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No fucking answer. Again.
I tossed my cell onto the wooden bar and waved down the bartender.
“Another Vodka and 7.”
“Bad day at work?” he asked while making me a third drink.
“You could say that.”
“What do you do?”
“I have some businesses with my estranged family.”
The guy chuckled and slid my drink across the bar. “This one’s on the house. Couldn’t pay me to work with my family.”
I should’ve driven home after leaving the office. But instead, I found the nearest dive bar and parked myself on a stool. Now it was four o’clock in the afternoon, and I was halfway loaded and more than a hundred-plus miles from Gia, who wasn’t picking up the fucking phone.
I downed half my drink in one gulp. Cheap vodka. Tomorrow I’d pay for it.
A million fucking scenarios had played through my head over the last hour. Maybe he was full of shit—somehow he’d found out that information about Gia and used it to piss me off. Gia could have chatted with Lauren at the party for a little while, and I hadn’t noticed. Maybe she’d mentioned she was pregnant with some guy named Harlan’s baby. And Lauren had told her husband.
It could happen.
Although I had a more difficult time explaining how the fuck he knew about the heart-shaped mole on her ass.
I squeezed the glass in my hand so tight, I thought it might crack. The thought of Elliott knowing firsthand about Gia’s mole made me want to explode.
There were a dozen other scenarios that I came up with. None of them pretty.
Gia must’ve known who I was from the start. She’d slept with my brother and then set her sights on me to get even with Elliott for screwing her over and leaving her pregnant. That just isn’t possible. This was Gia, for Christ’s sake.
Gia and Elliott are still sleeping together.
Gia was a plant by Elliott and Edward to try and distract me.
My mind seemed to be running rampant, and the more I sipped my drink, the wilder the scenarios that I imagined.
The entire thing just needed to be wrong somehow. There was a logical explanation for this. I needed to just calm the fuck down. Once I finally got through to Gia, she’d make sense of it all.
Yet, I couldn’t stop myself from going over and over how Gia had described Harlan over the last two months.
Well-dressed—looked like the typical Hampton crowd.
Elliott was the typical Hampton-looking douche.
Articulate and put together.
My brother may be a dick, but he was well-educated and put on a good front.
She’d met him at The Heights.
Elliott had come around a few times when I wasn’t there earlier in the summer. My staff had told me about it the next day.
Not to mention, now that I think about it, Harlan was my father’s dog’s name growing up. That fact had completely slipped my mind even though the afternoon I first saw that dog was clear as day in my mind right now.
I was probably eleven or twelve, and my mother had taken me to visit my grandfather. It was the week before Christmas, and he had the biggest damn tree I’d ever seen set up next to the fireplace in his living room. Trains were set up around the thing. Grandfather had told me there was a remote for the trains up on the mantel and that I could play with them while he and my mom talked in the other room. When I went to grab it, I’d found a framed family portrait on display next to the remote. A portrait of my father’s family. It was like some shit out of The Waltons—everyone had plastic smiles. The mom was sitting in a fancy chair, the dad stood behind her with one hand on her shoulder, and the boy was down on one knee next to a golden retriever. I remember thinking they could sell this shit as the picture that comes inside the frames at the store. As much as I hated it, I also couldn’t stop staring at it. I never did wind up playing with the trains, but when Grandfather came back—I still had the framed photo in my hand, and I asked what the dog’s name was.
Harlan.
That’s what he’d said.
How the fuck had I forgotten that until now?
I guess I had no reason to suspect anything. Or maybe I was just too blinded by a set of great tits and a gorgeous ass to see anything that was staring me straight in the face.
Dumb fuck I am.
I sucked back the rest of my drink and started to feel numb. That’s exactly what I needed. To get the thoughts in my head drunk enough to stop them for a little while.
“Is this seat taken?” A woman sidled up next to me.
I waved toward a dozen empty chairs alongside the one she had in her hand. “Looks like you have your choice of seats.”
