Page 13 of The New Year's Party
All four faces looked to him. Jenn plus their three little witnesses.
“You have... blood on your lip,” he said. His head was pounding. His brain felt like a cement mixer, sloshing impossibly heavy stuff around in purposeless circles.
Jenn wet the tissue with her tongue and rubbed. She smiled at him. “Good?”
It didn’t matter. Even if she hadn’t seen the search on his browser, even if he’d been able to catch her off guard, and be a step ahead for once, she’d still find a way to beat him.
It didn’t matter what the game was. Jenn always won.
“You got it.” He forced himself to smile, for his kids. His eye twitched. “It’s a date.”
Chapter 5
Bunny
December 31, 11:00 a.m.
Stunned was one way to describe how Rebecca “Bunny” Kaminski was feeling as she left the reading of her grandfather’s will. She stormed out of the strip mall lawyer’s office across the slushy parking lot toward her Honda Civic with Tennessee plates, astonishment and rage clouding her vision.
She’d driven all the way to Indiana because it was cheaper than flying and renting a car, and she wasnotabout to ask her hateful extended family for help, but she didn’t have snow tires or all-wheel drive, so her car wasn’t handling the sleety conditions of Michigan City. She had a new ding in the side from when she’d hydroplaned on her way here.
Why had she ever thought it was a good idea to come here in person during the Christmas holiday when there was a conference call option?
Because you imagined you’d leave this meeting with the keys to Grandpa Max’s house, stupid!
Because she’d imagined herself walking through the slummy old Victorian in downtown Michigan City to take any last treasures she wanted before gliding into the local real estate agent’s office she’d already researched, tossing the keyson the woman’s desk, and saying, “Sell this, please, as quickly as possible.”
She did this a lot. Hoped for things to turn out great, only for things to go to shit. When would she learn? When would she get her head out of her ownbuttand realize that thingsdidn’twork out for her, that peopleweren’t—
Her phone dinged and she looked without thinking.Oh.The name on the screen was pretty much the last she ever expected to see. She stopped cold in the middle of the parking lot.
“Nathan Phelps as I live and breathe,” she murmured as a chilly gust blew her long blond extensions into her face. Her ex-fiancé—Phelps to everyone else, Nathan to her. You’d think that after pulling what he’d pulled all those years ago, he would have retreated in shame. But Nathan didn’t experience shame like normal people. If he’d apologize justonce, maybe—
Heard your in town... New Years is on FYI
Bunny looked at the text and shook her head. He knew bad grammar was one of her pet peeves. She was asongwriter, for God’s sake.Language mattered. Undoubtedly, he was provoking her. She texted back,
You’re
Another ding. Followed by two more. Nathan liked to text in short sentences, which was also incredibly annoying, like someone compulsively ringing the doorbell until you opened.
You’re what?
Hot?
Charming?
Three dots told her he wasn’t done yet. She waited, jiggling one foot. The dots persisted. Dear God, was he writing anovel?
A sting of sleet hit her right on the cheek. “What are you doing?” she chided herself out loud, brushing hair out of her face. Getting sleeted on, apparently, because her ex-fiancé still made her want to shoot back. ThankGodshe hadn’t actually married him.
She dunked her phone back into her purse, even as she imagined herself going to the New Year’s party. Wearing something incredible so Nathan could catch a view of what he’d missed out on, which was alot. She didn’t have anything appropriate with her, but she could swing by the Lighthouse Place outlets... After all, she was already in town...
No! Now was not the time to resurrect old feelings by the warm fires of the holidays, hersorNathan’s. Not when her chance to finally make her life work had just crumbled in her hands.
The rage, momentarily pushed aside by the distraction of Nathaniel Shithead Phelps, slid back onto center stage.
She wasn’tgreedy. That wasn’t it. It was money that had beenpromised. It wasn’t that she had been happy when they said Grandpa Max was going to be taken off life support, but also, Grandpa’s money was supposed to be her ticket out of the bug-ridden rental apartment she and her kids were crammed into while she tried to figure out her post-divorce life and what she was going to do career-wise, since her side hustles weren’t cutting it. This morning’s reading of the will was supposed to be her miracle. A sign of favor from the universe. A divine being saying,Oh, hello, Bunny, I know I’ve ignored you most of your life, but you did spend your entire childhood in Sunday school and your teenage years in youth group, and I never forget a face! You’ve triedpretty hard, haven’t you? And you know what, it’s Christmas, so... here you go!
