Fiona squeezed her back. “Obviously something spectacular.”
It was true, and it had to have been in a past life because this one was kind of a mess—and definitely not the shiny, happy, perfectly Instagramable version she shared with her family. When failing wasn’t an option, a person faked it until they made it. That had been her game plan since she’d arrived in Harbor City, and she had no plans to change it. As long as she could keep up that perfect-life pretense, it would happen.
“I’m putting that out there in the universe,” she mumbled later as she rode the train to her office. “Again.”
However, when she walked over to her cubicle—ignoring the curious looks and barely whispered comments from her coworkers—and found an empty cardboard box on her desk, she knew the universe was team Evil Twin. It had to be.
The light on her phone blinked on a second before her boss’s voice came through on the intercom. “Hadley, can you please come see me?”
She didn’t have to ask what about. The box kinda made that pretty apparent.
“I’ll be there in just a minute,” she responded, calling up the reserves of her fake-it-until-you-make-it pride that she wasn’t sure she had enough of for this moment.
Then she packed up the personal items on her desk into her now-full box and carried it to her boss’s corner office, head held high and sniffles on lockdown because if faking it had ever meant something, it was right now.
The only thing that kept her from losing her shit right then was the memory of Will’s shocked expression when he’d realized what they’d done. If she could survive Will thinking for even a moment she was into him, she could survive getting fired.
She hoped.
…
The Holt family country home was two and a half hours north of Harbor City. It was also a million miles from the responsibilities of being one of the two most eligible bachelors and sole heirs to the fortune Jeremiah Holt had begun amassing during a crooked poker game in a half-burned-out speakeasy in the very woods Will was staring at while trying to figure out how to get his brother to ghost that woman.
She has a name.
No. He was not going there. Not again. He’d done that too many times since that kiss at the fundraiser and it had—without a single exception—ended up with him rubbing one out like he’d never made out with someone in a coatroom before. He had. Many times. Okay, that might be an exaggeration, but it wasn’t like Hadley was special.
Shit.
Her name. He ground his teeth, the ache in his jaw attesting to how much he’d been doing that lately. This time he would not give in. He would not remember. He would not think about her soft lips, her needy little moan, her silky-smooth thighs, her— Dammit, Holt. Get your shit together.
His brother, Web, cleared his throat as he glanced down at the cutting board in front of Will as they both stood in the kitchen. “Now, I’m not much of a cook, either, but I think that onion is chopped.”
Will looked at the minced-within-a-millimeter-of-its-existence onion for the chicken cacciatore. “Just making sure.”
“And the grumbling to yourself?” Web took two beers out of the fridge, popped the tops, set one down next to the cutting board, and took a drink from the other. “I mean, if this is stressing you out, we can just order Thai.”
“I was not grumbling to myself, and I’m not stressed,” he grumbled.
Web just raised one eyebrow and pointedly nodded toward the onion Will was apparently chopping—again.
Will set down the knife. “The recipe says ‘finely diced.’”
“Do you just want to talk about it?” Web asked, needling him the way only a brother could. “You know, unpack your feelings and admit you feel guilty that Hadley lost her job because of you and that I’m going out to Nebraska to be her plus-one for her sister’s wedding.”
There was nothing—nothing—about that sentence that didn’t make Will’s gut churn. Unpack his feelings? Admit guilt? Hadley? Nebraska? He grabbed the beer and downed half of it.
“It wasn’t my fault. I talked to her boss.” It hadn’t gone well, but he’d done what he could to isolate Hadley from the fallout of a pissed-off ex-fiancée with an eternal grudge. “I can’t help it if Mia, who is on the company’s board of directors, made all sorts of assumptions.” And, if the doorman-to-doorman gossip was to be believed, all but demanded that Hadley be fired. Thank God Web hadn’t outright asked him if the gossip was true. Surprisingly, he seemed to think Hadley would never even consider making out wit
h Will.
He was tempted to tell Web the truth about why Hadley was so determined to spend time with him, why she always brought up how she could really help steer the Holt Foundation in a better direction. How she was so focused on the money that she brought a full-on spiral-bound prospective report. Then, whenever she and Web went anywhere besides that hole-in-the-wall place after rugby games, Web always picked up the tab. That she was always short for the cab ride home when Web insisted on covering the full fare. Plus, there was all the dream apartment shopping she did online, down to posting pictures on Insta of how she’d furnish her fantasy place. And the way she always seemed to be mentioning that she was between paychecks? Yeah, it sounded a little too much like the way Mia had set Will up to play the sucker with the sole purpose of marrying him for his money. That’s why he couldn’t stop thinking of Hadley. He had to protect his brother.
He needed to come up with a better way to break up Hadley’s gold-digging plans for Web.
Like admit to your brother that you kissed her?
Damn, he wished he knew why he couldn’t, but no matter how many times he’d tried today, he couldn’t get the words out, and that’s how he’d ended up with micro-diced onions. “Why do you care so much about her anyway? I’m your brother. You should feel bad that I got dragged into it.”