Page 86 of Plain Sight

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DEV

It’s supposed to be a red flag if your place of work puts too much emphasis on being a family.

Consider this: sometimes, a family is what you need.

Not me personally. Not Devereaux Madden, the man who fell from the heights of grad school to land among the stars of Phoenix Enterprises. The Hills? They needed a family. Somebody who would step in when it was inconvenient. Somebody they could trust not to judge them for how they handled things. Somebody who could keep a billion-dollar company running while any number of people had breakdowns or walked in elementary school graduations or got arrested.

I still don’t need a family. That’s not my point.

My point is⁠—

Hang on. The business of running a multi-billion-dollar company like Phoenix never stops. I can’t just stop sending emails to dwell on the nature of family.

My point is, I might not need a family, but I like being on the periphery of one. I like that Mason didn’t second-guess my abilities and hired me on the spot, two minutes after he met me. You can make the argument that he was sleep deprived to high heaven. To that I say—he didn’t fire me when I woke him up from his nap, and that’s what counts.

Everything that’s happened since counts, too.

I have to admit—although it pains me to say it—that there might be some value in feeling like part of a family. Not actually being in the family. Just being near it and watching how things play out through the years. Am I allowed to take any credit for that? I think I am. I’ve covered Mason when he had to pick up his youngest sister, Remy, from school, and when there were parent-teacher conferences, and when he was losing his mind over Gabriel’s recent foray into a nasty business group, and when he almost decided to sell the company so he could find Jameson and bring him home.

It’s nice. That’s the point. It’s nice to see the happy ending part of the story. It’s hard to work with and for a man and watch him—and his siblings—fight their way through heartbreak and hardship and not feel relieved when it all works out.

I like how it’s worked out.

Fine. I’ll admit the rest, too. I like being close enough to family to come to pool parties and brunches. Do I take them up on every offer? No. Do I want to? Yes. But most of the family parts of life aren’t Sunday brunches. They’re late night emergency legal sessions and helping a nine-year-old with her homework and letting a grieving teenager take over your office when he can’t stand to be in school and putting food in front of people when they’re too busy or stressed or sad to eat.

When family stuff comes up, Mason talks about it in front of me. He talks about it to me. Phoenix isn’t the family. The Hills are, and I’ve known Mason long enough to be sure that if push comes to shove, it’ll be his siblings before Phoenix every time.

All this to say: I don’t need a family other than this one. I don’t need a stranger to make me feel like I belong. I belong here. Standing by. Ready to leap into action.

“Are you thinking about him?” Jameson whispers in my ear.

I bat him away. “What is wrong with you?”

He leans back in his seat at the restaurant where the five of us—Mason, Gabriel, their devil of a brother, his assistant Kirk, and I—are having a working lunch. It was supposed to be a working lunch, anyway, but the vision hasn’t materialized into reality. It’s materialized into me drinking a hard lemonade and attempting to guide a discussion about the stock market into productive territory.

Jameson narrows his eyes. “I was trying to catch you off-guard. It’s a technique.”

“I don’t know who you’re talking about.”

I know exactly who he’s talking about. I attended a pool party at a friend of Mason’s over the summer—several of them, when everything was said and done, but who’s counting?—and at one of those parties there was…

…a man.

He was just a man.

A man with navy swim trunks and lean muscles and dark hair and dark eyes who looked for all the world like he’d just jumped down from the deck of a ship. I saw him standing there in the sun, and then Mason’s friend’s brother Poseidon tackled him into the pool.

The moment had to be over, I thought.

I was wrong.

He resurfaced, all wet hair and glistening body, laughing, his smile wide and white and beautiful.

Again—he was soaking wet. He had been tackled into the pool.

Need I say more?