Page 4 of My Favorite Bad Decision
“Route?” I ask blankly. “There’s more than one?”
Across from me, Miller’s jaw drops. “There are eight routes. Do you seriously know this little about it? How could you be so unprepared?”
I give him the finger before I open up the trip email on my phone. I turn to Deb. “My employer booked the trip. Lemosho? Is that a route?”
Miller blows out a breath and starts texting furiously again. “Yes.”
“Which route areyoudoing?” I demand.
“Lemosho,” he grunts, facing straightforward with his jaw set hard.
Fuck.
This is a disaster on so many levels. There’s the fact that I don’t want to spend eight days with him, but there’s also the guilt.
Because no matter how awful Miller is, Maren would be happier with him than she is with Harvey.
And I might be the reason she didn’t end up with him.
2
MILLER
Maren’s little sister is a fucking brat.
That’s the first thing I thought when I met Kit Fischer—seventeen and too lovely for her own good—at a family dinner I’d never wanted to attend in the first place.
I’d bumped into Maren over a drunken spring break. She was beautiful. I was twenty-two. That’s the entire reason we got together. I thought I’d made it clear that I was leaving for law school soon, that I wasn’t looking for anything serious, and if asked I’d have said we were just hanging out. Insisting I attend her family dinner didn’t feel especially likehanging out.
“Youhaveto go,” my youngest sister had said. Maren was already making a name for herself, but it was the chance to meetUlrika—a model so famous she needed only one name—that really wowed my sister.
Because her dating history was a fixture of gossip columns, I knew Ulrika had used her long legs and blonde hair to run through wealthy men for twenty years straight, producing two lookalike daughters along the way. But I had no idea what I was in for withoneof those daughters when I agreed to go to her house.
“Would you like something else to drink?” asked Maren as I set my empty wine glass on the linen-covered table.
“Do you always drink that quickly?” asked Kit.
“Kit,” Maren and her mom hissed, horrified.
She shrugged. “Just wondering if this is a pattern. Alcoholism tends to present early in life.”
While Ulrika and Maren both had this sweet, almost childlike innocence about them, the youngest member of the family came off like a bitter war veteran who’d seen some shit and had nothing left to lose.
She made fun of my hair and what I was wearing, and followed this by asking how much my father had to donate to my alma mater to get me in. Henry Fischer—Kit’s biological father and Maren’s adoptive one—was known for his brutal takedowns. It seemed the apple hadn’t fallen far from the tree.
In the kitchen, Ulrika’s boyfriend, Roger, clapped a hand on my shoulder. “Don’t mind Kit,” he said. “She means well.”
I raised a brow, and he laughed. “Her mom hasn’t always made the best choices with who she’s brought around. It takes a while to win Kit’s trust. She took a golf club to the guy before me, though he absolutely deserved it.”
Ulrika had run through four husbands at that point, and there were rumors about the last one—suspicious bruises, a drinking problem. I’d assumed they were bullshit.
Maybe they weren’t.
Maybe Kit’s animosity wasn’t about me at all. Maybe it was how she protected the people she loved. I could respect that.
“So how much of your family’s income comes from the Greek mafia?” she asked when I returned to the table.
I handed her my phone. “Check with my mom. She handles the finances.”
