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Her fury returned tenfold. Without thinking, she opened a drawer, retrieved a pair of craft scissors, and walked up to them.
“You,” she said as she cut off Benjamin’s tie, then stuffed it into the breast pocket of his suit before she moved on to David and did the same, adding, “Three.” Next came Jackson, and there went his tie, severed in half and shoved into his breast pocket, too. “Suck,” she added full venom in her voice.
It would have been so much better if they reacted with confused outrage. Instead, they did nothing but look at her as if she were two years old and having a tantrum.
“Care to tell us what we did this time around?” David asked innocently.
“You three are the worst. I didn’t think you could get any worse, but you did. You singlehandedly ruined my—” Something popped into her brain, warning her to stop talking immediately for reasons she couldn’t figure out just yet.
“I just don’t like any of you,” she said, hissing. She turned to Tilly, hugged the poor woman for being a victim, and exited the kitchen.
“Where are you going?” Jackson asked as she marched away.
“As far away from here as I can get,” she replied without turning around.
“Not in that skirt. It’s too short.” That stopped her in her tracks.
Grumpy Benjamin’s voice echoed around her head with the sound of a thousand deranged bees. She spun around. The hem of her summer skirt sat modestly, just above her knees. It was not short at all.
“Really?” She retorted. The instant she became conscious she had walked away from the kitchen with the pair of scissors still in her hand, a new level of crazy was unleashed.
Without missing a beat, she proceeded to cut into the fabric of her skirt, twirling the garment around so she could hack off that part of her skirt as well. When she had taken off a good portion of the hem, she smiled rather sweetly, but she knew she was coming off as a little psychotic. “You can’t tell me what to do, what to wear, where to go, who to speak to, who not to speak to, and dammit, who I can marry and who I can’t marry.”
Not that she had any prospects lined up, and not that she hadn’t tried to get hitched out of spite, but still. Although there were times when she contemplated just picking off the first guy she saw on the street and then eloping with him just so she could see them fail at being her guardians.
She couldn’t even go on a date without them knowing about it and then actually showing up at the damn restaurant to intimidate the life out of the poor man, but she also couldn’t even speak to a guy without them knowing about it either. They came armed with a list of everything that was wrong with the guy. It was profound.
After dating serially for three months just to get them off her back, they had uncovered an active con man masquerading as a billionaire, a guy who said he was an astronaut but lived in his aunt’s basement playing heist games, one who said he was a secret agent, and she needed protection from a gang of thieves who were after her cat.
“Legally, we can.”
She walked straight up to them and whispered fiercely. She didn’t want Tilly to hear her colorful language. “Well, you can take your legalese and stuff it up each of your overbearing, insufferable, arrogant, asses.”
As she spun around again, intent on angry-walking away from them with her head held high and her fury still blazing, she realized she’d maybe cut away a little too much of her skirt. But there was no going back now. She really didn’t care if she was flashing them her ass if the breeze whispering against her granny panties was anything to go by.
It would serve them right to be subjected to such a scene.
Chapter Four
Slamming her bedroom door shut, she sucked in a huge breath to suppress her fury.
She already missed her friend. They were supposed to get their nails done next week and the week after that, they had planned to go on a mini-vacation to California, and what about their movie night, where they each took turns to pick a movie? Hannah invariably picked a rom-com and Paisley a horror.
Hannah...
Paisley wondered if she should put in a good word for Hannah to them. Well, by good word she meant she could totally blackmail them into dating Hannah. It wasn’t as if she hadn’t blackmailed them before to do her bidding.
They were so rich; it was plain just embarrassing. It was just as well that she had great ideas to divest them of a good portion of their money, one charity at a time.
Since they became her guardians three years ago, against her explicit wishes, because everyone thought she wasn’t capable of picking a trustworthy husband, she threatened to embark on a crusade to expose them as rich and privileged heartless bastards, who didn’t care about the planet, its people, or saving the adorable little pygmy hippos, unless they made sizable donations to charities of her choice and they had to do so without any tax benefits too.
That resulted in her opening a company she ran as a donor-advised fund where they were the sole donors and she distributed funds to a multitude of charities.
So far, she had well over three hundred charities already to which they made a substantial donation every single month and they didn’t even know where their money was going. And suddenly what started as a campaign to be excessively annoying as a retaliation for them being her guardians in the first place, started a whole new career for her.
Her life’s work was adding more and more charities and increasing the amounts they donated consistently. It did faze her that they just kept making more money anyway.
But it also surprised her time and again that they humored her to that extent, but she wasn’t going to question it when she was helping thousands of people and animals every day.
