Chapter 6
“Have you seen Brett today yet? Has he said anything about the dress?”
I leaned an elbow on my desk and hid my face, as though that could hide me from the woman on the other side of the phone.
But there was no hiding from Avery. She knew by now that I didn’t answer my cell phone during work hours, and had taken to calling the main line—which I was responsible for answering—instead.
“If he hasn’t complimented you in that dress,” she went on, “he’s a dick, is all I’m saying. That dress is fire.”
This was the problem with borrowing clothes from her. It made it harder to pretend I’d dressed for myself instead of to get Brett’s attention.
“God, I wish I’d never told you,” I groaned. “Wait. I didn’t tell you. I wish I’d never told Nolan.”
“You should have told me.”
No, I should have kept my mouth shut. Telling Nolan had meant that Avery was at the door waiting to greet me when I’d finally made it home on Sunday, and because I hated looking like a total loser in front of my goddess of a sister, I’d had to reframe my rejection into something less rejectiony.
“We’re feeling things out,” I said, repeating what I’d said then. “Remember? Taking things slow. Don’t start making plans for renovating my room yet.”
She sighed in a way that made me think she really had been making plans for my departure. “What exactly does feeling things out mean?” As though she hadn’t asked every day this week.
It was Friday.
It had been a long week.
I pulled a Post-it note off the pad on my desk and wrote buy lottery ticket and underlined it twice. She wanted me gone? Well good luck finding an insta-babysitter when I won the Powerball. “It means we aren’t rushing into changing our relationship. If something more happens, it happens.”
“Does he even know that you want it to be more? Because if he does, then ‘not rushing into changing things’ sounds like he’s trying to nicely say he’s not interested.”
She was trying to be helpful. Part of me knew that.
But the bigger part of me was too pissed that she automatically assumed I’d been rejected and even more humiliated that she was right.
“You know what, Avery? I don’t need your fucking advice.”
“Ah. I see. Instead of scheming how to get one Sebastian who isn’t interested into giving you his attention, you’re now scheming how to get a different Sebastian who isn’t interested into giving you his attention. Same shit, different Sebastian. Got it.”
Avery’s default mode was bitchy when she got defensive.
Like sister, like sister. “At least I don’t have to quietly get my orgasms from a vibrator while my husband falls asleep before the baby for the seventh night straight.” Hashtag intimate details I shouldn’t know about my family but do because I sleep twelve feet down the hall.
It was low, especially since she’d confessed she’d been feeling down about the lack of sex since the baby was born, but her remark had been low too. Mad and hurt and wanting the last word, I hung up before she could say anything back.
Then, because I didn’t feel any better, I picked up the receiver and slammed it into the cradle again.
And then I pasted a fake and overly friendly smile on my face because the glass doors swung open, and a very well put together brunette walked in.
I expected her to cross the lobby to check in with me, but she stood in place for a moment, looking a little lost. Staring hard in my direction.
Probably hoping that I could tell her where she should be, but in my fragile state, her stare felt hateful, and I had to try very hard not to crawl under my desk with the Oreos that I secretly kept in the back of my bottom drawer.
“How may I help you?” I asked when she finally crossed over to me because I wasn’t going to scream at her from several yards away, no matter how lost she looked.
“Yes, I have an appointment with Scott Sebastian.” The maliciousness I’d thought I’d seen must have been imagined. Now all I sensed was friendly professionalism with maybe a trace of nervousness. “Tess Turani with Conscience Connect. Ten a.m.”
I pulled up Scott’s calendar, realizing this was the first time I’d looked at it all day.
In fact, I’d barely looked at it all week.
In the past, I would have had each hour memorized, searching for the best times to pop into his office with made-up paperwork to sign or a question that I already knew the answer to.
I really was over him, wasn’t I?
I’d spent my energy this week thinking about Brett instead, but pining for him looked a lot different than pining for Scott.
I’d tried very hard to act natural around him, like the night we’d spent together and his follow-up rejection hadn’t affected me in the least. He needed time to see that I wasn’t into Scott anymore, and hard as that was for me to give, time was what he’d get.
My surprising self-discipline had kept me from stalking his calendar. Which was why, when I didn’t find Tess Turani on Scott’s, I had to do a search for her name to find she was on Brett’s.
“Oh, there you are. You’re not meeting with Scott; you’re booked with Brett.” My ribs felt tight. As if there was something lodged in between them. He’d called up earlier to tell me where he’d be for his pitch meeting today, but he hadn’t given any indication that it was with a woman.
A young, attractive, big-eyed, beautiful-skinned woman.
Well, hello, Green-Eyed Monster, my old friend.
“He’s waiting for you in the meeting room.” I somehow managed to not sound like an asshole. “I’ll take you back there.”
“Ah. Okay. Thanks.” She sounded surprised. She’d thought she was meeting with Scott Sebastian, the VP of the department, instead of just an account manager.
But she was meeting with Brett Sebastian—the man who could make a woman come in twenty different ways in one night and know the exact perfect breakfast to make her the morning after. Did she have any clue she was about to enter the realm of a god?
With the polite receptionist attitude I’d been hired to exude, I stood up and moved around to the front of the desk. As soon as my back was to her, though, I scowled. Her expensive shoes clicked on the marble floor behind me, evidence enough that she was following.
At the meeting room, I pushed open the door and ushered her in, careful not to catch Brett’s gaze because I wouldn’t have been looking for it as Just a Friend.
But when she walked past me and Brett offered her an especially warm greeting—the kind of greeting reserved for people who’d met before in a non-business setting—I couldn’t help myself, and I threw a glance in his direction.
And that tight thing between my ribs twisted deeper.
He definitely knew her.
He definitely wanted to know her more.
Leaving the door open—because I was a masochistic asshole—I stepped to the side, out of their sightlines, so I could cling to the wall and listen in. As far as I could tell, neither of them even noticed that their conversation wasn’t exactly private, which only made the twisting worse.
Who the fuck was this chick?
It didn’t take long to figure out that she’d been the woman Brett had met on Saturday night. The one he’d told me about minutes before I decided that I should finally jump the guy’s bones. The one he’d said he wanted to see again.
Was she who he’d been thinking about the whole time he’d been with me? When he’d fisted my brown hair in his hand, had he pictured her darker locks? Had he turned me around as often as he had so that the fantasy was better played out in his head?
I felt like I wanted to throw up.
And cry.
And be a different person than I was. Someone who was worthy of Brett’s affections.
Someone who hadn’t wasted ten years chasing impossible conquests like Scott because she was too scared to discover the possible conquests didn’t want her either.
Someone who wasn’t always told no when she put her feelings on the line.
At the sound of my name said in a way that suggested it had been said a few times, I blinked up to see Matthew in front of me. “What was that?”
“Did Paris email you the write-up for the feature in Business Trends?” he asked impatiently.
I pulled my attention away from the dark recesses of my mind and tried to picture my inbox. I’d scanned it earlier but hadn’t made it through all my emails. “I think so. Let me forward it to you.”
At my desk, I found the email and sent it on then was pulled to find the brochures that had supposedly been delivered from the printer but no one had seen and then to sign the technician order to test the office Wi-Fi before I was able to go back to the meeting room under the guise of making copies in the next room.
Paper in hand that didn’t need to be duplicated, I stood again outside the door and listened. “I’m one of the lesser Sebastians,” Brett said, a joke that I’d heard him spout on several occasions when people discovered he wasn’t from the most famous/powerful line of the Sebastian family tree.
Personally, I hated it, but the self-deprecation seemed to charm people into relaxing. “Not a descendent of Irving. Ida, his sister, was my grandmother. I’m just a cousin. Much less powerful, much less formidable.”
I strained my ear listening for her response and heard my name instead, coming from the opposite side of me. “I’m making copies!” I exclaimed too enthusiastically.
Scott—one of the greater Sebastians, according to Brett’s joke—gave me a quizzical look. “That’s...good. Do you know where Brett is meeting with the rep from Conscience Connect?”
“Oh, yes.” I perked up. “Right in there.”
This was good. Scott Sebastian always upstaged his cousin.
Not good for Brett, obviously, but he generally seemed to take it in stride.
He was probably used to it, having been a “lesser Sebastian” for his whole life, and hopefully it didn’t wound him too badly right now to have Scott sweep in and steal Tess Turani’s attention. But honestly, I didn’t care if it did.
Yeah, I was a shitty friend.
Heartache and rejection could do that to a gal.
I was still standing there when, inevitably, Brett came out of the room not a minute later, closing the door behind him. “Hey,” he said.
“I’m making copies,” I said, a lot less obviously than when I’d shouted it at Scott. “Meeting go well?”
“Yeah.” He seemed unsure. Then more confidently. “Yeah. I think we’re finally on track to find a sponsorship that can really help our image.”
“That’s great. I see Scott seems to be interested.” Like I said—a shitty friend.
Brett hardened. “Yeah. It does. I’m glad, for Tess’s sake.”
“Tess. You’re on a first-name basis with her already.
” My vow to keep it cool around him was very close to breaking.
Usually, Brett was ultra-professional, always using last names with all outside business associates, even internally, and while the Just Friend version of Eden would definitely have pointed out the change in his behavior, it would have come out more teasing than accusing.
“I told you about her,” he said stiffly. “Met her at the party.”
“You did?” Not smooth, Eden. Not smooth at all. “Oh! I think the copier’s finished. If you’ll excuse me…” I slid into the copy room, shutting the door behind me, to get the papers that I didn’t need that had finished printing a while ago since I’d apparently selected five copies.
I bent over and lightly banged my head against the machine. Apparently, I wasn’t as skilled at this I-fucked-my-best-friend-last-weekend-and-we’re-still-good thing as I wanted to be.
Also apparent was that the tool I’d hoped to use to win Brett—time—was no longer on my side. Not if he planned to pursue a relationship with Tess.
For a brief second, I wondered if she’d possibly choose to ignore Brett in hopes of landing Scott. The latter would probably try to bang her. He was known as a playboy for a reason.
But the possibility didn’t relieve me for long because I’d had both the Sebastian men, and I knew which one of them was actually the greater—both in bed and out. Only a fool would hold out for the uncatchable Scott when Brett was standing there with an invitation written all over him.
The irony wasn’t lost.
I’d been a fool. I knew it. A scared fool. Was I only interested in Brett now because he might possibly be unavailable?
I couldn’t think about that too long. I needed to focus my energy on the more important question—how to convince Brett we were perfect for each other. A famous saying suggested that if you wanted something different, you had to do something new.
Unfortunately, I couldn’t think of anything new.
So I guess I would just be scheming harder.