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1
LANDON
The news broke on Tuesday afternoon while I was at happy hour. I was sitting with my four closest friends when I saw the news scroll out on all three television screens behind the bar—the founders ofLavigne Beautyhad been ordered to pay out two hundred million dollars to their former consultants.
“Fuck,” I said, interrupting Con. I leaned sideways and squinted past Dominic’s head to read the banner.
Garrett craned his neck to read it, too. He blew out his breath in a low whistle. “Two hundred million. That’s going to make a dent.”
Julian said, unimpressed, “Huh. My last movie cost four hundred million to make.”
I was still watching the screen, but I felt the others turn to stare at him. No one knew what to say. Most of us had come from modest backgrounds and worked our way up. Julian had been born wealthy and spent his life getting wealthier.
“Drinks are on Julian tonight,” Dominic said finally, slapping him on the back. He glanced over his shoulder at the screens, but he wasn’t very interested. He looked back at me, clearly wondering why I was still half out of my seat, eyes fixed on the news.
Con remembered though. “You worked with the Lavignes, didn’t you?”
I nodded even as I moved away from the table to get a better view. One that didn’t have Dominic’s fat head in the middle. Yes, I’d worked with the Lavignes. It hadn’t all been business though. With one particular Lavigne, it had been a pleasure. Until it wasn’t. Now Cami Lavigne’s family business was all over the news. Those were her parents walking out of the courtroom. Her stepfather, Robert, looked like a crane in a black suit, picking his way down the steps, limbs long and gangling, his awkward movements strangely graceful. He kept his head lowered, but he was so tall the cameras got his expression easily. Stone-faced, like always.
If he was a crane, Cami’s mother, Elyna, was a flower. She wore a pale pink dress and a brave, tremulous smile, her perennially youthful face turned up to the sun so that the world could see the bewildered innocence reflected on it. Her dark eyes, so much like Cami’s, were shining with unshed tears.
My chest tightened. I hadn’t seen those eyes in four years. Not since Cami Lavigne disappeared from my life, leaving only the lingering scent of Bleu de Chanel and a note that said she was going to live in an ecovillage in Turin. She’d call when she came back to town.
As far as I knew, she’d never come back to town.
She’d sure as fuck never called.
“What happens now?” I asked, returning to the table and interrupting my friends’ debate on what constituted afortune. Julian was of the opinion it had to be at least half a billion. The others were taking turns calling him an ass.
Dominic, a financial advisor, said, “If they were my clients, I’d advise them to declare bankruptcy.”
Garrett offered his perspective as a crisis manager. “If Elyna leaves Robert, she can recover. Maybe she can anyway, but it’ll be easier if she can cast him in the role of the bad guy. People don’t want to believe she knew what was happening. She’s too beautiful. The single-mother-who-worked-her-way-up-from-food-stamps origin story is too good.”
“It is good,” Con agreed. Con had hardly been on food stamps, but he’d been a single father who had worked his way up. He frowned at the screen now. “Maybe Robertwasthe one pulling the strings.”
I saw what he did. A tall, thin, awkward man with a coldly handsome face that looked like it had never once relaxed into a smile. Robert was standing, vulture-like, over a beautiful, petite woman who was clutching the pearl handle of her purse with both hands, offering genuine-sounding apologies for anything they might have unintentionally done to hurt someone.
I stared at her, marveling at how much things had changed. The Lavigne name was poison now, but when my security company did work for the Lavignes six years ago, their brand had been pristine. Public opinion wasn’t sure if Elyna was a victim or a villain now, but back then, she had been considered a cross between a success story and a saint. She’d pulled herself out of poverty and now was determined to pull other women out with her by giving them their own “companies.”
The world had been fooled, but I hadn’t been. Even before the scandal, I’d seen that there was somethingofflurking behind that beautiful exterior. Elyna loved her husband and her daughter and money, and she didn’t see anything else. She fawned over her “consultants” when they were in front of her and forgot they existed when they left the room. I’d had to work with her house manager to ensure the men I had working the Livin’ Lavigne Locoevents got basic necessities like water in hundred-degree heat and bathroom breaks at day-long events.
After six months of dealing with shit like that, I’d come to the conclusion that it wasn’t cruelty that kept Elyna from providing for them. It was an inability to see them as fully human.
Public opinion might have been divided, but I had no doubt Elyna had done everything she’d been accused of. Defrauded, lied, stole. Whatever she had to do to add to her bottom line, no matter who it took from. And I had no doubt that she genuinely didn’t understand why she was being punished for it now—why all that hard earned money was being taken away. She’d won it with her cleverness, her boldness, her ruthlessness, and they’d lost it with their softness, their weakness, their gullibility.
It might not have been legal, but I was sure that in Elyna’s mind, it was fair.
Her daughter couldn’t have been more different. Cami saw everyone, felt everything. She’d been too young for me—only twenty-three to my thirty-eight—but that hadn’t stopped us. It had taken an ecovillage in Turin to do that.
“Earth to Landon,” Julian said, dragging me back to the present. “Ground control to Major Landon.”
“What?” I snapped. “I’m paying attention.”
And I was, more or less. Even as I was reading the closed captioning on the screen behind Dominic’s head, part of my brain was tracking the conversation. Con was talking about his daughter, although I couldn’t have said whether it was the older one or the newborn. I replayed it in my head. The kid in question was waking up three times a night, so probably not his 22-year-old.
“Get a night nanny,” I advised to prove I’d been listening.
“It’s amazing,” Garrett marveled. “I know he didn’t hear a word we said.”
