Chapter 46
46
Preston
“ Y ou’re a dead man!” bellows Thompson Merraker, closing in on one of PowerFun’s marketing people, brandishing his laser blaster.
The marketer goes down, having taken his last hit.
“Who’s next?!” Thompson cries. “Who’s the next dead man walking!?” He waves his blaster around like a deranged Stormtrooper.
From behind a foam obstacle, Julie Ambrose rises like a phoenix. “I. Am. No. Man!” she war cries, tearing off a series of blasts and pinning Thompson with his last hit.
He staggers, clutches his chest. He waves his fist at the sky and curses his misfortune. Then he goes down.
I’ve never seen him like this. In fact, I’ve never seen him in anything other than a suit and tie, buttoned up and deadly serious.
And this?
This is perfect.
Julie stands over her kill, crowing. “Vanquished!”
“Fair and square,” Thompson concedes, rising to kneeling and reaching out a hand to shake hers.
They’re both grinning.
They come to the side of the arena, where I’m standing, grinning myself.
“This was so fun,” Thompson says. “I haven’t had fun like this…”
“Since you were a kid?” I ask him.
“For a long time,” he admits. “Way longer than I want to think about. And what a great way to—ease tensions.”
Julie leans on the railing on my other side. “Smart move,” she says to me. “I don’t think anything you could’ve told me about Thompson’s capacity to be human would have gotten through to me.”
“Hey,” Thompson says lightly. “Go easy on your new coworker.”
She raises her eyebrows.
“Okay,” he concedes. “I have been accused of being an android before. But I do think PowerFun has a great business model, and to the extent it’s possible for us to let your culture percolate through ours—I think we’d benefit greatly from it.”
He sounds like an android again, but it’s a lot easier in this context to see that it’s a kind of awkward stiffness, not an inherent lack of soul. I hope Julie sees it too…and her wry smile in my direction tells me she probably does.
“Let me take your team out to dinner,” Thompson says.
Julie looks startled. “Um, sure,” she says.
“No business talk,” I warn them. “Or at least no promises you don’t know if you can keep.”
“Come with us,” Thompson says.
“I’d love to,” I say, “but I have work to do.”
I’m exhausted by the time I get back to my apartment. My talk with Anjali went a lot longer than I thought it would. It’s almost ten.
The last thing I’m expecting—or wanting—when I open the door is to see Shane, Quinn, and Rhys sitting on my couch.
“What the fuck are you doing here?” I ask.
“Staging an intervention,” Shane says.
“I’m not,” Rhys says. “I’m only here because they asked me to be here.”
“I don’t need an intervention,” I say.
“No, you really, really do,” Shane says.
I look at Quinn, hoping he’s prepared to be the saner of the two of them. But he just nods. “You do.”
“The thing is,” Shane says, “I know you think we’re full of shit, but there’s something to the grandfather matchmaking thing. And we’re not just saying that because it happened to work twice. We’re saying it because we saw you with Natalie, and it was—” He stops.
“You were—” Quinn attempts.
They both stare at me like I’m supposed to know what they’re saying.
“We think you should come back to Rush Creek and tell her you’re in love with her,” Shane says.
I snort. “You’re too late.”
Rhys lets out a deep sigh of relief. “I’m so fucking glad to hear you say that,” he says. “You can save yourself so much time and money by never getting married in the first place and never having to get divorced.”
Shane and Quinn glare at him.
“Don’t say it’s too late!” Shane says. “It’s never too late! It’s never too late to realize that you’ve been a tool and a dick. You can tell her you never should have put all that energy into trying to prove shit to Granddad and that you’re all done. You’re letting it go and you want to be with her.”
“No,” I say, “I know . I get all that. I mean you’re too late to convince me to try to make things work with Natalie.”
“She’s so great, Pres—you can’t mean that,” Quinn says, and it’s Quinn, man of few words and fewer big emotions, so that means a lot coming from him.
“No,” I say again, because why is it so hard sometimes for two people to have a conversation about the same thing? “I mean you’re too late to convince me because I already had my big revelation. Probably while you were in the air over the Midwest. I already gave notice to my boss.”
“You—what?” Quinn and Shane say simultaneously, even though I’ve just, as far as I can tell, done exactly what they were trying to convince me to do.
Rhys shakes his head in disgust.
“I had this big come-to-Jesus moment about how the best mergers are between the most unlikely companies—you know, opposites attract and all that—quit my job, put my apartment on the market, and I’m moving back to Rush Creek.”
“Oh,” Quinn and Shane say and exchange a glance.
“That was an expensive trip for nothing,” I say sympathetically.
Rhys glares at both my other brothers. “Told you,” he says.
“Yeah,” Quinn tells him, “but you were wrong about everything else.”
Shane shrugs. “Any chance you have any expensive Scotch?” he asks.
“Of course,” I say. “And in fairness, the trip wasn’t totally for nothing. I have something I need you to do. ASAP.”