In A Fix - Mary Calmes Page 0,5

looked me up and down, and did something with her face that I guessed was supposed to be a smile, but came off more like she smelled something distasteful. “Good morning. You must be Brig’s mysterious friend.”

Her tone was flat, stilted, and downright cold. Okay. That reaction usually didn’t manifest until people were around me for a few days.

“Not so mysterious,” I said, shrugging and slipping into my cover story. “We went to Choate together, and then he went off to Harvard while I went west, to Stanford.”

She nodded slowly.

“I got sick of the cold, which is funny since I ended up in Chicago.”

There was a pause before she put her hand over her heart in mock surprise. “Oh, you’re planning to speak to me?”

“Pardon?”

Her chuckle as she reached for my arm was surprising. She used me as a brace as she took off first one Christian Louboutin heel and then the other. “They don’t all speak to me, you see,” she rushed out, her limpid cornflower blue eyes lifting to mine as she set the heels carefully on one of the hanging bags, between the straps. I understood her caution; they were expensive after all. “Not to me.”

What she was saying clicked in my brain then. “His other friends, do they not speak to you much?”

“Only Lan, who’s going to be family, so he doesn’t count. He has to be nice to me.”

She meant Nolan Stanton, of course, Brigham’s younger brother.

“It’s lovely that Brig knows at least one nice person. I wish you’d been on the ski trip in December. You would have made Vail less of a horror.”

“How do you know I’m nice?” I asked, watching in amusement as she dug a pair of flats out of the top of her tote bag and, leaning against me, put one on, and then the other.

“Well, I can already tell you’re not one of his douchey frat friends who have absolutely squat to say to me.”

I grinned at her. “That’s because it was supposed to be a bro weekend, and so why were you, the fiancée, there?”

“No, no,” she said quickly, clarifying, wagging her finger at me. “Not the fiancée. We’ve never had that conversation, and I don’t have a ring.”

It was interesting how she felt the need to make that clear for me. Not that she seemed heartbroken or sad or angry. More…wistful. She wanted it, that was obvious, but it was like she was coming to terms with it never happening.

And this was what Jared meant, I suspected, when he said I needed to practice empathy. If I was being honest, I was less interested in why she seemed wistful than if I was right that that’s how she felt.

“Girlfriend, then,” I amended, gesturing for her to step in front of me as the concierge announced that it was time for us to go up. “The others will still wonder why you’re along on this weekend of debauchery.”

“Is that what it’s going to be?”

“One assumes,” I said tiredly.

She chuckled softly. “Don’t sound so excited.”

“I’d prefer to stay home and read.”

Her smile was wide as she nodded. “In comfy clothes, with a cup of tea, on a window seat with a blanket, am I right?”

“I see we’re of a similar mind,” I said, charmed by her. “Perhaps you’d like to come home with me now, to Chicago.”

She giggled. “Oh, I like you,” she said with a sigh, following the man in the black suit onto the elevator. “But Brig was adamant that I come, so”—the gallic shrug spoke volumes—“what was I supposed to do?”

I nodded.

“I mean, who says no to Brig Stanton?”

No one, apparently.

As the elevator began its ascent to the thirty-third floor, I realized she was staring.

“Something wrong?”

“No, I just can’t get over how—I mean, you really don’t at all look like any of his other friends,” she said, brows furrowing, like I was a puzzle that needed to be solved.

I got that a lot. Even Rais, roughly three minutes into his new job at Torus, knew who I was before he’d actually confirmed who I was.

“You’re Croy, right? Mr. Colter said I’d know you ’cause of your hair.”

I squinted at him. “Because of my hair?”

“He said it was an odd color.”

What was odd about platinum blond? I’d been the towheaded kid when I was little, and the white became silver as I got older, with some pewter streaks thrown in, but remained mostly white.

“It’s not odd,” I muttered defensively under my breath.

“He didn’t say he was short?”