Pride and Papercuts (The Austens #5) - Staci Hart Page 0,19

in my pockets, I followed her at a distance. By my estimation, we were about at critical mass. Her heels clicked on the hardwood as she headed for the stairs, but I turned for the kitchen in search of the liquor cabinet, knowing she’d be right behind me.

Halfway up the stairs, her footfalls stopped. Stomped back down. Clicked in my direction. I’d just put the topper on a decanter of scotch when she flew into the kitchen and leveled me.

“You were supposed to apologize,” she shot, slamming her purse on the island.

“I tried,” I said simply, taking a sip of my drink.

“Unsurprisingly, you somehow managed to upset her even more. What did you say?”

For a moment, I didn’t answer, staring into my glass as I swirled the amber liquid around. “She’s a difficult person to apologize to—she wouldn’t stop talking long enough for me to explain. Everything I said made her mad. How do you talk to someone like that?”

“You listen, you wait, and then you try again.”

“She stormed off before I could wait or try again. But I did listen. She was right about some things, wrong about others.”

Georgie exhaled in a loud, controlled sigh. “You have to fix this. She is an employee of our client, not some girl you met in a bar.”

“We did meet in a bar.”

She made an impatient sound. “What has gotten into you? Why can’t you show her common professional respect?”

My brow quirked, my eyes back on my drink. I answered both questions with three words.

“I don’t know.”

“You’ve never been what anyone would call charming, but you’ve crossed the line on this one.”

“She and I seem to fundamentally disagree, but rather than keeping it to herself, she reacts without thinking. She’s rude, quick to fight, and can’t stop herself from voicing the multitude of feelings she has on any given topic.”

“So what you’re saying is that she’s too much like you. Except for the feelings thing.”

“We’re nothing alike, George.”

She laughed, a full-blown burst from the bottom of her belly. “Sometimes, I wonder how it’s possible that someone so successful could be so clueless. I am so mad at you—so mad—and you are in the biggest trouble. You degraded her in front of a room of colleagues, which made you look far worse than her—the team has been gossiping about it all day. So you need to come up with a way to smooth things over. Dig deep and get over yourself so you can work with her. She’s not going anywhere, and I don’t care if Cooper Moore is a buddy of yours or not—he’s going to be unhappy if you continue to mistreat her. And if Aunt Catherine hears you’ve potentially put an account of this size at risk, she’s going to flay you.”

None of it was untrue.

“Figure it out, Liam. Take a second to recognize that her traits—the ones that make you act like an animal—are alive and well in you. Maybe if you focused more on your similarities instead of getting twisted every time she opens her mouth, you’ll see you could be an excellent team. But either way, we’re not having this conversation again. Okay?”

I made a noncommittal noise rather than answer, taking a drink.

With a huff, she turned to leave. “You’re exhausting.”

She’d just disappeared from the threshold when she swore under her breath, reappearing to snatch her purse off the island, tear open the fridge for a bottle of wine, and grab a wineglass before flying off again.

“I’m taking a bath and drinking this,” she called from the stairwell. “Do not disturb.”

Again, I said nothing, but a smile tugged at my lips. She hated when I said nothing, though I didn’t do it to upset her. I just found that I didn’t have the chance to say the wrong thing if I said nothing at all.

With a shift, I looked out over the dark patch of Central Park inside a frame of shadowed buildings. This was the house we’d grown up in, the house I’d inherited when our parents died. I remembered Georgie riding her tricycle around the terrace. Thanksgiving meals at the dining table. Georgie and I lounging in the library on rainy days—me sneaking into Dad’s comics and Georgie raiding Mom’s romance shelves.

I remembered the night of the call about the accident, but other than that flash of memory, everything else was a blur. By the time we got to the hospital, they were gone. The drunk driver had injured three other pedestrians when he blew