Tess shook her head. “I don’t know how. If she talked to me like that, I’d talk right back.”
“I’m sure you did before she trucked into the greenhouse,” I said.
“I tried,” she answered with a tilted smile.
“Let her get it out of her system. I’ll be the family dog.”
Tess’s brow quirked. “The family dog?”
“Yeah, you know, Dad has a bad day at work, comes home and yells at Mom for burning dinner. Mom yells at the kid for spilling milk. Kid kicks the family dog.”
She frowned. “That’s so sad.”
Another soft laugh. “Oh, it’s not so bad … I’ve got nothing to complain about. Sounds like Lila’s getting it handed down to her and she’s gotta vent it off. It’s not really about us. It’s about her.” I shrugged again.
Tess shook her head. “You’re so laid back, you’re practically horizontal.”
“It’s genetic. You’ve met my father, right?”
The room laughed.
“You do your fair share of fighting, Kassius,” Mom said, turning to Tess. “Don’t let him fool you. I’ve broken up too many fights to harbor any illusions about who’s starting them.” She gave me a pointed look.
“Luke starts them. I’m the one who finishes them,” I noted.
“Because you cheat,” Luke added.
“Cheat or outmaneuver?” I asked.
“Cheat,” Luke and Jett said at the same time.
“Kassius, how was your date with Verdant Osborne?” Mom asked eagerly. “You’re the only one who entertains my matchmaking with enthusiasm. Which is why you’re my favorite,” she said archly, glancing at my brothers.
Luke and I shared a meaningful look. Mom had a knack for matching me with the easiest of lays.
“We went to dinner and a movie,” I said, not mentioning the fact that I couldn’t tell you a single thing that’d happened in the show. We’d spent a hundred and nineteen minutes finding various ways to get each other off in the back row of the theater, fully clothed. “It was educational,” I added.
“Well, she does have her PhD from Columbia. I’m sure she has a thing or two to teach you.”
“You have no idea.”
Luke coughed to cover his laughter. Jett just shook his head at the cheesy chicken. Tess rolled her eyes.
Mom, however, beamed. “She’s such a nice girl. Her mother was just telling me at garden club about how she works weekends, volunteering at the library. Isn’t that lovely?”
“Lovely,” I echoed, nodding.
Verdant was nice, well-read, and educated, just as my mother had said, but neither of us had any interest in another date. She was the kind of girl who was in the market for a doctor or lawyer, not dirty gardeners their rich moms found for them at garden club.
The ability to remain naive of her audience was truly one of my mother’s greatest qualities. She had no idea she was the odd duck in the blue-blood garden club she attended, grandfathered into attendance simply because my great-grandmother had started the club in the first place. My mother was innocent, blissfully unaware that they looked down their proud noses at her, humoring her with dates for her sons with their daughters, knowing full well that their daughters wanted nothing to do with the unrefined Bennet brood. Well, with the exception of Marcus. He was a prize stud—and utterly unattainable. He’d humor Mom by attending the dates with clinical detachment and polite endurance, just as he handled the rest of his life. I didn’t think he’d slept with a single one. It was easy for me and Jett to fool around—none of the rich girls wanted a gardener or a retail manager for anything more than a night. But Marcus knew he was firmly in the marriage market, and as such, those girls would take a turn in his sheets as a sign of impending nuptials.
Lila rolled into my mind like a fog, licking at my awareness until forming fully, a vision in white, the stark red of her hair, the stern line of her mouth. Ambitious and in control was Lila Parker, a woman who wanted the best of the best, the top of the rock, the cream of the crop. She was luxury embodied, luxury and blatant power. It sounded in every tick of her heels, held up by the square of her shoulders and the stiffness of her spine.
I wondered what she would look like soft and languid, imagining that the only chink in her armor, her only vulnerability, was when she was being loved down, silky red hair on expensive white sheets, those cool eyes liquid silver, molten with desire behind heavy lids. Her alabaster skin flushed with pleasure, those lush, wide lips of hers bruised and swollen from insistent kisses.
A sight I’d never witness, judging by the unending well of disdain she held for the dirty gardener giving her lip at the flower shop. There weren’t many people I flat-out didn’t like—I got along with everybody and, other than my siblings, avoided conflict unless it was over a thing I had passion for. Lila Parker was my exact opposite. Where I was unruffled, Lila shook her tail feathers like a peacock. Where I’d rather have a beer together than argue, she seemed to argue as her primary mode of communication. And yet, here I sat, wondering over her, curious as to the fire that had forged her and the person who’d lit it.
But it was just as well. I didn’t need her priss in my life, and she didn’t need my filthy. Not for more than a night.
Though what a night that would be, I thought with a smile before burying the notion like a flower bulb in winter, not thinking how it might bloom come spring.
4
Tally-ho
LILA
Ivy gaped at me, hand still on the doorknob of her apartment.
The silence stretched, and when I realized she wasn’t going to respond, I asked, “So, can I come in?”
She blinked and stepped out of the way. “Of course.”
The plastic bodega bag, brimming with toiletries and stamped with a handful of Thank Yous, rustled against my dirty pants leg as I passed.
Ivy frowned. “Is that … dirt?”
“I fell in the flower bed at Longbourne,” I answered matter-of-factly, plunking my bag on the couch. “Can I borrow some pajamas?”
Ivy closed the door and waddled in. “Yeah, sure—as soon as you tell me what happened.”
“I told you—”
“I caught Brock fucking Natasha Felix, can I stay with you, is not an explanation. Now, sit. On the coffee table, please. I can’t vacuum anymore without needing a three-hour nap,” she said, hand on her burgeoning belly.
I did as she’d requested, sitting straight-backed, crossing one leg over the other, and clasping my hands on my knee. “What do you want to know?”
Ivy sank into the couch next to my bodega bag, her face softening, eyes wide. “Are you okay?”
“As okay as I can be. It did a lot for my ego when he tripped and fell trying to catch me with pants around his ankles just as the elevator doors closed. I hope he broke something. Can a dick break?”
“Penile fracture is a thing, though I don’t think he’d get it from falling.”
“Shame,” I lamented on a sigh.
Ivy’s lip slipped between her teeth, her eyes on me like I was a lost puppy.