The Schemer (Harbor City 3)

“Look, you’re gonna have to live in the same building as the guy. I say you make a peace offering.”

It wasn’t a bad idea. Who wanted to go to war with their neighbor as if they were urban Hatfields and McCoys? “Suggestions?”

“Here.” Kiki reached into her purse and whipped out a gift certificate for her company, Be Merry Catering. “The guy obviously can’t cook. I can provide a week’s worth of meals. All he has to do is call and tell me what he wants from our at-home menu.”

It was brilliant. “You’re the best.”

“True story.” Kiki lost some of her teasing humor. “So how did your last visit with Nunni go?”

A heaviness invaded Everly, and her limbs felt like concrete blocks. “About as well as could be expected with the dementia. She thought I was my mom again.”

Kiki winced in sympathy. “So you got the lecture?”

“Yep.” Just like nine out of ten visits. It wasn’t unusual for dementia patients to pick one life event to circle back to over and over again, but that didn’t make it any easier to hear—especially when it always cut straight through to Everly’s heart. “Every time I thought she’d let go and move on, she circled back around to warning me about all the evils of men who promised heaven and delivered hell.”

“Your dad sure was a piece of work.”

“That’s putting it mildly.” The man was a narcissistic, lying, abandoning asshole of the highest order.

Kiki raised her glass again. “To getting over your daddy issues.”

“What daddy issues?” she asked, but clinked their glasses anyway, ignoring the little voice that told her she was full of shit.

“Girl, don’t even pretend.” Kiki rolled her eyes. “You judge every guy who even looks at you like he has to pay the sins of your father.”

That may be true, but who could blame her after what her father had done, what had happened to her mother after, and the fact that the whole episode had so scarred her nunni that it was the one thing she fixated on most as she spent her days in the assisted living center. The whole thing was a shit show, and Everly got to live it every single day of her life. Still, there was no denying one very important fact.

“Just because Nunni has dementia,” she told Kiki, “doesn’t mean she’s wrong about self-entitled rich assholes.”

…

The next day, Tyler woke up without a trace of jet lag to find an envelope had been slipped under his door. Since it wasn’t ticking, he opened it up.

Be Merry Catering

Gift certificate for one week’s worth of at-home meals. Please call for more information.

It was signed Everly Ribinski.

What. The. Fuck. A guy burns one tray of brownies—okay, it was like his millionth time he’d failed at cooking, but she didn’t know that—and he gets told to just give up? If he’d given up, he never would have made it out of Waterbury. He’d be in some boring dead-end job instead of raking in millions doing what he loved.

He glanced down at the paper in his hand. He’d never had salt poured in a wound via gift certificate before. So that’s how it was gonna be, huh? War by passive-aggressive gift certificate?

He tossed the paper on his kitchen island and paused, considering his options. Was he overthinking this? He’d been making brownies for her to apologize for his shitty comment about her accent, and she’d called the Harbor City Fire Department. Then, she’d followed up by telling him he was so bad at cooking he needed to hire a caterer. Okay, he did suck in the kitchen, but he was learning. Plus, even after only talking to her twice he knew that woman never had a simple thought in her life. She was layers of intelligence and motives—like a fucking parfait.

The clip-clop of the passive-aggressor in question’s heels made its way across his ceiling. He listened to her catwalk her way from one end of the apartment to the other, each step sounding as self-satisfied as he was sure she was feeling.

Fine. Two can play this game.

Grabbing his phone off the island, he shot off an email to his assistant.

…

Fuzzy pink foot-shaped monstrosities with googly eyes glued to the top looked up at Everly like a deranged stalker. She held them to her phone so Kiki could see what had arrived in the package along with a note from Tyler wondering if her high heels hurt her feet as much as they hurt his ears.

“Slippers?” Kiki asked, pressing her face closer to her camera as if she really wanted to get a better look at the hideous things. “He sent you ugly-ass slippers?”

All Everly could do was nod. She took another look at the slippers, shivered involuntarily, and dropped them into the trash.