I Flipping Love You (Shacking Up 3)

Pierce taps the counter. “I said that out loud, huh?”

“You sure did. Good job holding your cards close, dude.” Lawson shifts his attention back to me and clears his throat. “Okay. No cut on commission. Can’t blame me for trying.”

“Okay.” Marley smiles, no longer pissed off at the situation. “Now that that’s settled, you want me to see if I can get you in to see the property before it hits the open market?”

“Exactly. You think you can make that happen?” Lawson sips a seaweed green shake. It coats his mustache and makes it look like he sneezed all over his upper lip until he licks it away.

“Let me make a few calls.”

Of course Marley can make it happen. She’s the agent on the house Lawson is talking about. All she has to do is call the owner and set up a walk-through. All I need to do is draw up the paperwork. And we’ll make full commission on the sale, which could put us in an excellent position financially. It means we might finally be able to finance our own flip.

I don’t like how much it seems like a setup on both sides. It feels … dishonest not to let them know that we’re the selling agents.

But I know Marley, and she isn’t going to tell him we’re the selling agents until she absolutely has to. Not when he’s pulled his house from the market in the eleventh hour. She slips her phone out of her purse and crosses through the living room. Flipping the latch on the sliding glass door, she steps out on the deck, leaving me alone with Pierce and Lawson.

“So, kind of ironic that you’re the lawyer and he’s the one with the piercings, huh?” I gesture between them and wish my mouth and brain would work in tandem instead of independently of each other at times like these.

“Right?” Lawson grins. “And I even have the junk jewelry. Guess you already know my brother here is too straight an arrow to decorate his dick.”

It’s on the tip of my tongue to tell Lawson it actually curves a little to the right and is fantastic without any decorations, but luckily Pierce speaks before I do.

“Really? Was that a necessary share?”

Lawson inclines his head in my direction. “She’s the one who brought it up.”

Pierce sighs. “If we’re going to look at a house, you need to change out of your hippie gear and dress like a real human.”

“I’m not changing, and I’ve already been in that house. I know what it looks like. I want it. We just need to know what we have to offer to get it.”

“Do you mind if I talk to my brother alone for a moment?” Pierce asks me with a tight smile.

“Oh! No, not at all. I’ll just step outside.” I’m glad for the reprieve. I join my sister on the deck. Now that I’m thinking with my brain and not my sex parts, I realize I should’ve followed her in the first place, then maybe I wouldn’t know about Lawson’s peen piercing. Those two men couldn’t be any more opposite.

Marley’s heels lie on the deck, while she paces the length in bare feet. She gives me some kind of eyebrow wag with a little thumbs-up, then she inclines her head to the right.

I glance over and do a double take. Beyond the loungers that are set up facing the beach with a perfect view of the volleyball nets in front of our rental, and the side table with what appears to be a set of broken binoculars, lies a dog. Apparently, Pierce really does have one.

Trip—I think that’s his name—lifts his head when he sees me and pops up, running around in a circle before he trots his lopsided way over. He only has three legs. I’m instantly in love with this dog, and a little bit more enamored with Pierce. Trip seems to be completely oblivious to the fact that he’s missing a leg.

I rub that space under his chest that makes so many dogs happy, and his tail thumps on the boards.

That’s when I realize it wasn’t the dog Marley was pointing out, but the set of dolls perched in lounge chairs, tiny glasses with little umbrellas in them poised in their plastic hands. Huh. Odd. Maybe one of them has a kid. Oh God. What if I slept with a single dad? What if he wants me to be his baby mamma?

I can barely handle doing my own laundry and cleaning up after myself and my sister, let alone a little child. It’d be one thing to mess up my own offspring, but I don’t want to be responsible for messing up someone else’s.

“Actually, we’re in the area. We could arrange to meet in say, twenty minutes? They’re very keen to move quickly. Yes. Definitely. We’ll see you then.” Marley ends the call and does a little hip shimmy, then looks over her shoulder to make sure we’re not being watched from the other side of the sliding glass door. “It’s on. We need to make sure they give their best offer up front. They were planning to follow the listing for their place as a gauge, but I said if we start at $799K, that we should get a little over $800K for it with so few on the market and what other comparable properties have gone for.”

“Does this feel dodgy to you?”

“Does what feel dodgy?”

“Don’t you think we should tell them we’re representing the sellers too? What if they think we held off on putting up the property until tomorrow to scam them?” My fingers are at my mouth and I’m at risk of biting my nails.

Marley’s confused expression shifts to understanding. She takes my hand in hers and squeezes. “We didn’t do anything wrong, Rian. You’re not scamming them. We’re going to make a legitimate sale like we always do, no messing with numbers, no playing odds or people.”

I take a deep breath. “It’s just … he’s a lawyer and he’s in real estate. What if he knows people who knew Dad? He could figure out who we’re connected to and then no one would want to buy from us.”

“Take a breath, Rian,” she says softly. “We’re completely ethical here. Is it crazy that you’ve slept with this guy and now we’re potentially selling them a house? Sure, but it has nothing to do with what happened with Dad. You need to stop owning that; you were a kid and you had no idea what he was doing.”

I exhale my panic on a nod. Logically, I know she’s right, but all of these pieces coming together make me anxious, as does the fact that I’ve slept with a relative stranger—and would like to do it again, despite current circumstances. Beyond that, being so close to affording our own flip makes me as antsy as it does excited. And maybe it has something to do with being so close to the Mission Mansion this weekend, where so much of our history is tied up. As much as I want to be close to it, I still get nervous. We’ve done our best to distance ourselves from our family’s scandalous past, but if it ever came out, our careers in real estate could come to a grinding halt. Who would want to buy houses from a couple of girls whose family is responsible for stealing millions of dollars through real estate fraud? It doesn’t matter that we weren’t responsible, a sullied name taints the generations that follow.

“Do you think we should reconsider giving them a break on commission since we’ll be getting all of it?” I fight to keep my fingers from migrating to my mouth.

“Let’s see what they offer first.” Marley motions to the dolls, probably to distract me. “What the hell do you think this is about?”

“Maybe one of them has a kid?”

“Yeah. I thought that too, but those dolls are too perfect. Like they’ve never been played with, and there was one in the hallway. It’s odd, right?”