the couch in the open living-kitchen area in the renovated historic loft. I desperately wanted a family. I couldn’t believe my older brother, Jack, was taking it so slow with Chloe. He wasn’t even engaged. If I’d had a great girlfriend like Chloe, who was fun and bubbly and loved Christmas and family and entertaining, I would have married her already and had a box of babies.
“Do babies come in boxes?” I wondered aloud.
I needed to get it together. My condo wasn’t even decorated for Christmas. It felt cold and bleak. Normally, when I felt like this, I would go out to a club or a high-end bar and find a pretty actress or model to bang. But my sister would kill me if I messed up her show. Also, I wanted to keep any controversy centered around baking, not my personal life. It was Christmas after all.
I threw open the window, hoping to cool off, as I tallied up the days until I would be able to have casual sex—hell, any sex—without messing up the show.
“Months,” I said, leaning out over the balcony railing. “It’s going to be four months.”
I was not going to make it.
“You need to figure out how to convince Dorothy to sell you that property.”
In the distance, the abandoned smokestacks and towers of the industrial warehouses and factories were silhouetted against the skyline. My redevelopment plan was to keep the existing buildings and restore them to pristine condition. Between them, I would have new buildings—modern glass boxes that wouldn’t compete with the highly crafted brick detailing of the historic structures.
I would expand the Hillrock West Distillery restaurant and tasting room. We’d host big events, there would be expensive condos, and Archer Svensson had said that he and Greyson Hotel Group would put in a boutique hotel. At Christmas, the whole place would be decorated, with an ice-skating rink and horse-drawn carriage rides through the complex so people could look at the lights.
But it didn’t matter how much alcohol I gave Dorothy or how much I flirted with her. She wouldn’t budge.
“Fuck,” I growled, staring down the street and trying to will the project into existence.
I might have willed too hard, though, because instead of a phone call from Dorothy stating that yes, she was willing to sell me the property for nothing more than a kiss on the cheek, a black-clad specter materialized from the shadows. And she was walking a cat.
9
Morticia
“You want me to do what?” I growled to Gunnar.
He took a nervous step backward. “Look, you have to live in the apartment.”
“I’m not even supposed to be here!” I complained.
“You signed a contract,” Dana interjected, waving a sheaf of papers in my face.
“Besides, the judges hated my brownies, and I’m sure that I’ll be gone by the next bake-off day.”
“I wouldn’t be so sure,” Dana said, swiping through her phone. “You have quite the following. There’s a fan page dedicated to you. People are shipping you and Jonathan so hard. You can’t buy this kind of publicity.”
“Which is shocking, really, because I’m hardly being paid anything,” I griped.
“Aren’t you pimping yourself out on Instagram?” Dana asked.
“No. I refuse to debase myself to get followers. I am an artist with integrity.” I crossed my arms.
“Really? Because your follower count increased to twenty thousand over the last couple days,” Dana said.
My eyes twitched ever so slightly. I had followers?
We will be strong. Consumerism is a curse. Followers are not friends.
“You could get sponsorships,” Dana singsonged.
Well, hell, that Getty internship clearly wasn’t paying for itself.
I grabbed the phone from her. “With my newfound power, I will educate the unwashed masses on the genius of Martha Edelson, feminist artist extraordinaire!”
Unfortunately, my new crop of Insta fans did not care about art. However, I had received an excessive number of requests for the pumpkin brownie recipe, and the episode hadn’t even aired yet.
“Oh!” I said, scrolling through my DMs. “I have a sponsorship offer.” I peered at the message. “What the hell? They want me to post about their Christmas-themed sex toy in exchange for a free one? No thanks. I only take cold, hard cash.”
“Broaden your horizons,” my friend Emma said as she helped me carry my stuff up the stairs, because of course there was no elevator, because of course Jonathan owned a building that did not include an elevator.
“A Christmas-themed sex toy might be fun. You know, bring a little holiday cheer to the act.”
“Isn’t it jolly enough without a singing dildo that lights up?”