Chapter 10
SPEAK EASY AND CARRY A BAG OF CHEX MIX
Rhys
She knows.
Margot knows what I’m not asking for.
My mom would be horrified—vengeance isn’t the answer, Rhys—but fuck, it feels good to let myself daydream about a world where everything goes right enough that I manage to destroy my stepfather.
To think about the man who gave the barest shit about me unless I was useful having a taste of his own medicine, yeah.
Yeah, it feels like claiming back some of who I am.
Like defending the teenage kid who needed a parent who still loved him but got stuck with fucking Xavier Yates instead.
But it’s not an idea without cost, which is why I haven’t asked for it.
Once I go there—I can’t take it back.
Revenge is messy. It comes with unexpected consequences. And I don’t know if that’s how I want to restart my life when I take my place back in the security world.
I rise from my spot on her bed, hand on the towel where it’s tucked in on itself. “Good talk. Don’t fuck me over.”
“I rarely fuck people over unless they deserve it. Don’t blow my cover.”
“Don’t make me have to.”
She’s standing just to the side of the open bedroom door, tracking my movements as I head out of the room.
I’m nearly past her when she reaches out and touches my stomach, which promptly breaks out in goosebumps like an asshole. “Did I do that?”
I look down at the round purplish bruise and ignore the visible shivers on my skin. “Yep.”
“I wouldn’t have if I’d known you were coming.”
I lift a brow at her. “Wouldn’t you?”
She smiles, her expression a mix of mischief and kindness, and I feel like I’ve been socked in the gut all over again.
This time, though, the sensation is accompanied by a distant, hazy memory of my first high school girlfriend.
She was a pain in the ass, but she was cute.
Fun too.
I don’t want to believe Margot knows the meaning of the word fun if it doesn’t come with flaying someone alive.
And I don’t believe for one second that her only motivation in lying to the triplets is that she has trust issues and doesn’t want to complicate the lies they’re telling their families.
She’s up to something else. I can feel it in that part of my gut that’s never steered me wrong.
“Have fun tonight,” I say as I saunter out of the room like I don’t want to touch her back just to see if her skin would also be the kind of asshole that would pebble up with goosebumps under my fingers. “Hear Jonas is gonna be there.”
She doesn’t reply, but I swear I can hear her thinking a solid motherfucker.
Also, I didn’t hear anything at all about Jonas Rutherford, and even if I had, I doubt it would’ve been that.
Decker said since their friends who co-own the retreat center started having kids, they don’t hit town after naptime much anymore. And Jonas’s security team would probably have a fit at an underground speakeasy.
No easy second exit route.
Margot’s security guy seems none too pleased with it either as he interviews me for a position as his backup after I get dressed in the living room while Margot’s showering.
He tells me he’s running my references and will be in touch.
I don’t wait for her to finish getting ready, and soon after my informal interview, I’m happily strolling into Silver Horn myself after giving the password at a nondescript door in the alley behind an Indian restaurant downtown.
I’ve heard of this place, but it’s the first time I’ve seen it in person.
Dim lighting, lots of low, curving furniture in reds and blacks.
Old-fashioned paintings of mountains and gold mines hang on the brick walls between red velvet curtains that can be drawn around various sections for more privacy.
Fucking swanky for a small town in the mountains.
Decker and Jack are at a seating area tucked in a back corner beyond the glossy wood bar with a curtain mostly closed around them, so I make my way over the Turkish rug-covered wood floor to join them.
Decker’s in the same clothes he was in the other day—or maybe his pants are green instead of tan today?
—and Jack’s wearing a PAC-MAN T-shirt that makes me want to hit an arcade.
Their hair is polar opposites—Jack’s military-short, his face shaved, while Decker’s as shaggy as I’ve ever seen him in both hair and beard.
Jack’s dog is on the floor beside him. He lifts his head, pants, and wags his tail a bit, but otherwise doesn’t react to my presence.
“Margie with you?” Jack asks as I take a seat in the chair farthest from the door with my back to the wall and a view out of the parted curtains.
I shake my head. “She was showering or napping or something.”
“How’s her van?”
“Seems to be running fine now.”
“Good.”
Decker eyes me, and for some reason, that makes Jack sigh.
I look between the two men. “You doing some kind of silent triplet communication?”
Lucky drops into the seat beside me, dressed in dark blue nurse’s scrubs that aren’t dissimilar to the housekeeping uniform at the retreat center, just a different color.
“Dude, why are you having Rhys investigate Margie?” Lucky says to his brothers.
“That’s exactly what I was just asking,” Jack says.
I glance back at the bar.
Bartender’s occupied, and clearly, they feel comfortable talking about their business here.
Curtains must be effective, because I can’t hear any distinct words from the conversations of the other groups of people here.
“Just watching out for all of you,” Decker says.
“You’ve been writing too much suspicious crap,” Lucky tells him.
“Look, if she’d shown up five years ago?
Before Theo got accidentally famous and Emma fell for Jonas fucking Rutherford and Sabrina hooked up with the guy who made a fortune inventing those self-sealing cereal bags, I’d have been like, cool, whatever, don’t tell Dad who you really are, but now?
Now, we’re too close to people who are people, you know? ”
I have no clue how I keep a straight face through that.
Margie could buy the whole town and have enough left over for dessert.
“I heard Margie met Jonas and went basically catatonic at work today,” Jack says.
“Can confirm,” I say. “Firsthand witness.”
And it’s mostly true.
She freaked the fuck out.
I know they say she eats sharks for breakfast, but the woman has a soft side. She’s not all steel and meticulous business calculations.
She also makes friends with old ladies and delivers peace offerings to guys she hit while defending herself.
And don’t tell me she has to be doing the housekeeping work she was hired for herself, though I’m still not certain that’s not some angle related to her real day job.
Maybe she’s also undercover to look for an angle for a hostile takeover of the retreat center.
Who knows?
“You almost went catatonic when you first met him too,” Lucky says to Jack.
“I did not,” Jack objects.
“Didn’t you though?”
“I was changing his kid’s diaper the first time I met him. It was the smell.”
That doesn’t make any sense to me initially until I remember that Jonas didn’t know his oldest kid existed for the first almost two years of his life.
Not Emma’s fault, the triplets have told me on more than one occasion. She apparently tried to get in touch with him, but his team didn’t think her messages were real.
Decker looks at me. “So? Find anything?”
Yeah, your sister’s a liar and she’s still hiding something.
She’s also someone who could get past my defenses if she wasn’t lying because I fucking like her. Appreciate her. Respect her. Something. “She makes terrible coffee, but she’s a damn good housekeeper.”
Decker’s eyes narrow like he knows I’m selectively telling the truth. “And?”
“And I’ll keep digging and watching. She made friends at the retreat center with some old lady who’s writing her first book.”
“Dude, yeah, she texted me about that yesterday.” Lucky kicks Decker’s shoe. “She probably would’ve texted you directly if you weren’t so Judgy McJudgypants.”
“She knows Mom and Dad don’t have any money, right?” Decker replies. “That staying in our cabin for a few weeks is all she’s getting?”
“Knock it off,” Jack mutters.
“Taking her side?” Decker mutters back.
“I’m fucking Switzerland, okay?”
Lucky sits straighter. “You have a new girlfriend named Switzerland, and you didn’t tell us?”
“Don’t be a literal asshat,” Decker says. “You know what he meant.”
Movement near the door catches my attention, though I probably would’ve sensed her even if I hadn’t seen her.
The woman radiates the energy of a squirrel and the tenacity of a bulldog.
Don’t think that part’s genetic.
The triplets don’t have it the way she does, at any rate. They’re good dudes, all motivated in their own ways, and they get their shit done, but they can’t touch Margot and her capacity to tackle the world.
Maybe all three of them together could get eighty percent of the way to her determination and drive.
And if that’s all she was—a businesswoman with drive and tenacity and an endless capability to keep going until she gets what she wants—I’d be telling Decker right now who she is.
But I’m still stuck on remembering the way she helped the server at that dinner, and the way she’s smiled at my friend and his brothers, and the unexpected ways that she’s not the high-maintenance spoiled rich woman I would’ve expected.
There’s more to Margot Merriweather-Brown than meets the eye.
Jack and Decker notice she’s here too.
Lucky can’t see the door with the angle of the curtains and his seat, so he’s slower to realize something’s shifted, but as soon as Bandit leaps to his feet and makes the softest woof of greeting I’ve ever heard a dog make, Lucky turns too.
Margot sails through the speakeasy like she owns the place, and based on the way Decker slides another look my way, I think he thinks so too.
Like he hadn’t expected his secret half sister to have the poise and confidence she does.
I shrug at him.
His cousin’s a barista from a small mountain town, raised by a single mother, and she’d walk through a building like that.