“Guys, I’m going to have to finish this game early. My bestie is here.”
The guy’s brow furrowed in confusion. She leaned down and knocked the rest of her balls into the holes, hardly paying any attention. He and his friends’ jaws dropped, and I just laughed. I’d seen it happen one too many times.
Heidi’s dad had owned a pool hall when she was a kid, and her skills were legit. I was pretty sure pool was the start of her love affair with geometry. She’d gotten into civil engineering at Tech, and she now worked at Wright Construction, the largest construction company in the nation. I thought it was a waste of her talent, but she liked to be the only female in a male-dominated industry.
“You hustled us!” the guy yelled.
She fluttered her long eyelashes at him and grinned. “Pay up!”
He tossed a couple of twenties on the pool table and stormed away like a sore loser. Heidi counted them out and then stuffed them into the back pocket of her destroyed jeans.
“Emery, baby,” Heidi said, flinging her arms around my neck. “I have missed your face.”
“Missed you, too. You buying?”
She laughed, removed one of the guy’s twenties from her pocket, and threw it on the table. “Peter, shots for me and Emery!”
Peter nodded his head at me. “Hey, prom queen.”
“That was Kimber. Not me!”
“Oh, right,” he said, as if vaguely remembering that had happened to my sister and not me. “You dated that Wright brother though, right?”
I breathed out heavily through my nose. Nine and a half years since Landon Wright had broken up with me on graduation day, and I was still recognized as the girl who’d dated a Wright brother. Awesome.
“Yeah,” I grumbled, “a long time ago.”
“Speaking of the Wright brothers,” Heidi said, pushing a shot of tequila and lime toward me and adding salt to the space between her thumb and finger.
“Nope.”
“Now that you’re newly single after you kicked that jerk to the curb.”
“Oh God, Heidi, can we not talk about Mitch?”
“I promise I won’t talk about the skeezeball if you hear me out.”
I sighed heavily. “All right. What about the Wrights?”
“Sutton Wright is getting married on Saturday.”
“She is?” I asked in surprise. “Isn’t she still at Tech?”
Heidi shrugged. “She found the one. It’s kind of a rush job. They only got engaged on Halloween.”
“Shotgun?” I asked.
The entire Wright family was riddled with scandal. With billions of dollars to throw around and no moral code, it was easy for anyone to get in trouble. But the five Wright siblings took it to a new level.
“No idea really, but I’d guess so. Either way, who cares? I am not missing a chance for an open bar and a swank party.”
“Have fun with that,” I said dryly.
“I’m taking you with me, bitch,” Heidi said.
She raised her shot glass to me, and I warily eyed her before raising mine to meet hers.
After I downed the tequila and sucked on the lime, I finally responded, “You know I have a rule about Wright siblings, right?”
“I know you’ve been jaded against the lot of them after Landon, yes.”
“Oh no, you know it’s not just Landon.”
“Yeah, so they’re all a bag of dicks. Who cares? Let’s go get drunk on their dime and make fun of them.” Heidi seductively placed her hand on my thigh and raised her eyebrows up and down. “I’ll put out.”
I snorted and smacked her arm. “You’re such a whore.”
“You love me. I’ll get you a new dress. We’ll have fun.”
I shrugged. What could it hurt? “Fine. Why not?”
Two
Jensen
“My whore sister is pregnant again, and this time, she wants to keep it,” I said to no one in particular as I expertly knotted the red bow tie at my neck.
“Yeah, that’s kind of the point of the wedding today, Jensen,” my brother Austin said. His bow tie still hung loose around his neck, and he was already on his third glass of whiskey. At twenty-nine years old, he was already shaping up to be the one who tarnished the Wright name. If he wasn’t careful, he’d end up just like our father—a raving alcoholic up until the moment he was buried six feet under.
“Can’t believe we’re fucking doing this today.”
“She’s in love, man,” Austin said.
He raised his glass to me, and I fought the urge to call him a sentimental dick.
“He’s looking for a paycheck. A paycheck that I’m going to have to provide because there’s no way he’ll be able to take care of our little sister.” I finally got the bow tie straight and turned back to Austin.
“Have a drink. You’re being too uptight about the whole thing.”
I glared at him. I had to be uptight about this shit. I was only thirty-two, and I was the one in charge of the business. I was the one who had been left with all the money and responsibilities to take care of my four younger siblings. If that made me uptight, then fuck him.
But I didn’t say any of that. I just strode across the room and refilled his glass of whiskey. “Have another drink, Austin. You remind me so much of Dad.”
“Fuck you, Jensen. Can’t you just be happy for Sutton?”
“Yeah, Jensen,” Morgan said. She stepped into the room in a floor-length red dress with her dark hair pulled up off her face. Her smile was magnetic, as usual.
Morgan was only twenty-five and the most normal one of my family. We all had our issues, but Morgan gave me the least amount of grief, which made her my favorite.
“Don’t you start in on this, too,” I told her.
“Sutton is her own person. She always has been. She does whatever she wants to do, no matter what anyone says,” Morgan said. Taking the drink out of Austin’s hand, she downed a large gulp. “Don’t you remember that time she decided she was a princess superhero? Mom couldn’t get her out of a tutu, cape, and crown for almost a year.”
I laughed at the memory. Sutton had been a handful. Fuck, she still was a handful. Twenty-one and already getting married.