can march into the greenhouse and bawl Kash out about the color spectrum.”
I chuckled. “She can bawl me out all she wants. Won’t bother me.”
Tess shook her head. “I don’t know how. If she talked to me like that, I’d talk right back.”
“I’m sure you did before she trucked into the greenhouse,” I said.
“I tried,” she answered with a tilted smile.
“Let her get it out of her system. I’ll be the family dog.”
Tess’s brow quirked. “The family dog?”
“Yeah, you know, Dad has a bad day at work, comes home and yells at Mom for burning dinner. Mom yells at the kid for spilling milk. Kid kicks the family dog.”
She frowned. “That’s so sad.”
Another soft laugh. “Oh, it’s not so bad … I’ve got nothing to complain about. Sounds like Lila’s getting it handed down to her and she’s gotta vent it off. It’s not really about us. It’s about her.” I shrugged again.
Tess shook her head. “You’re so laid back, you’re practically horizontal.”
“It’s genetic. You’ve met my father, right?”
The room laughed.
“You do your fair share of fighting, Kassius,” Mom said, turning to Tess. “Don’t let him fool you. I’ve broken up too many fights to harbor any illusions about who’s starting them.” She gave me a pointed look.
“Luke starts them. I’m the one who finishes them,” I noted.
“Because you cheat,” Luke added.
“Cheat or outmaneuver?” I asked.
“Cheat,” Luke and Jett said at the same time.
“Kassius, how was your date with Verdant Osborne?” Mom asked eagerly. “You’re the only one who entertains my matchmaking with enthusiasm. Which is why you’re my favorite,” she said archly, glancing at my brothers.
Luke and I shared a meaningful look. Mom had a knack for matching me with the easiest of lays.
“We went to dinner and a movie,” I said, not mentioning the fact that I couldn’t tell you a single thing that’d happened in the show. We’d spent a hundred and nineteen minutes finding various ways to get each other off in the back row of the theater, fully clothed. “It was educational,” I added.
“Well, she does have her PhD from Columbia. I’m sure she has a thing or two to teach you.”
“You have no idea.”
Luke coughed to cover his laughter. Jett just shook his head at the cheesy chicken. Tess rolled her eyes.
Mom, however, beamed. “She’s such a nice girl. Her mother was just telling me at garden club about how she works weekends, volunteering at the library. Isn’t that lovely?”
“Lovely,” I echoed, nodding.
Verdant was nice, well-read, and educated, just as my mother had said, but neither of us had any interest in another date. She was the kind of girl who was in the market for a doctor or lawyer, not dirty gardeners their rich moms found for them at garden club.
The ability to remain naive of her audience was truly one of my mother’s greatest qualities. She had no idea she was the odd duck in the blue-blood garden club she attended, grandfathered into attendance simply because my great-grandmother had started the club in the first place. My mother was innocent, blissfully unaware that they looked down their proud noses at her, humoring her with dates for her sons with their daughters, knowing full well that their daughters wanted nothing to do with the unrefined Bennet brood. Well, with the exception of Marcus. He was a prize stud—and utterly unattainable. He’d humor Mom by attending the dates with clinical detachment and polite endurance, just as he handled the rest of his life. I didn’t think he’d slept with a single one. It was easy for me and Jett to fool around—none of the rich girls wanted a gardener or a retail manager for anything more than a night. But Marcus knew he was firmly in the marriage market, and as such, those girls would take a turn in his sheets as a sign of impending nuptials.
Lila rolled into my mind like a fog, licking at my awareness until forming fully, a vision in white, the stark red of her hair, the stern line of her mouth. Ambitious and in control was Lila Parker, a woman who wanted the best of the best, the top of the rock, the cream of the crop. She was luxury embodied, luxury and blatant power. It sounded in every tick of her heels, held up by the square of her shoulders and the stiffness of her spine.
I wondered what she would look like soft and languid, imagining that the only chink in her armor, her only vulnerability, was