Sweet Heart (The Hearts of Sawyers Bend #2) - Ivy Layne Page 0,27

started school, her mother was dead, Prentice’s final wife, Darcy, had also died, and Prentice decided he was done with parenting. Not that he’d done much of that in the first place.

Sterling was mostly left to run wild. Miss Martha had done her best, but she’d had a house to run and the rest of us to distract her. Sterling had no one. She'd made it through high school mostly because the boarding school where all the Sawyers went was too afraid of losing Prentice's generous donations to kick her out. She'd been thrown out of three colleges before she managed to graduate and had spent her time since then drinking and spiraling out of control.

Griffen had taken her in hand when he moved into Heartstone Manor, and since then, she'd been a lot better. I hadn't seen her drunk in over a month. That was saying a lot for Sterling.

I had a disorienting moment of déjà vu when she looked at me—her golden hair, blue eyes, and perfect bone structure so like our cousin Bryce’s—and said, “There isn't any money in my bank account.”

“That's unfortunate,” Griffen said mildly. “What are you going to do?”

Sterling stared at him, nonplussed. “I'm going to ask you to put money in it. Obviously.”

“You can ask all day, but it's not going to happen.” Griffen set down his pen, his eyes on her patient. Gentle.

“What do you mean it's not going to happen? Dad always gave me money.” She leaned forward, ready for a fight, her eyes flashing.

“I'm not Dad,” Griffen said, still calm, refusing to give her the argument she wanted. “You've had a free ride for long enough. You want money, get a job.”

“That seems to be the theme for the day,” I added. Sterling raised one perfectly arched eyebrow in my direction. “You're third in line today. Fourth if you separate Ophelia and Bryce into two people.”

“Who was number three?” Sterling asked, distracted by her curiosity.

“Your former sister-in-law.”

Sterling's eyebrows shot up. “That bitch had the nerve to ask you for money?”

“She did, right after Ophelia and Bryce hit me up. And I told all three of them the same thing Griffen just told you. You want money? Get a job.”

“Are you going to give me a job? Or do you expect me to go all over town putting in resumes?”

I glanced across the desk at Griffen, who raised an eyebrow at me in question. I shrugged in answer. “Do you want to work at The Inn? It is tradition. The rest of us all put in time at The Inn when we were growing up.”

“Are you going to stick me in housekeeping?” Sterling’s upper lip curled in a sneer that again reminded me of Bryce. While I hadn't had a shred of sympathy for our cousin, who'd grown up with every luxury including his mother's doting affection, I did have some sympathy for my baby sister.

“I don't know. If you don't want housekeeping, what do you think you'd be good at? I expect you to do whatever job you get, not just clock in and collect a paycheck. You understand that, right?”

“Duh. You're way too much of a hard-ass to make it that easy.” She slouched back in the chair and eyed me appraisingly. “I don't know what I'm good at. I've never really done anything.”

“What do you think you'd like?” I had something in mind, but I wanted to see what Sterling would say first.

“I don't know.” She stared up at the ceiling, thinking. “I don't think I want to wait tables. Or work the front desk. Are there any jobs in the office? I'm good at organizing things.”

Griffen and I stared at her in disbelief, both of us remembering the state of her bedroom when we’d moved back into the house. It had been filthy, so disgusting that Griffen had refused to let our own housekeeping staff touch it until Sterling cleaned it herself.

Sterling shrugged a shoulder and straightened in the chair. “Okay, fine, I get why you guys are giving me those looks, but it's true. I was always in charge of throwing parties at my sorority, which takes a lot of coordination, even if it doesn't look like it. I know word processing and spreadsheets. I'm not totally useless.”

“I didn't think you were,” I said, hoping my idea was a good one. “Our head of event coordination has an assistant, and that assistant is about to go on maternity leave. She may be back, she may not,