She yanks at the rings on her hand and sends them flying through the air toward my face. I catch them automatically with my left hand. A hand, now that I’m paying attention, that sports a matching band. A big, shiny, new gold ring.
“Tell. We got married,” she says. “Also? You’re a dick.”
CHAPTER TWO
GRATEFUL IT’S NOT MY CIRCUS
Hana
LIKE ANY TODDLER or alpha male, Liam Masterson is not used to not getting his way. Fortunately for him, he has me in his life—a life I’m newly determined to shake up like a soda can. He prides himself on his calm, take-charge demeanor, but I’ve always been able to rile him up if I put my mind to it. It’s a gift, although currently it’s also a gift he clearly would like to return to the store because apparently our spur-of-the-moment marriage was not in his letter to Santa or his five-year master plan. Too bad, so sad. Making this easy for him would be a colossal mistake. He’s spent years dismissing me as a sweet, slightly annoying and totally asexual being. That changed last night and there’s no way I let him tuck me back into the baby sister box.
We had sex.
I saw his penis.
Truly, saw doesn’t begin to cover what I did; I touched, licked, fisted and rode said penis and it was every bit as amazing as I’d ever fantasized. Better, in fact. My first reaction when I woke up was to pull his big, cranky, standoffish self to me and kiss the ever-living daylights out of him. I wasn’t ready to let go of my fantasy Liam.
Fantasy Liam would have taken charge—like Real Liam—but he’d have rolled me underneath him and demonstrated a perfect understanding of to have and to hold. Hands-on demonstrations are the best, so yes, the current state of things isn’t ideal. He doesn’t seem to want to hear have me—at least not from my lips.
In fact, for the first time in forever, I’m mad at Liam. Usually he makes a brief but compelling appearance in my sexual fantasies, I get off, and then the next time I see him IRL, I blush and hope he hasn’t acquired mind-reading powers. If anyone could, it would be Liam.
The man’s never met a skill he couldn’t master. It’s like he just wakes up on a random weekend, and then when most of us would think oh good, it’s Saturday, so maybe I’ll zip over to Walmart and buy a nice geranium for that empty plant pot and satisfy my new gardening aspirations, he teaches himself hydroponics and constructs a greenhouse by noon for the one-of-a-kind flowers he’s germinated from seed. And then he’d sell those seeds for a million bucks, invest the proceeds and have a country named after him by dinnertime.
If you asked me to pick two adjectives to describe Liam, smart and ruthless would top my list. He’s unbelievably good at making money because he doesn’t hesitate to use both of those qualities. The thing is, I’ve never really questioned his morals. Does he love money? Absolutely. I don’t think too many people would argue that being broke is an ideal condition, and he was dirt-poor growing up. I’m a fan of keeping my bills paid, too. And it’s not as if he’s a Scrooge McDuck, gleefully swimming in pools of gold coins. He gives back generously to his community and I know for a fact he’s super hands-on with a big science education foundation.
Because behind the expensive suits and private jets lurks a secret Boy Scout. He’s the person you call when the ride-sharing service declines your credit card and you’re facing an eight-mile walk, the guy who will come over at 4:00 a.m. to fix your backed-up toilet, the one who never yells even when you reverse your first car into his truck and there’s all sorts of bumper damage. He just buys an aftermarket rearview camera and installs it while you’re crying in the bathroom and then moves on as if it never happened. He has this pathological need to fix a problem and tie it up with a badge-worthy knot.
The last thing I want is for him to fix and dismiss me, however, so I force myself to saunter out his bedroom door. This requires ignoring the authoritative way he says my name, as if I’m a pet he can order to stay. It also requires ignoring certain inconvenient facts, like my being naked. Nudity is a common side effect of alcohol for me. Not only does drinking make my clothes melt off, but it leads to those articles showing up in the strangest places. You’d think my panties at least would be on Liam’s bedroom floor, but the wide-plank, artisanal, bloody expensive wood is as immaculate as an iceberg. Wherever we started our wedding night, it wasn’t here.
One of the few things Liam and I have in common, other than my brother, is our fuzziness on the precise sequence of events.
In addition to my naked state, the second inescapable fact seems like a multipart disaster. A veritable list of sad truths.
1. It’s 10:12 on a Saturday morning.
2. I’ve just spent the night making my dirtiest dreams about Liam come true.
3. I proposed to him because why not make my dreams come true?
4. Answer: because he doesn’t remember our getting married.
5. He hates himself for not remembering.
If I’d known amnesia was a possibility, I’d have whipped out my phone and recorded the consummation the way he did the ceremony itself, but it’s too late now. Whatever changed his mind last night about my little sister status and had him agreeing to my drunken marriage proposal, it was an aberration and he’s now reset to his default factory mode of older brother. Next will come the patronizing, well-intentioned overprotectiveness that makes me want to scream—and not in the mind-blown-orgasm-achieved way.
I do my best to come to terms with this sad reality as I stand in the hallway outside Liam’s bedroom. I haven’t spent much time at Château Sin since Liam bought the palatial Napa Valley property a few years ago. Napa’s gorgeous on the outside, all vineyards and rolling hills, but once you see inside some of the gated enclaves (or sneak inside like I did), you realize a few things fast. It’s an expensive playground for San Francisco’s wealthy socialites, philanthropists and tech billionaires, the kind of place where an acre of grape land sells for ridiculous amounts of money and then the owner has outdoor sex parties with a hundred of his acquaintances.
I’m not allowed here because he appointed himself the protector of my virtue when I started high school. Still, I’m not stupid and I know how to use the internet. The man has fan pages. By the time I was thirteen, I knew he was a sex god and that he believed he was protecting my innocence. In theory, I appreciated this evidence of a moral character, although his scruples inevitably got in the way of my teenage lust. At sixteen I’d fantasized about gifting him with said innocence, and by eighteen I’d taken care of business thanks to a coed freshman dorm.
My few Liam-sanctioned visits to Château Sin prior to last night had been brief and largely confined to the massive swimming pool surrounded by grapevines and ridiculous faux Grecian statuary. We’ve spent as much time discussing the reasons for the estate’s unofficial but horribly tacky nickname as I’ve spent up here—none. Liam’s house is as rigidly compartmentalized as his personal life: he lets anybody and everybody wander all over the ground floor, touching his shit and enjoying themselves, but the second floor is strictly off-limits. I’ve always assumed his forbidden spaces held his secret man cave/dragon lair. Batmobile storage. Dead bodies. Discovering it’s just a clothes-eating, orgasm-granting black hole is weird.