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I clamped my lips together. “One last question.”
“Go.” He looked at his watch, then back at me. “You have less than a minute,” he teased, and I rolled my eyes.
“Why exactly do we have to be married?”
His face darkened again. “So my mother won’t try to get me to leave you at the risk of her financial stability.”
I sat back, studying him. What the fuck was I up against?
With the silence filling the room and Spencer clearly affected by his last statement, he nodded at me, buttoned his jacket, and walked out of my office without another word.
Chapter Eight
NAT
I hit the buzzer on the intercom for the second time, tapping the toe of my Jimmy Choo heel on the cracked concrete, my arms weighed down under all the Korean barbecue I was holding and rapidly growing more and more uncomfortable in every way a woman can when wearing a tight skirt and heels, standing south of Olympic Boulevard as she waited for someone who clearly wasn’t coming to let her in.
“Goddammit, Shane,” I murmured under my breath, wondering if my brother was passed out or screwing some broad and not answering the door.
I reached into my purse to pull out my keys, isolating the spare that my little brother had given me to his apartment. It had only been for use in case of emergency, but the last time I used it under the assumption that it was an emergency, I ended up walking in on my brother in the middle of fucking some random girl from one of his programming classes. Seeing my brother’s naked ass wasn’t an experience I was particularly interested in repeating. Still, we had plans, and I couldn’t help feeling worried that something else had happened to keep him from coming to the door.
“Oh, hey, Sis,” a softly musical voice came from above my head. I looked up to see my brother’s handsome face. His beautiful brown eyes—which began taking on more than their share of exhaustion at much too young an age—were just as hazy as I’d expected, with even bigger pupils than usual. “I know you weren’t about to use the emergency key without permission, were you?”
“What the hell do you mean without permission?” I retorted. “When I’m stuck south of Olympic after nine, and my brother’s not answering, I’d say that that counts as an emergency, wouldn’t you?”
“I’m not sure. With those shoes, I’d say you have a pretty decent weapon on hand,” he said, holding the door open for me. “What’d you bring for dinner?”
“Korean barbecue,” I said, leading the way up to the second-floor apartment my brother had been living in since he graduated from USC by the skin of his teeth.
“Dammit,” he said. “I was hoping for pho.”
“If you’d wanted pho, you should’ve answered my text,” I said.
Aside from the cheap rent, one of the few things I could say about this neighborhood was the fantastic food that could be found nearby. Some of the best restaurants in the city were within a four-block radius of this apartment, as crappy as it might seem. The only problem was the vast majority of people who ran in my circle had a stick up their asses about any restaurant with less than the three-dollar signs icon next to the place on Yelp.
Then there was my brother and his crowd. I honestly couldn’t say much without getting upset or disturbed by his life choices. I’d probably never come here to check on him if I did. Instead, I accepted it all for what it was when it came to Shane.
Since he was little, my brother had a different way of responding to stress than me. While my father’s bullshit had simply made me shut down and turned me into a human ice sculpture, as he’d often referred to me, it had had the opposite effect on Shane. Unfortunately, our older sister, Liz, had more or less checked out by that point, so I never got a sense of how she responded to dad’s antics.
When Shane acted like an asshole, though, I was the only one left to deal with his behaviors, and I quickly discovered that the only way to work with Shane was to make the whole thing into a game. Whenever I made him dinner as a kid, he’d tell me what I’d given him to eat wasn’t what he actually wanted. The first few times, I tried to appease him, but it didn’t take long before one day, I snapped and told him that he should’ve spoken up before I cooked. He blinked at me sheepishly and apologized before picking up his fork and beginning to eat with the best table manners I’d ever seen him use.
It was strange how silly things such as that forced us into a sibling bond while living in a highly toxic family. Of course, it was all nonsense, I see that now, but it helped us survive that home.
“Damn, you brought enough to feed an entire army,” he said as I spread the food out on the table, going to get the mismatched plates from the kitchen. “I don’t know if I’m hungry enough for all of this.”
“Well, you’ll have leftovers then,” I said, not looking at him as I felt my stomach drop at the words. My brother had always had a legendary appetite, so hearing him say that he wasn’t hungry immediately told me everything I needed to know about his current state of sobriety. “Just eat what you’re hungry for, and leave the rest for tomorrow.”
“That doesn’t seem very fair. You’re the one who got it, so you should take it with you.”
“If I took it, it would go bad. I’m going out of town tomorrow and won’t be back for a few weeks.”
“A few weeks?” A familiar pang entered my heart at how my little brother’s face fell and how disappointed he seemed. He quickly blinked it away, fixing me with another charming smile, but I knew he must’ve felt many different emotions at the thought of me leaving. “What an exciting life you lead. Where are you going?”
“London, for work,” I said. “The company is expanding there, and I need to be on the ground to secure a few deals before anyone else gets their dirty little hands on them.”
“Oh, shit,” he said, his face lighting up with the usual excitement I associated with Shane. “London is so sick. The music scene out there is wild. I’m jealous as hell. What do you think if I go with you?”
“Maybe next time,” I said, smiling at him as I sipped my tofu soup. “But for now, I’m going to be so busy with work that I won’t be around, and that will make for a dud trip.”
