expressions of disgust.
“Kissing Jett?” Luke asked.
I groaned. “No, not kissing Jett, dummy. Kissing somebody else, someone I wasn’t allowed to kiss.”
Luke paused in thought. “Fine, I would have hit him. Kash would have too.”
I cut a look in Kash’s direction.
He shrugged. “I want to say I wouldn’t, but I probably would have. Or at the very least, roughed him up a little.”
“Exactly,” I said. “I sort of, kind of get why he did it. But I hate him all the same. I’ll burn him down if he gets in Jett’s way.”
“But Georgie went home with Jett, right?” Kash asked. “Sounds like a win to me.”
“It does, doesn’t it? Except I’m almost positive Darcy’s going to throw the hammer, and it’s gonna hit Jett square in the chest. Darcy’s never going to let her see Jett, especially if it means he has to apologize or acknowledge he was wrong.”
“Man, he sounds like such a dick,” Luke said, scratching at his massive pectoral muscle.
My lip curled. “Could you please put shirts on? I’d rather not taste my lunch a second time.”
Laughing, Kash tugged his on—stretched across his chest were the words Plant Lady. Luke just bounced his pecs.
“My shirt’s in storage, sorry,” he said, flexing his muscles both discreetly and pointedly, that shit.
“At least one of you cares about your sister’s health. Or maybe you do want to see the contents of my stomach.”
Luke’s eyes flicked to the glass ceiling. “If you actually throw up, I’ll give you fifty bucks.”
“Anyway,” I started, “there’s a sliver of hope. We’ll know more tomorrow, I think. But if Darcy interferes, I might go ape.”
“I don’t know if I’d fling shit at him at work. That’d really put a ding on your résumé,” Luke said.
“Oh my God, could you be serious for two seconds?”
He nodded. “Nope.”
Another groan, the kind only Luke could get out of me. “Just go easy on him tonight at dinner, would you?”
“Whenever are we not easy on him?” Kash asked.
“I don’t know, ask that kidney bruise of Luke’s.”
Luke twisted around to try to look. “What, that old thing?”
“You should know better than to mess with him for reading Outlander again. He’s still your big brother.”
“Yeah, and he doesn’t let us forget it either.”
“Who doesn’t let whom forget what?” Mom said from behind us, and we all turned.
She was adorable, a slight thing with curly silver hair that had once been as black as her children’s and eyes the same blue, hers wide and innocent. She wore the prettiest smile, and it was damn near impossible to get her down. The only times I’d seen her consistently upset was when my grandmother died and when she was in the middle of the lawsuit with Bower last year.
Of course, that’d almost ruined every Bennet. But Mom most of all.
She’d been part of society once upon a time and attended the same private school with Evelyn Bower, Catherine de Bourgh, and their toadies. My grandma had established a prestigious and exclusive garden club that all their mothers were a part of, and their places were passed down to their daughters. Though Evelyn and Mom had been enemies since high school and their mothers before them, the feud took root when Dad dumped Evelyn for my mom. After that, it was insult, injury, and impediment as a rule. She wanted to destroy Mom, Dad, and everything they held dear, if for no other reason than she could.
For years, poor Mom hadn’t even realized the lengths to which those women would go to humiliate her. But she’d learned that lesson the hard way, thanks to Evelyn.
Mom shuffled toward us, leaning heavily on her cane. I’d picked it out for her a few weeks ago after she came home with some ugly metal thing with a white rubber stopper on the bottom. This one was black with big peach and white flowers on it and a sensible, virtually invisible black stopper.
The three of us smiled and converged on her like hens, and she cooed at our nearness.
“Look at you, all here together,” she said, beaming.
“Laney was just telling us the hot gos—”
I smacked his bare chest with the back of my hand and gave him a look.
“Goslings,” he finished. “The hot goslings in the park. Didn’t you hear about them?”
She frowned, eyeing us. “Shouldn’t they be flying south?”
“Oh, sure, sure,” Luke said. “But these are special geese. They only mate when snow is exactly three weeks off, which they know because they have these tiny little sensors in