Chapter Three
Clover
An unsettling heat travels up my spine, and I feel as if I’m on fire as everything sinks in. I pull off the thick, extra-large hoodie and chuck it onto my vanity chair.
I have no idea why I did what I did. I thought I was totally over them. Completely, one hundred percent over them, and that silly masquerade ball where everything went to crap. They didn’t even try to let me down gently—they just said nope straight up—not happening.
They reminded me to my face that I was Troy’s baby sister, as if I’d forget that little fact. Also, all that happened while I sat in a chair in lingerie I had bought specifically for laying myself bare.
Well, laying myself bare was supposed to follow after they saw me in my see-through bra and panties. They did not want to see any more of me, clearly. That was a year ago, and I avoided them like the plague for the last three hundred and eighty-nine days.
“I was over them,” I say, angry at myself and adding a dramatic sob as I feel a good old-fashioned meltdown coming on, my second one of the day.
“Oh, it wasn’t just their disgustingly handsome faces that sent me down this spiral.
There were pictures—picture-perfect pictures—of the most beautiful women in the world draped on their arms. The article went crazy, fangirling the heck out of them and the beautiful woman who seemed to have captured their hearts.
” I could not help the sneer in my voice.
“So it appears, blah blah and blah blah and blah blah were the ones who captured their hearts. Surely it must be love because they were all seen together a total of nine times each. Nine times, Alessia,” I cry. “By billionaire standards, they’re practically married,” I wail.
“I was never going to compete with those women. Look at me? I stepped in cow crap last month, at Finlay’s farm. I can still smell it; it lives in my nostrils like some phantom ghost.”
Yes, being in vet school and doing rotations now is not all that glamorous, but I love my job, so there’s that.
I’m never going to be beautiful or sophisticated enough to appear in a magazine, let alone on the arm of a billionaire, let alone three billionaires, because this girl decided she loves—no, I mean lusts—all three of them.
Double crap.
“I hate them so much. Why did they have to be so... so... I hate them. And I can’t explain this,” I say, pointing to the heap on my bed.
I wish I had never known them. Except I knew them all my life.
Even though they were my brother’s best friends, I rarely saw them, what with us being away at school. But then I did see them, properly, possibly for the first time when I was eighteen.
I think every person with a pulse had a crush on them, so I was hardly unique. They’re tall, gorgeous—I mean, obscenely gorgeous, obviously. The few times I met them, I couldn’t construct a single coherent sentence when they said my name.
I thought I’d get over it. Vet school was kicking my butt, so who had the time to be infatuated with three guys, all at once, equally? Me. I did. My obsession with them never went away.
It stayed and ruined me. I couldn’t date anyone else, couldn’t sleep without dreaming about them, or breathe without being aware of their existence. My whole world crashed around me from the moment I first saw them, and I haven’t been the same since.
But deep down, I’m still a practical person.
So I took a chance at a masquerade ball with a very specific twist: buy a ticket, and if your number gets chosen by a celebrity or billionaire, you win a private dinner with them in one of the venue’s luxury hotel rooms upstairs. I bought tickets for all three of them.
It would be the most serendipitous, perfectly fated thing ever if they picked my number. Not that I was leaving anything to chance. I already had a backup plan—I was going to make a deal with whoever was chosen so I could take their place instead.
But they picked my numbers. Me. We were meant to be together, surely. It was written in the stars. Except that detour in my destiny was just so they could tell me face to face, “Yeah, no.”
“Well, you know what,” I say to Alessia, the memory of their rejection in the hotel room still stinging. “They can have blah blah and blah blah and blah blah. I’m done. I’m so done.”
I need to do something grand, something outrageous to signify this pivot in my life. But what... Then an idea forms in my head, and my heart beats faster. “You know what I’m going to do, Sia?”
“Tell me,” Alessia begs.
“It’s perfect, so perfect, you’re going to fall to your knees and worship me for my ingenuity.”
“Just tell me,” Alessia says as she follows me around my room, while I open drawer after drawer looking for a couple of markers.
“I’m going to sell their underwear online, and I’m going to buy myself a ticket to... to some island somewhere with white sand and blue waters. I have ten days of vacation. The timing is perfect.
“I’m going to have myself a five-star vacation.
I’m going to day drink little pink cocktails with umbrellas.
I’m going to sunbathe, swim with the dolphins, and eat carbs.
So many carbs. And then I’m going to return a new woman, and if you ask me about them, I’ll say Kellan who? Nolan who? Oren who?”