Enemies With Benefits (Loveless Brothers 1)

* * *That evening, after dinner, Daniel and I sit on a couch in the living room, watching Rusty.

She’s taken all the available cushions, piled them up on the floor, and is leaping onto them from the arm of the couch. I just watched Daniel try to corral her for about twenty minutes, but it was hopeless.

He gave up, exhausted.

Rusty stands on the arm of the couch, balancing carefully, her arms held out to the side. She’s tied a towel around her neck like a cape.

“Three, two, one…”

She bends her knees, crouching.

“GERONIMO!”

Rusty leaps onto the pile, already giggling.

Then she springs back up and climbs back onto the couch, ready to do it again.

“I think she’s possessed,” Daniel says to me. He’s sprawled across the other couch, the cushion behind him missing, probably in Rusty’s pile. “Is there a full moon or something?”

“That’s probably it,” I agree, keeping my voice totally neutral. “Kids just get crazy sometimes, I guess. So much energy.”

Rusty jumps onto the pile again.

Daniel sighs.

I say nothing.Chapter FifteenEliIt’s already four o’clock in the afternoon. At five o’clock sharp some pharmaceutical company’s retreat is having a happy hour and raw bar on the Presidential Patio.

The oysters were absolutely nowhere to be found.

I rub my temples, looking at the guy standing in front of me.

“What do you mean, you don’t think they’re down there?” I ask Zane, one of the college kids who currently has a summer job in my kitchen.

He frowns at me like it’s a trick question, real confusion crossing his face. I sigh inwardly, wondering why on earth Montgomery hired someone with the last name Payne to work a fast-paced job where he’d have to think on his feet sometimes.

Hell, a job where he’d have to think ever. I don’t know Zane — Lord, his name is Zane Payne, seriously? — or his parents, but they’re cousins to some of my high school classmates.

The Paynes are not known for their intellect, cleverness, or wit, is what I’m saying, and Zane Payne seems to be performing to expectations.

“I mean…” he says, and pauses. “I don’t think I saw them?”

I shiver, despite myself. We’re standing in the walk-in cooler, our breath puffing up in front of us, and neither of us know where the oysters were. I don’t even know if we have oysters, despite ordering them last week for this event.

If we don’t have oysters, I don’t know what the fuck I’m going to do.

“Okay,” I say, and push past him, swinging open the heavy door of the cooler. The kitchen’s bustling: the ovens on, pots steaming on the stovetop, my sous chef, Naomi is rolling out pasta on the stainless steel countertop for wild mushroom ravioli.

“We’ll go check the loading dock,” I say, striding through the kitchen. “Naomi, can you keep an eye on the au jus that’s on the stove?”

“Got it,” Naomi says, and I swing through the kitchen doors and into the wide, concrete-floored hallway, Zane on my heels. The kitchen is in the barn that was once a dairy barn — the other, which houses offices, was a former horse barn, I think Montgomery told me — and it still has a lot of those semi-industrial trappings.

I push open the door to the loading dock and looked around. A few pallets of stuff, all wound up tight in plastic, stand around.

There’s a pile of flower pots in a huge wooden crate. A precarious-looking plastic-wrapped stack of chairs. There’s a pallet stacked high with what, on closer inspection, turn out to be plastic-wrapped sod.

We wander through the loading dock, looking for either someone who works down here or the oysters themselves. At this point, I’ll take almost anything as long as it provides a clue.

We walk between more stacked-high stuff: old-fashioned lanterns; golf cart tires; throw pillows; cleaning supplies.

No oysters.

“Right, I don’t see them,” Zane Payne says.

We walk around a few more piles of things — bricks, fake flowers — moving deeper into the sides of the loading dock. I pray that somehow, some way, the oysters managed to find somewhere cold and dark.

My hopes are not high. I’m already trying to think of what to serve besides oysters. We’ll have to scrap the whole raw bar, obviously, but we can probably throw together some sliders, slap a few different sauces on there, and call it fancy.

That’s the last resort, though, and I clench one fist as I walk around another pallet stacked high with something or other. I really, really don’t want to fuck up this job on my second week here, especially not after the wedding cake fiasco of last weekend.

“This seems like it’s all not oysters,” Zane offers, still trailing behind me.

I move further into the loading dock, finally finding the cement wall.

“Is Zane your first name?” I ask, distracted.

“Yeah?”

Still no oysters, and I’ve hit the end of the pallets. I scan the docks, but it seems futile.