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“You stay with Ian,” he retorted. “I shared a room with Ian for eighteen years. I shared mom’s uterus with him for nine months before that. Why the fuck do I always have to share?”
“Can we not talk about mom’s uterus?” Ian said, making a face.
“Oh my God,” Malcolm said. “You guys drive me insane. Get your own rooms then. But the company is only paying for one, so you’ll have to split the expense comp.”
I could afford my own room more realistically than Dylan. I still had money from my one year in the league playing football. I could let him take the room the company paid for and just get my own, but he was pissing me off. He was being intentionally difficult and I didn’t get his angle. So I kept my mouth shut.
Dylan adjusted his tie and stood up. “Fuck my life.” He stomped out and went to his office and slammed the glass door. It wasn’t the kind of door that shut with a bang. It had a soft close. So his efforts were in vain. It didn’t give any sort of satisfying exclamation point to his exit. We could also still see him because the walls were glass.
It made the whole move seem juvenile and I was tempted to laugh.
When he realized we were all watching him, he flipped us off.
“What’s his problem?” I asked.
“I think he’s feeling cockblocked by sharing his apartment with you,” Malcolm said.
Our oldest brother was a no bullshit kind of guy. He had no patience for games and just gave it to us straight. I blinked at his bald pronouncement. “Oh. For real? Like, it’s that bad? I didn’t realize that’s what all this was about.”
“It’s bad. He didn’t want us to tell you though,” Ian said. “Because of you-know-who. She who shall not be named. He didn’t want you to feel bad.”
Ah, Mary Frances. They all thought I was still fucked up from what was undeniably the most toxic relationship I’d ever been in. She had cheated on me in our bedroom with one of our guests during our Halloween party the year before and had somehow tried to spin it that it was my fault.
“Well, now I fucking feel bad!” I had abused my brother’s generosity unintentionally and now he was missing opportunities to hook up with the Peytons of the world and it was because he’d been worried about my emotional well-being. I hadn’t thought it was that big of a deal that we were roommates, but clearly it was.
“He could have spoken up,” Malcolm said with a shrug. “He’s thirty years old.”
I sighed. “I guess I’d better find an apartment. I don’t want any more issues.”
My brothers meant the world to me, even if they were annoying as fuck.
“Cool,” Ian said.
“I think that’s a great idea,” Malcolm said. “As is keeping your hands off the new hire. You look at her like she’s a hot fudge sundae.”
“Yeah, yeah. I hear you.” I wasn’t going to make any promises beyond that because I wasn’t totally sure I could keep them. “She’s more like the cherry on top of the sundae though.”
“She’s a virgin?” Ian asked, and damn if the bastard didn’t sound intrigued by the idea.
“What? No.” I didn’t add that I one hundred percent knew for a fact she was not a virgin. That secret didn’t need to come out.
“But a cherry…”
“I get it,” I said, cutting him off. “I just meant she’s like the finishing touch. Or something like that. I don’t know. Stop confusing me.”
Ian laughed. “Oh, man. You are such a mess right now.”
I couldn’t even argue with him.
ChapterFive
Faith
I’d gottenthe job at Four Brothers. I couldn’t believe it. Granted, it was a junior position, not the original senior marketing position MacKay had mentioned, but it was a job. An actual paying position with a salary and health insurance and two weeks of paid vacation.
The snag was that I had to move to the middle of nowhere Kentucky, which wasn’t my first choice. The entire reason I was living with Cash was because I’d wanted to find a job in Nashville and have the opportunity to explore the city and all it had to offer. I’d never lived in a bustling metropolis before. Sure, I’d been in Baton Rouge for college but I’d spent most of my time on campus and it wasn’t a massive city anyway. It was no Nashville.
Now I was trading Nashville for a small town that was probably remarkably similar to the small town I’d grown up in. Four Brothers Bourbon was distilled in Wanted, Kentucky. I’d thought that was some kind of typo but nope. It did not have any sort of dubious romantic connotation either, like that the founder of the town had sent an advertisement back East for a wife or something. Apparently, back in the day Wanted was the site of a nineteenth century county jail and brothel combo, which raised some questions for me as to how that worked exactly. But at any rate, now it was all bourbon, all the time.
