Chapter 10 #2
Whatever fear-fueled momentum propelled her through the day had long since worn off. They’d need food, something beyond the binoculars to defend themselves with, and camping gear. (Fletcher seriously debated whether or not they’d have room to pack their fabulously soft sheets.)
But the manor was a minefield. Navigating it without setting off one of her colleagues required expert precision.
One hallway blurred into the next. Jet-Setter editions touting Mediterranean escapes and South American adventures breadcrumbed toward the main entertaining areas. At an intersection, Fletcher took a right turn, bypassing the prep kitchen’s swinging doors.
Waylon stopped stubbornly in the middle of the hall. “Kitchen’s this way.”
Fletcher kept walking. “I know.”
“I can hear your stomach growling from here.”
“Quit listening.”
A series of formidable steps shuffled down the hall behind her until Waylon spun her around by the shoulder. With a nudge, he pushed her back toward the kitchen. “Did I hallucinate when you said Next step, food?”
“Exactly. Food.” Fletcher ground her heels in until they stopped their death march. “Not kitchen. The kitchen is inevitably occupied.”
Waylon’s overtalkative eyebrows rose in question.
With a gulping inhale, Fletcher spelled it out for him: “Opal doesn’t go anywhere without a secret joint.
I saw her pull one out of her makeup bag after last quarter’s sales strategy meeting.
She’s definitely in the kitchen. Munchies.
Sheila’s with her because Sheila will take free drugs from anyone.
Plus, when Sheila finished suntanning this afternoon, she found Raul floating like Gatsby in the pool—”
“Raul’s dead?”
“Raul’s dead. Shot. Floating in the pool.
Keep up. So, Opal would have offered her a hit to stop her from freaking out.
Even though Sheila drives Opal crazy, Sales will stick together.
They’re pack people. Stronger with numbers.
But Opal’s ambitious, and with Theo gone, she’ll use Sheila.
Rick, too. They’ll stock up and head out to find Rick by morning. ”
“What are you?” Waylon asked. “The salesperson whisperer?”
“I’m good at my job.”
For the sake of her own satisfaction, Fletcher led Waylon closer to the kitchen doors, following the sound of crashing silverware, slamming cabinets, and an unmistakable nasally voice.
“So, I was telling Eric that Penelope said that Wendy told her that Jeremy’s parties aren’t any fun unless you do cocaine, and there I was, cocaine-less.”
Through the open sliver, Fletcher spied Sheila’s mile-high curls where she sat cross-legged on the counter. She stopped talking only long enough to plop a leftover slice of sushi in her mouth. Fletcher could practically taste the day-old tuna from where she was standing.
Next to her, Opal swung a chef’s knife through a mango, the blade chunking into a wooden cutting board. The sound startled Fletcher backward. “How do you even get yourself into these situations?”
Sheila shrugged. “I just tell people I’m a Cartwright.
Works like a charm. Nobody cares what I do when I’ve got Uncle Dyer’s money.
Like, this one time in college, I told him I needed money because tuition increased, but I cashed the check, skipped finals, and went to Saint Bart’s.
” Fletcher peeked back at Waylon, whose mouth twitched in irritation but not surprise.
Apparently a little low-stakes familial fraud was par for the course. “One night, we drank so much rum—”
“Remind me to never ask you a question ever again. Hurry and finish packing so we can go find Rick.”
The intern chewed. Swallowed. Said, “I could tell you about my spring break trip to Ibiza instead.”
“Please don’t.”
Fletcher tuned their conversation out the second she felt Waylon’s smoke-warm breath on her ear. He whispered, “Touché. Follow me.”
Dyer Cartwright owned more wine than France.
The basement’s wine cellar doubled as a tasting room, with damask wallpaper and several refinished oak tables surrounded by high-backed chairs. It was bigger than Fletcher’s apartment in every dimension. She had half a mind to barricade the door and wait the week out down here, drunk on pinot.
If she thought for even a second that Jackie would forgive her cowardice and still hand her a promotion rather than killing her on the way to the rescue boat, she totally would have.
Instead, she plucked a hundred-year-old red off the shelf and uncorked it next to their growing stack of more reasonable hiking snacks—cured meats and salted nuts and dried fruit—just for good measure.
Anytime she thought working with Waylon could be congenial, he’d do something stupid, like wield a jar of olives like a medieval torture device.
Or, when her head started to spin and she dreadfully admitted that she hadn’t eaten anything since dinner last night, hand-feed her grapes.
If hand-feed was code for started bombarding her with green grapes like tiny fruit missiles.
Two hit her in the shoulder, and a third bounced off her pith helmet.
“Would you knock it off?” she barked.
His smile hooked at the corners.
Oh no.
Rapid-fire grapes shot at her, his wrist a semiautomatic rifle. They pelted her. Bang, bang, bangbangbang. That one definitely had the stems still attached.
Fletcher smacked her hands against the table, cheeks flaming so hot it could put Cheetos out of business. “What’s the matter with you? Were you bullied at Stuyvesant or something?”
Waylon poked a grape in her open mouth. She froze in protest. The tips of his calloused fingers touched beneath her chin, lingering only enough that her jaw snapped shut.
When she was done chewing, she said, “You incense me.”
He nudged a bunch of grapes across the table. “You’ll get over it.”
Had grapes always been this good? The only thing that would make it better was a side of more wet, old grapes. She poured the red wine into a stemmed glass (Dyer would never even think about owning stemless glasses) and, when she was done, Waylon drank right from the bottle.
Fletcher sipped. If only to ignore the way Waylon was watching her, a notch forming between his brows. She could see it in her peripheral vision—deepening with an unreadable emotion. (Assuming, of course, Waylon Cartwright had emotions at all.)
They hadn’t spent this much time together, well, ever. And what time they had spent together previously was as enjoyable as a Pap smear. Neither of them knew what to do with the dead air. The only sound in the cellar was grape chomping and wine slurping.
Eventually, Waylon asked, “Did you like it? Working for my dad?”
Did. Past tense. Because she would never work for Dyer again.
Which made her suddenly entirely too aware of her own propensity for emotions.
“You don’t have to do this.”
“Do what?”
“This. Act like being around me doesn’t make you want to donate both kidneys.” At his look, she added: “You’re right. You’d never be that selfless.”
Waylon leaned his elbows onto the table, perched his chin on his knuckles. “Answer the question, Spence.”
“Yeah, mostly,” she said, throat sticky.
Dyer was a good boss and, she’d thought, a good man. At least until the will reading. And the camera smashing. And that wasn’t even touching on the sheer number of glassy-eyed animals he’d been decorating the estate with.
He’d always been calculated but never cruel. Or had she simply neglected to see it?
The surly fuckboy action figure sitting across the table, baby blues searing into her like the hottest flame, certainly had Fletcher questioning if everything she believed to be true actually was.
Three years of unspoken tension pulsed between them. He’d lost some of his boyishness since then. Cheeks slimmed and scruffed. Shoulders broader, biceps fuller. His blond curls as obnoxiously thick as ever, though, evidently immune to male-pattern baldness.
Fletcher had to clear her throat before saying, “Don’t take this the wrong way, but why would your dad have you inherit the island if you hated him so much?”
“Probably the same reason he left us all here to die. To get the last laugh.” Waylon split a grape between his teeth.
“And what right way was I supposed to take that, exactly? You should know better than anyone how my father felt about me considering you’re the reason he disinherited me in the first place. ”
Fletcher’s wineglass halted halfway to her lips. Disinherited? She forced another gulp to hide her confused frown. “You were capable of that all on your own.”
Waylon brought a hand over his heart. “Aw. You think I’m capable?”
This time, it was Fletcher’s turn to throw a seedless grape. He dodged easily, never taking his gaze off hers.
Wouldn’t she know if he’d been disinherited? After their first encounter, Fletcher had learned everything about the Cartwrights. She’d made sure of it. The level of research she’d done bordered on criminal.
Gun to her head, she could’ve recited the addresses of Dyer’s sixteen international properties, including four purchased under three different shell companies.
The numbers of five ma?tre d’s were burned into her speed dial in case she needed to call in an emergency lunch resy—not that she’d ever eaten anywhere that nice on her own dime.
The entire Cartwright lineage had been seared into her brain, so she’d always be ready for a pop quiz.
Egbert Cartwright founded Cartwright Media in 1924, excited to share tales of his travels to Bali, then Cairo, then Bermuda.
(Close call with the Triangle of it all.) Monthly issues sold like deep-fried Oreos at the Lincoln County Fair.
Which was to say, a lot. Enough that when Wilmer Cartwright inherited the company in the ’50s, the brand was invincible.
Impervious to his rollicking around the city with bottomless pockets, as Fletcher quickly learned all Cartwrights were wont to do.
By the time Dyer took command, Jet-Setter was the leading travel periodical.
Synonymous with extravagance and luxury, but still aspirational enough to convince flyover state farmers and their ruddy-cheeked daughters that a three-week European river tour was not only something they should want to do but could.
Each edition had thick, glossy pages with vibrant photographs of places Fletcher dreamed about. Cabanas with billowing linen curtains. Snowcapped Alpine villages. Historic palaces, quaint country homes, pastel buildings clinging to jagged coastlines.
She couldn’t then—and still couldn’t to this day—fathom how Waylon Cartwright could hate it so much.
Everything he had, he had because of Jet-Setter, and he’d walked away from it of his own volition.
All Fletcher had Jet-Setter to thank for was a chronic stress disorder and a growing ulcer her gastroenterologist nicknamed Steven the Anarchist. An ulcer that probably started growing on a bitterly cold December evening, navy and crisp and sparkling with a dusting of snow and strings of holiday lights.
Even an eight-thousand-square-foot wine cellar was too small of a space to share with someone who nearly ruined your life, accusing you of ruining theirs.
Of all the times she relived the gala in stress dreams and sleep terrors, she never considered what happened after security had dragged a sopping-wet Waylon out by the collar of his tuxedo jacket. Business went on as usual, and Waylon went off on his own.
“We should go,” Fletcher said, adjusting her pith helmet. Oak barrels and velvet tapestries soaked up her voice. Somehow, it was still too loud. Her skin felt hive-y, her lungs too tight. She had to get out of here. Away from him.
Waylon hesitated, only a breath, before shaking off whatever lingered between them and dredging himself upright. “What’s next on your master plan?”
“Get far away from this murder house and find somewhere safe to sleep.”
“Lucky for you, the Cartwrights have a long history of glamping. We should have some sleeping bags in the observatory. I’ll grab them, and you can take the food to the garage.
I’ll meet you there.” Fletcher’s face must have morphed against her will, because he refocused on her with a quizzical look. “What?”
She snapped back to attention. Her facial muscles aimed for some semblance of neutrality, like she hadn’t spent the last six hours violently oscillating between daydreams of roasting Waylon on a spit and feeling his calloused palms on her waist, her hips, her thighs.
The stress was seriously getting to her.
“Nothing,” she said. “I just never thought I’d live to see the day Waylon Cartwright and I cooperated. Let alone the day you used the word ‘glamping.’ ”
A darkness lingered in his gaze. Hate, or something stronger. Loathing?
All he said was “Lie low. If you aren’t in the garage in thirty minutes, I’m leaving without you.”
Whatever camaraderie had fermented between them in the wine cellar popped like prosecco bubbles the second they stepped back onto the first floor.
Waylon veered left without a word goodbye, off to the planetarium protruding off the eastern wing, where they stored camping equipment for dark-sky excursions. The kind Fletcher might have been excited to go on had this retreat been anything at all like she’d thought it would be.
Fletcher turned right. The straps of a canvas tote monogrammed with Tiffany’s initials strained against a week’s worth of rations. The garage wasn’t far—she could totally camp out there until Waylon returned.
It was a good plan. Great, even.
Until she turned the corner and ran straight into Molly.