Page 2 of Sleeping with the Frenemy

Her shoulders slumped. “I was hoping you’d come to your senses.”

“Is that why you drove an hour and a half out of your way? To talk me out of it in person?” She visited Nana one Friday a month. We originally planned to trade off every other week, but the four-hour round trip drive from New York City was rough, especially in the winter. My apartment in Allentown was only an hour from Philadelphia, so I handled most of the visits. Plus, my social life was much tamer than Katherine’s. And by tame I meant nonexistent.

“I promised Nana I would stop by,” Kat said.

Alarm bolted through me, and I shot upright in my chair. “You didn’t tell her anything, did you?” If my grandmother got wind of my employment plans, I wouldn’t have to visit her. She’d show up at the lodge and murder me.

Wait, no. She’d tell me how stupid I was. Then she’d murder me.

Kat looked offended. “Of course not. I said I wouldn’t, didn’t I? But Nana isn’t easily fooled. I swear she knows something is up. She spent the whole visit asking very pointed questions, and I spent the entire three hours dancing around the truth.”

“At least you’re good at dancing.” She was an honest-to-goodness ballerina. And I was fiercely proud of her. Who could have imagined the little girl who took lessons at Miss Imogene’s Dance Studio in little old Virginville would grow up to dance for the New York City Ballet?

Speaking of which, I gestured to her boot. “Are you sure you’re supposed to drive in that thing?” She had a hairline fracture in the top of her foot. It was a common enough injury among dancers, but nevertheless frightening for someone whose livelihood depended on two working feet. Or, in her case, tiptoes.

“Good question.” She clonked across the living room, somehow still graceful despite the hunk of plastic encasing her right leg from the knee down. She stopped in front of the dining table—an antique Nana rescued from the landfill—and gazed at the pile of bills as she spoke in her usual bubbly rush. “The doctor didn’t mention driving. No one in New York seems to remember the rest of the country gets around in cars. Why haven’t you opened any of these?”

I looked at the wobbling stack. “What’s the point? I can’t pay them.” Worse, the bills were just a drop in the bucket compared to what I owed the Valentis.

As if she read my mind, Kat asked, “How much do we owe the Valentis?”

“Don’t ever say that name around Nana. Last time I mentioned them, she turned her head to the side and spit.”

“How much?”

I suppressed a sigh. There was no point keeping it from her. Most of the liens and judgments were public record, anyway. “One hundred ninety-three thousand dollars.”

Her jaw dropped. “What? You’re never going to be able to pay that off!”

“Yes, I am.” Slowly. Because I also had student loans. And rent. And a car.

But I couldn’t think about that. Not all at once. If I did, I’d curl into a ball and give up. As long as I made the minimum payments to the Valentis, they probably wouldn’t foreclose. For one thing, there were other creditors snapping at my heels. More importantly, the property was still in my grandmother’s name. I’d scraped enough money together to pay a high-profile Philadelphia lawyer to review the lodge’s debts. He assured me that even evil assholes like the Valentis usually avoided the bad press that came with taking homes from little old ladies. Treading water would probably work.

So it was a matter of not drowning.

I squared my shoulders and looked at my sister. “And the Valentis are going to pay me, remember?”

She put her hands on her hips. “Victoria, you can’t go work as a maid at the Valenti Hotel!”

“The politically correct term is housekeeping. You should know that since you cleaned apartments in the city.” It was how she paid her tuition during her first two years at the ballet academy—and the inspiration behind my plan to save the lodge.

“That was in New York!” she exclaimed. “And I wasn’t working for our sworn enemy!”

“Valenti money is as green as anyone else’s.” Even if it was dirty.

She pulled out a chair and plopped in it, her expression exasperated. “There are so many reasons this won’t work.” She ticked items off her fingers. “You already have a full-time job. You live a half hour away from Virginville. Oh, and the Valentis will fire you as soon as they find out. I can’t believe they hired you in the first place. Did you use a fake name?”

I adopted my best Big Sister voice. “The Valentis don’t work there, Kat. They own hundreds of hotels. You really think Mark Valenti is running the check-in desk?” I knew for a fact the head of the Valenti family hadn’t set foot in Virginville since the hotel went up. As with all of his hotels, he hired locals to staff it. Which made his business model even more objectionable, in my opinion. He was the hotel version of Walmart—running mom and pop stores out of business under the guise of creating jobs for struggling communities.

Kat bristled. “Of course I don’t think that. But aren’t you worried about this getting back to the Valentis somehow?”

“Honestly? No. There hasn’t been a Valenti in this town for seven years. It’s easy to forget they were ever here.”

She was silent a moment. Then, voice soft, she asked, “What about Chase?”

“What about him?”

Shit. That came out sharper than I intended.

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