First and Tension (Summersweet Island 4)

“They are being punished for their betrayal; don’t you worry,” Birdie assures me with a firm nod, her ass perched on the opposite end of the counter from her sister, leaning forward to wrap protective arms around her own fiancé. Like either one of them could possibly protect their idiot men from me if I decide to do them bodily harm.

But I won’t, because I’m nice, and nice people don’t stab their friends with the letter opener sitting on the counter just to the right of Palmer’s elbow.

“It’s just… the girls were so sad and upset on your behalf,” Palmer tries to explain to me.

“We don’t like it when they’re sad and upset,” Shepherd adds, making Wren get hearts in her eyes and go all soft on me in my moment of female solidarity need.

“Yeah, we don’t get laid nearly enough when they’re sad and upset.” Bodhi chuckles from the other side of the room, where he’s lying on his back on the guest couch, tossing a tennis ball up toward the ceiling over and over.

Tess quickly snatches the ball out of the air from her spot on the arm of the couch above his head and then whips it down at Bodhi’s stomach as hard as she can.

“At least someone is on my side,” I mutter, as Bodhi groans, clutching his stomach and writhing in pain.

I get that they have their men now, and they are going to share secrets with the most important person in their lives now, and I’m okay with that. We’re all family. What I don’t get is why these morons decided to take what they heard and freaking run with it!

“We’re all on your side, and the guys are very sorry for what they did,” Birdie tells me.

“Oh, don’t stick up for them.” I roll my eyes in annoyance before taking a deep breath to find my Zen again, pasting a diplomatic smile on my face when I look around at the three men. “I thought when you guys finally came clean and admitted what was happening was all your fault that maybe you just casually mentioned it to one of your agents on accident or let it slip to your PR person, and then a shitty game of telephone spread from there. I would have still been a little cross with you, but mistakes happen. Completely forgivable.”

Shaking my head at all of them, that fiery pit of rage deep in my stomach I’ve been pushing down for the last week starts to boil and bubble, but still, I push it back as best as I can. I don’t lose my cool unless I’m at my breaking point. It’s always been my job to keep everyone organized and under control, and I’m not about to be the one who falls apart. Especially since the one and only time I ever did, I got fired from my dream job.

I’ve got this. I’m a pro at smiling through a loss. It was literally my job. Except now, I have to smile through losing my dignity. Everything is fine. Just fine.

“But oh, no.” I laugh humorlessly, trailing off with a humming sigh. “It wasn’t just a simple mistake that could have happened to anyone, was it, gentlemen?”

All three of them shake their heads with guilty looks on their faces.

“What was it you did again, exactly? Just want to make sure I have all the details correct.”

Don’t freak out and scream at them. Don’t freak out and scream at them. Cheerleaders always keep their composure, even in the face of defeat. Just wave goodbye to your pride. It’s lost forever now.

“We used a troll account on social media and posted that stuff about Quinn having a secret girlfriend in a reply to the Sharks’s formal announcement about his move,” Shepherd mumbles quickly and quietly with his head down.

“And?” I prompt, crossing my arms in front of me and grinding my teeth so hard I start to get a headache.

“And when the general public and all the digging they were doing was taking forever, we might have supplied them with your name,” Palmer adds guiltily, giving me the same damn grimace face that seems to be permanently glued to his good buddy Shepherd’s face.

“I’d just like to point out to the jury that none of us had anything to do with that grainy cell phone shot from the back of you puking in the bushes. No one even knows you were puking anyway; it just looks like he’s railing you from behind.”

“Nope. We shared that one too,” Shepherd speaks to Bodhi out of the corner of his mouth with his head still down, staring at his feet.

“Oh yeah.” Bodhi chuckles.

Hands on hips, smile on lips, calm the hell down, you bitch!

I couldn’t even make this shit up if I tried. All this chaos happening in my life right now is because my friends decided to fall in love with a bunch of idiotic yet sweetly adorable men who will do anything to make their women, and their women’s best friend, happy. Even if that means coming up with the absolute dumbest way to try to get Quinn Bagley to come out to Summersweet Island, thinking as soon as he saw me again, he’d fall madly in love with me.