Chapter Two
Clover
“Mind your own business, Alessia,” I say over my shoulder as I pass her, pulling my bags behind me.
But then, because the universe is against me, one of the bags snags against the leg of a table and bursts open slowly as if I’d taken a scalpel to it to perform surgery, but instead of blood and organs spilling out, it’s just my questionable life decisions that spill out in the form of snowy white boxer briefs.
Alessia picks one of them up and frowns at it. Guess the boxers are out of the bag.
“You didn’t,” she says, a look of astonishment on her face, her eyes so big she could engulf me.
“What exactly do you think I did?” I ask tentatively. Maybe she thinks I robbed a men’s underwear store. If so, I’ll go with that. Sounds much more plausible than what I actually did.
“You stole their underwear,” she shrieks.
“How in the heck did you know that? These could belong to some other guys I have crushes on.”
“Excuse me, Clover McAllister, these are custom-made boxer briefs by the most sought-after designer ever. No one in the world has them. They’re made of mulberry silk, Egyptian cotton, and bits of cashmere and Vicuna wool—Vicuna wool, Clover.
These were made especially and only for—let this sink in—for Kellan Gardner, Nolan Williams, and Oren Flynn.
The hottest billionaires alive. Your brother’s best friends who happen to be your obsessive crushes. Tell me I’m wrong.”
“Well, if you insist, you’re wrong,” I say, haughtily, while hanging on by a thread. Not a Vicuna wool thread, though. But I laugh in the face of remorse because I have none. They deserved this.
“Oh, babe, I thought you were over them,” Alessia says gently.
“I know,” I cry, kneeling down to stuff the boxers—my god, they do feel extremely expensive—back into the trash bag.
Alessia drops to her knees as well to help me, huffing all the time about how I was going to end up in prison, how she’d have to come and visit me, and how she could possibly carry on living like normal until I was released.
“I just went a little crazy, is all. I was coming off my last shift, and their stupid faces were staring up at me from a magazine, and I cracked.
“I mean, their faces weren’t staring up at me from a magazine out of thin air.
I passed a newsstand, and I saw their stupid faces on the cover of a fashion magazine, bought the lot and all the chocolate bars, and had a disturbingly quiet tantrum stuffing my face with sugar and poking my fingers into their eyes on the magazine covers in my car,” I say, looking down. Not my finest moment.
“Then, before I knew it, I was on my way to their penthouse to seek my revenge.”
Yes, I have the code to their apartment and the code to their private elevator. They’re my brother’s best friends; they know everything about each other, and I know everything about them through my brother.
“They broke my heart, Sia.”
“Oh, Clo. I get it. But why didn’t you consult with me first? I would have gotten someone else to do it for you; that way, your fingerprints wouldn’t be all over this. Because what happens when they find out it’s you?” Alessia asks as we carry the bags upstairs to my bedroom.
Thankfully, I have the house to myself. My dad is away on a work trip until next week, so at least he won’t have to wade through men’s underwear in the foyer that costs more than he could make in I don’t know how long, as a salesman.
And my brother is somewhere in the world. He never tells me where; he just bosses me around all the same. Lock the doors. Look behind you. Check your pepper spray. He’s in the military.
“I’m not that stupid,” I say to Alessia. “I bought a disguise. A thick mustache, a cap I kept low over my eyes, and—look—this jacket makes me look like a linebacker. A short one. But it does the job.
“And I even bought a pair of men’s trainers—look how big they are too. I had to stuff them with an entire box of tissues, by the way. They’ll have footage of me in their penthouse, but they won’t know it’s me. See? I covered everything.”
“They’ll know it was you, trust me. They’re too smart to be fooled.”
“They won’t,” I insist.
We dump the contents onto my bed and stare at the heap.
“Well, what are we going to do about this?” She uses her hand to draw an imaginary circle around the trappings on my bed. Oh, and Alessia is all in it with me now.
I’ve known Alessia since I was ten years old. We met at a prestigious boarding school in Switzerland, of all places.
Obviously, my parents could not afford to send my brother and me to such schools. We’re well off but by no means that kind of rich.
But both Troy and I inherited a ‘scholarship’ from our grandmother, mine for an all-girls’ school, Troy’s for an all-boys’ school.
It was the only way we could afford to attend schools like that. And there I met Alessia Hagen. Best friends from day one.
As to how she became our maid, that’s another story altogether, and it comes with a secret so huge, I’m the only person who knows it.
And of course, she doesn’t clean our house—well, not physically.
She pretends to clean a lot of houses for stinking rich people.
What she really does is get a cleaning company to do her work for her at a fraction of what she charges her clients.
According to her website, “Choose Alessia for a royal cleaning treatment because you deserve the best” is a huge selling point.
It’s a temporary gig while she figures things out. She’s thinking about being a librarian next, so she can sit all day long and read. Not that she doesn’t do that now, but she wants to do it for the ambiance.
“I don’t know what we’re going to do...Yet. But it’ll come to me. Just give me a second.”