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Maybe she wasn’t gorgeous like Grace and Sydney, or adorable and snarky like Jo-Jo, but she was smart. She’d just keep being the super nerd of their group.
Which said a lot, really.
They wereallextremely smart. Skipped grades, genius IQs, that kind of thing. She, Jo-Jo, and Sydney had been tested for a sociological experiment at FCU six months earlier, and Grace had been IQ-tested at her fancy boarding school for their gifted program when she’d been a teenager.
They were all really, really smart. Geniuses, technically. But they never told people that. It was their secret—only the four of them knew it. They mostly just wanted to be normal, more than anything. Or as normal as they could be, anyway. Considering…their families.
Pen hadn’t had friends as smart as she was before. Not in Garrity. She really hadn’t ever had close friends before, in general. Definitely nobestfriends either.
She’d always been the freak, just about everywhere they’d lived. Here in Finley Creek, she had people who “got” her. That mattered.
Grace and Sydney were hurting. Like soul deep hurting. She hated it when the people she cared about were hurting.
So many of them had been hurting a lot lately.
She covered her stomach, wishing she had another antacid. Sometimes the worrying over everything—everyone—got to be too much.
Melody came in. She had Zoey with her. Pen just gawked a minute at Zoey. Melody and Zoey had that whole confidence-is-so-sexy thing going for them. Zoey and Melody were a lot alike. Pen and Sydney were just the younger models of these two.
They joked about that sometimes.
But it was true.
There was a world of memories in Zoey's eyes right now. Memories that hurt Pen to see. Zoey was hermomin all the ways that really mattered.
Forever.
Zoey didn't need to be responsible for her any longer. Zoey was free to live her own life now. Pen just wasn't certain her sister knew how. Zoey had seemed a little sideways lately, too. Pen suspected it was the move. Zoey had felt safer in Garrity, Pen was almost sure of it. Zoey had loved living there. A lot.
Guilt that her sister was doing this whole living in Luc’s smarthouse thing, probably for her, had Pen’s stomach tightening in that anxious way again. She fought the nausea. It seemed like nerves and nausea were her constant companions.
Her sister had to start living for herself. And not just to take care of Pen.
15
Murdoch Michael Lake—sucha fancy schmancy boy now. Time to play trained monkey. Murdoch had his own tux. He wasn’t completely unsophisticated. Ok, so it had been purchased for his sister Celia’s wedding, but he was passable for tonight.
He looked at the men next to him.
Dom Acardi and Daniel McKellen were cops he respected. Having them show up on his door this morning demanding to know if he had a tux was weird, though.
They hadn’t really told him why. Big, annoying schmucks.
He’d just gone along with it—after McKellen had told Murdoch he was being recruited for a little task assigned by the governor.
What was a smart man in love supposed to do?
The governor had an exceptionally hot sister-in-law Murdoch hadn’t seen in one whole day, after all.
He was worried about her.
No denying that. If the only excuse he had to get near her was going to a fancy party, well, he’d just deal. Now he was dressed like a penguin and standing with the boys of Major Crimes, about to enter a fancy ballroom at the Barratt-Finley Creek, ritziest hotel in Texas.
He still didn’t have a clue why. The jackasses had refused to tell him all day. Just telling him to quit being such a wimp and a scaredy-cat. “So why am I here? Y’all going to tell me yet?”
“Number one, Melody Barratt called Daniel and said you have to be here tonight. Apparently, no one tells Melody no anymore. She likes to use us victims from the TSP to round out her numbers at these little shin-digs.” Acardi practically rumbled when he talked. He really was a bruiser. He looked like a mobster in the tux. “I think we’re supposed to be free security for these things—or trained guard dogs babysitting her youngest sister. That redheaded monster seems to draw trouble like flies, I’ve heard. I’m not sure which yet. I’m not brave enough to ask that billionaire’s crazy wife either.”
“And number two,” McKellen said, looking like the penguin suit was his natural garb. They were total opposites, these two, but reasonably trustworthy at a man’s back. “The governor likes to sneak away and meet with his special team here when we aren’t exactly expected to be watched.”
