Claim Me (Stark Trilogy 2)

“As for Tanner …” I trail off with a shrug. I suspect he’s the source, but I can’t prove it. “Doesn’t matter much. They know now. Yay,” I add dryly.

Jamie leans closer to me, her brows pulling together as she studies my face. “Are you okay? I mean, really okay?”

I almost put on my practiced smile and nod and say that everything will be fine. But this is Jamie, and she’s been my best friend since about forever. More important, she knew how much my big sister meant to me. How much I’d relied on Ashley to survive all the shit my mother put me through. The nights locked in my room with no way to turn on the light because my mother was convinced I needed my beauty sleep. The interminable hours walking with a book on my head. The second weekend of the month when I was allowed only water with lemon so that I would detox and “keep that nasty cellulite at bay.” The big things, the little things, and so much more.

I was the one to win the ribbons and the tiaras, but it was Ashley I’d envied. Ashley, who’d been allowed to live a normal life, or so I’d thought. Ashley, who’d tended to her little sister even before tending to herself.

I hadn’t thought about how my mother’s harping must have been drilled into my sister’s head, too. Or, at least, I hadn’t thought about it until it was too late and I was holding Ashley’s suicide note in my hand and looking at her neat, precise handwriting blaming her husband leaving her on the fact that she must have failed at being a woman and a wife. That somehow, she hadn’t managed to be the lady our mother had tried to train us to be.

Bitch.

I close my eyes and realize that my hand is resting on my thigh—right over the scar beneath my skirt. I’d cut before Ashley died, but once she was gone, I’d kicked it up a notch.

There are so many memories tied up in those scars, as if each small ridge of tissue represents an emotional mountain. Mostly, though, there’s Ashley.

“No,” I finally say in answer to Jamie’s question. “I’m not okay. But I was—before they brought up Ashley, I was dealing with it. I didn’t like it, but I was coping. And I’ll be okay again. I just wasn’t prepared today.”

“It will pass, you know. That’s the good and the bad about publicity. It goes away.”

“And like Tanner said, I’m the flavor of the month.” I smile, and this time it’s genuine. “Maybe next month they’ll leave me alone and focus on the rising starlet who’s dating Byron Rand.”

“Bryan Raine,” she corrects. “And don’t even try to change the subject. So come on—forget the stupid paparazzi. I want to hear the rest of what happened at the meeting.”

“Right,” I say, then finish off my martini. I’ve been telling Jamie what happened once Tanner and I reached Suncoast, and I was up to the actual meeting with the clients.

“I’ll field that,” Tanner had said when the head of IT asked me a conceptual question. “Ms. Fairchild is coming at this from a purely administrative point of view.”

“The little prick,” Jamie says when I get to that part of the story.

“No argument from me,” I say. “But I probably should have said nothing. I mean, the whole idea was to get the client to take the product and the team. That would get Tanner out of my hair for six months.”

“So what did you do?”

“When he finished, I just casually pointed out that while Tanner’s overview was entirely accurate, he left out some key information. Then I spent the next fifteen minutes running through ways to tweak the algorithm to give them a huge variety of options. I mean, conceptually, the program is brilliant, but when you get down to the actual coding, then all you really—”

“Okay,” Jamie says, lifting her hand. “I get the idea. Techie stuff. You impressed them. Tanner looked like a doofus.”

“So sweet and so true,” I admit. “But the beauty is that he didn’t look like an ignorant doofus. He knows his stuff. He just left out some important details.”

“Which is good, because they wouldn’t want some bonehead moving in-house for six months,” Jamie says.

“Exactly. I think I’d have to quit if Tanner were working down the hall from me. The guy’s toxic.”

“Well, we wouldn’t want you to quit,” Jamie says, rolling her eyes. “How on earth would you live? A million dollars just doesn’t go as far as it used to.”

I toss my napkin at her, but I’m smiling as I do it.

The bartender comes over and Jamie orders another martini. I go with a sparkling water.

“You have no sense of adventure,” she says.

I think about the rather adventurous things Damien and I have done together and bite back a very self-satisfied smile.

“So when do you get the money?” she asks.

“It’s already mine. But I need to tell Damien where to transfer it.”

“Uh, yeah,” Jamie says.

I shrug. The truth is, I’m oddly hesitant to invest it. There’s so much riding on that money, and after seeing how my mother’s horrible investments went spiraling down the drain, I’m nervous about making my own choices. Of course, Mother’s failure was about her craptastic running of the family business and her ridiculous over-the-top spending habits, but knowing that I am not my mother and believing that I am not my mother are two entirely different things.

“I’ve been talking with brokers,” I say, which is sort of true. I’ve talked with two receptionists to make appointments to talk with brokers. From the way Jamie eyes me, I’m pretty sure she’s cluing in to my deception. “And enough about the money,” I say, as the bartender returns with our drinks. I lift my water. “To you. Today a commercial, tomorrow an Oscar.”

“I’ll drink to that.”

“You’ll drink to anything.”

“True,” she says, and polishes off half the martini. “Would you have believed it?” she asks.

I don’t know what she means. “Believe what?”

“When we were in high school and you were doing all those damned Miss Corner Gas Station pageants and I was auditioning for community theater. Would you have believed we’d be in Los Angeles and I’d have a commercial and you’d be on the cusp of starting your own business? Not to mention lassoing the town’s most eligible bachelor.”

“No,” I say. “I never would have believed it.”