But the last thing I needed was some hookup with one of Bowie’s employees that was never going to last, making future nights like tonight awkward for everybody.
Specifically, Mom and Bowie.
They needed no awkwardness.
They needed no troubles.
They needed smooth sailing.
Because after the downright rotten, heinous, traitorous shit Uncle Corey put them through, they’d earned it.
And they deserved it.
So far, it seemed, so good.
We all got along, even Matt dug Bowie, and Matt was a loner. Sometimes you just never knew with him. But he openly liked Bowie.
Also, Dad and Bowie got on with each other. They weren’t best buds, but they could share space amicably. Which was useful, since Mom and Dad were still the best of friends and none of us wanted one of those ugly situations where they had to share us between them so we never got to have both of them together.
All of us together.
Dad hadn’t come up for tonight, which would just be weird, but he’d been around the entirety of Christmas and it’d all been good.
Last, Mom and Bowie were just…happy.
Pretty much all my life I’d seen Mom that way (and I didn’t think too long about that).
But I got the impression from the boys and Bowie (not to mention Harvey, Bowie’s best friend) that wasn’t de rigueur with Duncan “Bowie” Holloway.
He was a great guy. Outside of my dad, the best.
I was glad he finally had that happiness.
At the same time, it haunted me.
So no, I didn’t need any entanglements with the resident player at River Rain Outdoor Stores Corporate Headquarters. Even if he did something cute, like run a program for kids to get them out into nature.
But Duncan had these parties every year, and he liked throwing them. I could tell by the way Mom shared how he’d been prepping for it, refreshing the evergreen boughs of their Christmas decorations, cooking with Bettina, their housekeeper, lugging in trays and boxes of catering and decorating stuff.
Hell, I’d done a walkthrough before I’d come up to start getting ready and the place was decked out.
The motif was pinecones, cream candles, copious strings of miniature LED lights threaded through winter greenery, and juniper-colored cloth napkins (Bowie was a famous environmentalist, even the glasses for beer were real glass, definitely not a paper napkin or a piece of plastic in sight).
Still, it was Bowie’s brand of festive, and it said a lot about him that he’d have the seventy employees he employed in his Arizona stores into his own home for a big bash on New Year’s, doing this every New Year’s Eve.
It was very Bowie.
And I couldn’t hide in my (and Sasha’s) bedroom because a handsome man who’d probably brought a fresh-faced, bubbly mountain girl as a date was downstairs.
I had to get down there.
My stain had dried, and I looked amazing, so I had no further excuses not to be down there.
So I slicked on the gloss over the stain, dropped the tube in my evening bag embossed with swoops of pearls (and I did have my phone, I went nowhere without it), and I threw one more glance at myself in the mirror.
Divine.
I headed out.
In a fairy tale, he would have been at the foot of the stairs, catching my eye the moment I appeared at the top of them and staring at me while I drifted down as if he was having difficulties not falling at my feet the minute I cleared the last step.
Up until a couple of years ago, I could convincingly make the argument my entire life was a fairy tale.
But I’d learned.
No life was a fairy tale.
I descended the stairs and cleared the growing crowd in Bowie’s massive entryway with its crowning mezzanine and hit the great room.
I then wasted no time going to one of the two bars Bowie had set up that had a bartender who could make mixed drinks and pour chilled glasses of champagne and craft beer from a tap (there were hammered copper tubs stationed around the space filled with bottles of beer, if you preferred, as well as small blue bottles of a local company’s sparkling water, so if you liked, you could also help yourself).
I got my flute of champagne and floated away from the bar, took a sip, and above the rim of my glass, surveyed the candlelit, festive-LED-lit, lights-on-dim, soft-rock-coming-from-the-Sonos space.
And I saw it was a party in the mountains given by a mountain man.
But it sure was pretty.
I also saw that, apparently, Judge wasn’t keen on meeting the famous Imogen Swan, because he wasn’t one of the first to arrive.
“Green Acres is apparently the place to be.”
This was uttered directly into my ear from behind.
I turned, looked up and saw my handsome brother standing there.
The blood one.
Matthew.
“It’s good you, Mom and Sash are all in to cover the whole satin and sequins front so the locals didn’t have to concern themselves with that,” he continued to tease.