When the salad was placed in front of our plates, I instinctively glanced at the girl across from me.
She now had a peanut butter and jelly sandwich in her hands, and her father was looking at her with murder in his eyes.
“Oh, boy.” Bruno chuckled under his breath. “I think I like this girl.”
I did, too.
If she could elicit that kind of reaction out of Ivan Broussard, then she was already leaps and bounds ahead of about ninety percent of our table.
Feeling my eyes on her, she looked up, and I was captured by her violet gaze.
She blinked, took a bite of her sandwich, and then continued to chew as she stared.
After she was done with her bite, she took a swig of her beer, then grimaced when she came up empty.
When she set the bottle down onto the table, she wasn’t quiet about it.
My lips twitched.
Instead of continuing to stare, however, I looked away and went back to the semi-conversation that was going on with the men beside me, playing my part and donning the mask even though I didn’t want to.
CHAPTER 3
I have neither the time nor the crayons to explain this to you.
-Six’s secret thoughts
SIX
Twelve months later
The next time I saw Lynnwood Thatcher Windsor, was at a board meeting of all places.
My father forced me to come to them because I, and I quote, needed to learn how to handle the ship if I wanted to board it.
I didn’t want to board shit.
I wanted to do what I loved, and what I loved did not have anything to do with four confining walls.
Yet, there I was, because I knew that if I didn’t come, my father would hold up the meeting indefinitely.
He was that asshole.
The one that waited for everyone to get there, no matter what.
And I’d found out the hard way over the years because I’d been forced to attend them all. One time I planned to skip a meeting, and I found out later that my father had, apparently, held that meeting up for three hours while they waited for me to arrive. Only, I’d never arrived. I’d been hiking the Grand Canyon at the time.
Only after waiting that long did he think to call me. And when he did call me, I was in the middle of a hike. I’d answered, told him I wasn’t coming, and had hung up.
He’d postponed the meeting until I flew home and held the meeting at the airport in two Lincoln Town Cars.
It was only after the meeting had concluded that I’d learned that they’d all had to give up their Saturdays, twice, because of me.
And I wasn’t willing to be the asshole in this situation.
I’d be here, but not be here, if that made any sense at all.
Slumping down in my seat, picking at the ratty torn knee of my jeans, I wondered if I could get away with a small snooze.
My father wasn’t due to get here until at least twelve, and I’d shown up thirty minutes early to eat my burrito. I’d finished five minutes in, leaving me twenty-five minutes to snooze.
Eyeing the table itself, I pushed back the padded chair and scooted it back, glancing underneath the table.
Grinning, I left my purse and phone in my chair, then crawled underneath the table and stretched out on the carpet, belly first, pillowing my head onto my arms.
I was out within a minute.
I’d always been like that—able to sleep anytime, anywhere. It was something I’d been able to do since I was a young child.
Wyett hated it.
Car trip to the convenience store? Asleep.
Running to the next town over to go to Target? You guessed it, sleeping like a baby.
It was a great skill to have.
But, also, probably not all that safe when I went to sleep it meant that I kind of lost focus on my surroundings.
Which was why, twenty-three minutes later when I heard my father’s voice, I cracked an eye open.
“Nancy, find my damn daughter,” Dad growled.
“Yes, yes, sir,” Nancy, his intimidated assistant, cried.
I moaned and pushed out my seat while crawling out from underneath of the table. “I’m freakin’ here, Dad. Jesus. It’s not even time yet. I have an alarm set.”
Everyone in the room paused, surprised to see me there.
Everyone but one, that was.
Him.
Lynn.
The mayor.
He knew I was down there, there was no doubt about it.
“Do you have any manners whatsoever?” Dad grumbled, pinching the bridge of his nose.
“If I don’t, it’s because you didn’t instill them in me,” I growled as I stood up, turned, and planted my ass in my seat. “Kind of hard to teach your kid something when you’d rather send them to boarding school than deal with them.”
Only, I sat on my phone, so it wasn’t very graceful seeing as I had to lean over in what looked to be a fart maneuver to get the phone from beneath me.
Dad narrowed his eyes.
“Can we get on with this?” I asked. “I have shit to do this afternoon, and none of that includes sitting here listening to you moan about my sleeping habits.”
There was a choked sound coming from somewhere in front of me, but I didn’t take my eyes off of my father to know if it was the mayor or not.
But it sounded like it’d come from his direction.
However, when my dad did finally sit down and started the meeting, and I had a chance to look at Mr. Mayor, he wasn’t looking at me.
He had some sexy as hell glasses perched on the tip of his nose, his eyes were on the papers in front of him, and he looked like he was listening intently.
What he did not do was look at me even once.
“Any objections?” I heard my father ask.
Someone kicked me so hard underneath the table that I squawked.
“What’s your problem with this?” my father fumed.
I looked over at him, pissed now that he was pissed that I’d interrupted.
And, just because I liked to argue with my father, I couldn’t stop myself from saying, “You know what my problem with this is.”
I really had no clue.
Honestly, I didn’t even know what we were talking about today.
“So, you’re not happy with only giving the eligible employees of the company a half percent raise?” he asked.
What the fuck was he even talking about?
“Umm,” I hesitated. “Do you really think that’s all they’re worth?”
That was a good question, right?
That would show that I ‘cared’ even if I didn’t know what I was caring about.
“So, what do you want? More?” he asked. “With you holding a little under half, you have to agree with this, or they won’t get a raise at all.”
I narrowed my eyes.
I knew that I was the majority shareholder in the company.
My mother had left her shares to me when she died instead of my father—they’d been going through a divorce at the time, and she’d been very sure to leave her half to me so that my father didn’t get to use that big head of his for evil—meaning that I was just as much my father’s equal as he was mine.
He was right. Without me, none of them would get shitty raises.
“I think you should give them more,” I found myself saying, even though I had no clue how much this actually equaled out to be. “What I do know is that whatever bullshit number you decided on isn’t nearly enough. These employees are our frontline. Our heroes. We have to treat them well or they’ll leave.”