Every Little Thing (Hart's Boardwalk 2)

“Did you just call me a prostitute?”

“No, prostitutes are honest members of the oldest profession in the world—they provide sex as a service to men and men pay them for that service. You manipulate men who have money with sex to get to their money. I think that makes you a whore.”

“Bailey,” Dahlia muttered in warning.

But I was so angry I no longer cared what I said to my sister.

“If that was your idea of talking me out of this, then you’re not as smart as you think you are.”

Sadness overwhelmed me. “Vanessa, you have no intention of changing your mind whether I’m sweet and pleading . . . or just damn honest.”

“Yes”—she twisted her face in bitterness—“but hearing you plead would have made my day.”

“You little bitch!” Dahlia let me go and this time I had to hold her back. “You evil little bitch!”

“Don’t,” I murmured to my friend. “She’s not worth it.”

Dahlia whipped around to stare at me, incredulous. “But what about the inn?”

I didn’t know.

But maybe my parents did, or my brother. I strode out of reception, not giving my sister another glance, and as I made toward my office I heard Dahlia say, “You’ve got five seconds to get your boney little ass out of here before I smack the cosmetic enhancements off your face.”

As tears spilled down my cheeks, I tried to soothe the wound my sister had opened in me by reminding myself they may not be blood but my friends were the best sisters a girl could ask for.

Closing the office door behind me, I hurried to the phone.

The words spat out of me in a jumbled, frantic mess and my dad had to ask me to repeat them. His response once I did and did it slower, clearer, was a riot of curse words I didn’t think I’d ever heard my dad use before.

“This can’t be right,” Mom whimpered over the speakerphone. “You have to be wrong.”

I did not have time for my mother’s blind devotion to her children. “My inn is about to be part-owned by Ian Devlin. There is no mistake in that. Now help me or let me get off the phone. Dad, your lawyer wrote the contract. Surely, there’s something we can do.”

“I’ll call him and get right back to you,” he promised.

“I’ll call Vanessa,” Mom said. “I’ll make her change her mind.”

Good luck with that.

After I got off the phone I stared at the wall in the office.

I’d underestimated just how deep my sister’s resentment and dislike for me ran.

It wasn’t all about her weird resentment of me; I knew Vanessa didn’t hate me. The problem with my sister was her selfishness, and her inability to see beyond her own needs. She had no idea what the consequences of her selling her share of the inn to Devlin were because she hadn’t thought about it.

She didn’t want to think about it.

I called my brother. He didn’t answer.

Shit.

I tried again.

And again.

Just when I was about to give up on him calling me back, the phone rang. I snatched it up. “Charlie.”

“Bailey, what’s going on?”