over the next minute, my phone barely made a peep. When I looked down to check it, there were only four notifications.

Four. After I’d been offline for three entire days.

It was two boring emails: one from my bank and one from a fabric store newsletter I’d signed up for ages ago. There was also one missed call from my dentist, reminding me that I had an appointment coming up after my trip.

And then one text message from Red, from yesterday. I navigated to the text message, hoping to God it would at least contain some sort of juicy gossip or intriguing news.

>>Red: Hope it’s going well. Give me a call anytime.

I tapped out a quick reply to Red, letting him know I was fine and back into civilization.

“I guess not posting on Instagram for four days means everybody forgets who I am,” I said.

Fox glanced down at his own phone like he was staring at an ugly insect. “I wish I could say the same.”

“What? You just got about eighty billion notifications. Don’t you feel special? Popular?”

He puffed out a small laugh, shaking his head. “I guarantee you that 70% of those are from my assistant or one of my finance people or others wondering about Chamberlight. The other 30% are probably either angry texts from one of my exes, or my former best friend giving me a half-assed apology for the tenth time.”

I let out a long breath, tossing my phone away onto one of the couches in the back of the RV before relaxing back on the passenger seat again. I had been so excited to get service again, picturing dozens of built up comments on my Instagram pics and plenty of new messages on one of the dating apps. Now I wished the damn phone didn’t exist.

That was something I hadn’t felt in… years.

Fox was right. Traffic had slowed to a crawl on the highway, and it looked like we had a while before we’d be at the fancy hotel.

“You said your former best friend is trying to apologize to you?” I asked. I needed to get some sort of gossip, even if it had nothing to do with my life.

Fox ran a hand through his hair, staring out the front windshield at the sea of cars in front of us.

“Former best friend, yes,” he finally said. “Jack apparently got along better with my ex-girlfriend than I did.”

“Yikes,” I said. “That sounds bad.”

“It wasn’t fun.”

“When was that?”

“A little over a month ago.”

I lifted my eyebrows. “You lost your girlfriend and your best friend just a month ago?”

He nodded once.

I couldn’t believe it. It put in perspective why he might have wanted to leave New York for a while, and also why he might be drinking more heavily than usual.

Fox had seen a lot of loss in his life, actually. Behind all of his success was a lot of tragedy that most people didn’t see.

“Christ,” I said softly. “I’m so sorry. If that happened to me a month ago, I’d still be bawling into pints of Ben and Jerry’s three times a week, at least.”

“I told you I needed a break from New York,” he said. “Jack’s trying to apologize to me and say it’s no big deal, but he’s still sleeping with her.”

“What an asshole.”

“Tell me about it,” he said. “I really thought she was marriage material.”

I cocked my head to the side. “What does that even mean? Marriage material?”

He shrugged. “I think it’s what I look for in everyone I’ve ever dated, really,” Fox said. “Someone who would work with me. Both in public and at home. Someone who makes sense in my life.”

“So, someone you can take out to fancy events?”

“When you put it like that, it sounds bad,” Fox said. “But I guess that’s what I’ve always looked for. Not that it’s worked. I’ve dated many girls who seemed like marriage material, but we ended up with nothing to talk about and nothing at all in common.”