Sneak Peek Chapter 1
RYAN
“Ithink I’m going to be sick.”
I looked up from my phone to see a stricken expression on my mom’s face. We were in her study in our family home in Chicago. The morning sun streamed in through the windows and cast bright pools of light across the thick carpet, but right now, it really did look like that carpet was in danger.
Mom stared at her laptop screen, her cheeks white as snow and her eyes wide.
“Whatever it is, I’m sure it’s going to be fine,” I said calmly.
She stood behind her intricately carved antique desk with one hand pressed to her chest and the other gripping her laptop. “It’s not going to be fine, Ryan. Look at this.”
I set my coffee and phone aside and stood from the armchair, knowing full well she was probably just freaking out over nothing. Naturally anxious, there were days now when the slightest hiccup could cause her to have a nervous breakdown.
Meanwhile, I’d learned that most problems in life could be solved with either money or a well-placed phone call—and the good sense to know which to use first. I strode across her office with the intention of checking on the problem and then talking her off the cliff, but when I glanced at her screen, I realized that this time, she might have a damn good reason to be worried.
“Oh. Uh, oops?”
“Oops? This is not an oops. It’s a disaster.”
Yeah, I can’t argue with that. I gave her shoulder a quick, comforting squeeze and wondered why she’d booked a warehouse in the Meatpacking District for a bridal shower in the first place.
Technically, it was an art gallery now, an expensive, very fashionable gallery I knew allowed private events, but they also regularly displayed the kind of art that would make any parent question the existence of morals in modern society.
Unfortunately, that was exactly the kind of exhibition they currently had installed.
She thrust the laptop toward me. “The photographs won’t be taken down for the event, Ryan.
What am I supposed to do? When I made the booking, the gallery owner said we’d have exclusive use.
These images are crude! This isn’t bridal.
It’s basically porn.” Her voice dropped to a whisper when she uttered the word “porn” and I struggled not to chuckle at her panic.
“I think that just means no one else will be allowed in.” I glanced back at the photos prominently displayed on the gallery’s homepage. “Not that they would dismantle their entire curated display.”
The level of nudity in them balanced on a knife’s edge between artistic and pornographic, but the way those naked bodies had been arranged was sexually provocative. To say the least.
“This is a bridal shower for my friend’s daughter,” Mom whimpered.
“I was entrusted with finding a venue. They’re going to be furious, Ryan.
” It looked like she might have a stroke for real this time as she collapsed into the chair behind her desk and buried her head in her hands.
“She’s such a sweet girl. She cannot have her bridal shower surrounded by… by…”
She waved feebly at the screen instead of finishing the sentence, her shoulders trembling as she let out a choked sob.
“She can’t have it surrounded by art?”
“That is not art.”
“Incorporate it with a bridal shower game. Don’t women go feral for those at these kinds of parties? Pin the tail on the naked aristocrat.”
“Ryan!”
I bit back a smile. “Relax. I’ll fix it.”
Clearly, she valued this friend more than her own blood pressure, and as it happened, she was trying to arrange this bridal shower in the city where I was trying to live full time. My family kept trying to bring me back into the fold here in Chicago, but I’d been mainly in New York since college.
“What good would I be if I hadn’t made a few connections over there?” I teased, squeezing her shoulder again before pulling my phone back out of my pocket. “Just keep breathing. I’ve got this.”
Less than two minutes later, the crisis had been averted and I pocketed my phone again. Smiling, I sank to my haunches in front of her. It still killed me to see her so frazzled and frail. Once upon a time, this tiny, silver-haired woman had been a powerhouse on the social scene.
Despite her natural tendency toward anxiety, she’d arranged entire galas in less than a day and she’d never run into a problem she couldn’t solve. That wasn’t true anymore. Thanks, Dad, for being a criminal piece of shit.
“Hey, look at me,” I said gently, using a tone I only ever used with her. “The shower is now in a restaurant that overlooks Central Park. It’s got a beautiful terrace and no naked people on the walls.”
Her shoulders slowly dropped as she lifted her eyes to mine. “Really?”
“Really. Now all you need to do is let me know what the blushing bride wants for the décor. We’ve got this.”
“Oh, Ryan.” She wrapped both arms around me in a tight hug, her body still trembling against mine, but she’d be okay now. “They’re going to be so pleased to have your help with the wedding as well.”
My eyes slammed shut. Of course, my mother would’ve taken this as a literal invitation that I’d help with the actual wedding too. Fuck. My. Life.
I could try to say no, but once Nora Thayer had an idea, she had a tendency to run with it. Just ask my sister, who’s now married to a guy she didn’t even really know when she said yes.
Jane and Alex were happily married now, deliriously so, but it hadn’t started out that way. The day they had shown up at the courthouse to get married, with my mother and Alex’s brother in tow, they’d barely known each other’s names for a week.
Mom released me and pressed a kiss to my cheek. “Thank you, darling. I don’t know what I would’ve done without you.”
I sighed, still considering putting up a fight until I saw the hope in her watery eyes. Curse my soft heart. I can’t say no, can I?
Mom had been through so much and she was only just starting to resurface from the haze of the public humiliation that had turned her into a loopy hermit for the last few years.
As far as I knew, this was the first big social event she’d been involved with since my father’s arrest and subsequent imprisonment for fraud and embezzlement.
I’d encouraged her to go for it, assuring her it would be good for her to get back out there, and I would be an ass to leave her flailing in the wind.
It had taken a lot for her to get this far, and if this shower was a success, it would work wonders for her self-esteem and for her return to the social scene she loved so much. I didn’t much care for it, but it had been her whole life for a long time.
“You’re welcome,” I said finally, offering her a small smile before I squeezed her shoulder again and then pushed to my feet. “I’ve got to go, but I’ll talk to you soon, okay?”
She inclined her chin in a nod, drawing her laptop back across her desk.
I got out of there before she could assign me as the designated florist for the wedding too.
When the front door shut behind me, a driver was waiting in a sleek black town car outside and I climbed into the back seat, loving the fact that we had stuff like this again.
“Thayer HQ, Tim.”
The driver nodded. “Right away, Mr. Thayer.”
I grinned and settled back in the plush seat.
I could probably try to be modest and pretend my family’s fall from grace hadn’t bothered me at all, but that just wasn’t true.
It had sucked ass and I, for one, was savoring all the little luxuries that were slowly returning to our lives.
The leather seat was softer than a cloud.
I loosened my tie and looked through some emails, scrolling through my phone while Tim drove me to pick up my brother on the way to the office.
The door opened and Holden climbed in, wearing gym clothes and sweating like a pig. He grinned as he dropped into the seat beside me. “Man, it’s nice that Jane can afford to hire us drivers now.”
I was about to agree, but then he slammed the door shut and I recoiled instead, suddenly breathing air that smelled like old socks. “Are you not familiar with the concept of showering after a workout?”
Naturally, Holden ignored me. He’d graduated from Columbia in the spring after a few stops and starts, the result of some reckless antics and bad behavior. These last couple months, it was like he believed graduation had made him invincible.
He was home for the summer, doing a whole lot of nothing like it was a completely acceptable use of his ivy league education.
“What were you doing?” I asked incredulously as the stench permeated every molecule of previously breathable air in the car. “Holy shit, Holden. Did you do your workout in a pig sty?”
“I feel fantastic.” He smirked and leaned back in the seat, scrubbing his hands over his face and letting out a weirdly husky groan. “You should come with me tomorrow. My new trainer is a beast.”
“Literally, from the scent of things.”
As he laughed, my phone buzzed in my hand with an incoming email from our mother about the wedding I’d accidentally volunteered to help with. I cursed under my breath, which apparently invited him to lean across the seat and peer at my phone. “What’s that?”
“Just something Mom roped me into.” I raked my fingers through my hair as I read the basics. “I have no idea how I’m going to get out of it.”
Holden skimmed the message too, then barked out a laugh that made my eyebrows mash together instantly. I knew that laugh and it sounded a lot like he thought he knew something I didn’t.
“What’s so damn funny?” I asked.
He arched an eyebrow at me. “You don’t recognize the name of the bride?”
“No. Should I?”
“Maggie Pembroke, Ryan.”
“Is that supposed to mean something to me?”
H sighed. “Come on, Maggie Pembroke. We practically grew up with the Pembroke kids until Dad went and ruined our lives.”
Maggie. Maggie. Maggie. Usually, I was pretty good with names and I never forgot a face, but this must’ve been one I’d buried. Maggie Pembroke. Maggie?—
A memory suddenly flickered in my mind. It started with a whole lot of pink taffeta and my mother’s voice sending me on a mission to find the birthday girl. She’s going to miss her grand entrance to her very own thirteenth, Ryan. Find her.
I’d been maybe sixteen. Or seventeen. Somewhere around there.
The details came back in pieces first, then suddenly streamed in like an unstoppable tide. Yeah, I remember her now.
“She’s the girl who bit my hand.”
Holden frowned. “What the hell are you talking about?”
“Nothing,” I said, slamming back in my seat. “This is just great. That’s what.”
The wedding I’d agree to help with only because of my mother’s involvement was for none other than the little demon who’d once nearly bitten through my finger.
I’d gone after her that day, alright. Annoyed to have been tasked with finding the runaway birthday girl, I’d stomped around the entire venue until I’d finally found her hiding under a table in the back of her own party.
The caterers had been setting up this perfect princess dessert spread and I’d seen her slipper sticking out, but when I’d tried pulling the tablecloth back, there had been a flash of teeth and searing pain. I still had the damn scar she’d left on me for my efforts.
None of which boded well for the fact that I’d once again been tasked with doing something that involved her.
My eyes dropped to the faint silver line on my hand.
I hadn’t thought about that day—or those people—for years, but my chest squeezed as all those repressed memories of Maggie Pembroke threatened to flood past the meticulous Thayer-Steel wall I’d built in my mind over the last decade.
She’d been a child too afraid to do what was being asked of her.
Although in fairness to her, her thirteenth birthday was way more about her parents showing her off to all the elite in their social circles, not about Maggie herself.
I would have understood if she bit one of her parents’ fingers.
I might have even felt sympathetic toward her.
But there had been no reason to lash out at me and scar me for life.
“Why is Mom emailing you about her wedding?” Holden asked.
I shook my head, not wanting to talk about this. “I was trying to be nice and now I’m being punished for it. Let’s leave it at that.”