How My Brother's Best Friend Stole Christmas - Molly O'Keefe Page 0,38

drink.”

“Well,” he said, eyeing the drinks and the chairs as if he was running a cost–benefit analysis on all of it. “I suppose one won’t hurt.”

“What’s your poison?” Wes asked. “There’s a rare vodka in the back that my dad got from someone he was laundering money for. There’s a plum schnapps from who knows where and this scotch that probably cost—”

“Three hundred dollars a bottle,” W.B. supplied.

“Yeah.” Wes shrugged. “We both know Dad liked to spend money he didn’t have. My plan is to drink every drop. It might take a while, but I’m committed.”

“Do you have a beer?” W.B. asked.

“Sure,” Wes said, pulling open the mini fridge and handing WB a bottle of beer.

“I want one of those too,” Sophie said, putting down her glass of very expensive scotch.

Wes handed her one and looked at me. I waved him off. I would drink the expensive scotch because that was what I’d been given.

“So,” W.B. said. “I wanted to hand you the final reports for the year and talk about projections for next year.”

“Well, on Thursday I drink with my sister. You can leave the reports and we can schedule a meeting for the New Year.”

“Sophie should be at that meeting,” I said and took a sip of my scotch, letting it burn down my throat even as Sophie’s pissed-off gaze burned the left side of my face.

“She is,” W.B. said.

“I am.” Sophie nodded.

“You are?” Wes asked clearly this was all news to him.

“She’s got an idea. A plan,” I said and gestured to the papers in her hand.

“It’s…” She sighed. “It’s about the packaging.”

“Well!” a new voice said from the open doorway, and in front of my eyes Sophie wilted as her mother came into the room. “I can’t get either one of you to return my calls or come to my house for a holiday, but here you are.”

14

It was like the room just went flat. And cold. God, this woman was the worst.

“Hello Mom,” Wes said, getting to his feet to kiss Gloria Kane primly on each cheek.

“Where’s your wife?” she asked, smiling slightly at her son. “Or did you use the card I gave you?”

Wes’s face went hard and still. “Mom, this isn’t the best time.”

“Well, I don’t know when the best time is for anything anymore,” she said with a brittle shrug. There was a silence in the room, the kind of silence that happens just before a firefight. Everyone holding their breath, wondering if Gloria was a grenade with a pulled pin.

“Penny is working,” Wes said.

“Well, I would think you’d put a stop to that.”

“Mom—”

“It being a holiday and everything,” she said quickly, but what she’d really meant was clear. Clear on her face and the way she’d lived her whole life in her husband’s mealy shadow. I stood and touched Sophie on the shoulder and gestured for her to take my seat, then I stood in the corner.

“Mom,” Sophie said, leading her mother to her chair where the two of them shared a cool hug. Over Sophie’s shoulder, Gloria caught my eye and stiffened.

“I didn’t realize you were still in town,” she said to me.

“He works here now, Mom,” Sophie said.

There had been so many times in my brushes with Gloria Kane when her looks, if they’d had the power, would have had me dead and buried. But this look she was giving me—it was nuclear. I’d have been dead and buried—and so would everyone within a three-mile radius of me.

It was another reason Sophie and I were a bad idea. The cold relationship she had with her mother would literally freeze over and shatter. And maybe that would be all right for Sophie, but it wasn’t up to me to make that decision.

“Mom, would you like a drink?”

“Is your father’s vodka still in there?” she asked, and I caught Sophie’s eye roll and worked very hard not to smile.

Wes poured his mother a drink and W.B. leaned forward, his beer half gone. “Sophie,” he said. “Do you want to finish what you were saying? Your plan?”

“Sophie has a plan?” Gloria asked. “For what?”

Oh God, this was…bad. Sophie was nervous about it already and would never put herself out there in front of her mother.

“Nothing,” Sophie said stiffly.

“Well, I don’t mean to interrupt,” Gloria said, like there was a stiffness competition.

“If you have an idea,” W.B. said, opening up his folders. “I’d love to hear about it. I know we haven’t worked together closely in the past, Sophie, but when it comes