Page 138 of Charming Deception

“If you ask Graysen or Harlan, it is.” He raises an accusatory eyebrow. “And don’t you daydream for a living?”

I groan. “I wish I were making a living from it. And if you think writing amounts to daydreaming, you’re more of a dick than I took you for.” I bat my eyelashes and sip my wine.

I half expect growly threats about spanking, though that hasn’t happened since the one time in the limo. Unfortunately.

Instead, he frowns adorably. “You took me for a dick?”

“No. Okay, briefly. The Romeo thing, remember? The nice man you fired for no reason?”

“There was a reason,” he says, so grimly, I laugh. “I’m looking at it. And by the way, when I hired him back, he said, ‘I understand. I’d rather hire her than me too.’ That’s a direct quote, and he was dead serious.”

“See?! He’s such a sweetheart!” Since moving into Jameson’s house, I’ve bonded with Romeo over our mutual obsession with plants, and spent many hours chatting over tea in the greenhouse and toiling in the gardens with him, just because I want to. “You should give him a raise.”

“Don’t push it. And don’t call another man a sweetheart if you don’t want him fired again.”

Well, that was growly. And bossy.

Almost sounded like he was jealous of a little old man whom I find delightful.

Huh.

“Oh-kay. So, let’s get back to your job and your brothers and why they’re dicks. Wasn’t that where this was headed?”

“Pretty much. Basically, Harlan and Graysen don’t love to acknowledge that if I go golfing or yachting with a business connection, or if Damian entertains a potential business connection at one of our private clubs, that’s how we do business. But this is why I handle the marketing and they don’t. It’s all about communication. Who you talk to and how you talk to them. If Harlan had my job, he’d fail miserably at it. But honestly, I’d do the same at his.”

I muse on that a moment as I sip my wine. “You all seem really different. Yet similar in some ways.” I search for the right word to sum up the Vance family commonality. “Self-assured? Headstrong. Am I getting it right?”

He grunts. “To put it nicely. I’d put it like this. Graysen may be the oldest and literally the boss of us, but what we really are are four alpha males and one alpha female who’re constantly sinking our teeth into one another.”

I smile at that imagery. “Ouch.”

“Yeah. You could say that.”

“So how does the littlest alpha survive in such a pack of wolves?” I tease.

He frowns at being called the littlest. At six-four, he’s actually the tallest, though his brothers are all built like he is. They’re all tall, muscle-toned drinks of water, and their sister is curvy and formidable in her own way.

But any way you slice it, Jameson is the baby of the family, and I can understand how much that sucks sometimes.

“Well, my superpower has always been knowing how to communicate with people. Companies spend millions to try to get the right message to the right customers, and it’s tricky because different people need to be communicated with in different ways. I didn’t realize I had a talent for that, so to speak, because the ability to handle each of my siblings just came naturally to me. I figured it out on my own from a young age.”

I’m intrigued. “Tell me more. Like, what’s the best way to approach each of your siblings? I’m terrible at knowing how to talk to all kinds of different people.” Usually, I just avoid it.

And hide behind my words of fiction.

I curl my legs up under me as he tops up our wine. I could talk to him all night. We never talk this much before bed in the evenings. I’m convinced he’s avoiding the intimacy of pillow talk with me because that sort of intimacy is a slippery slope to sex town. And he’s never expressed any change in his stance about us not having sex.

I keep waiting for it, like a salivating, Wanty kitten, but it hasn’t happened.

Yet.

“Well,” he says, “with Graysen, you have to be serious and professional. He wants to know you’re following the rules, playing inside the lines. That’s very important to him.”

“I could see that.”

“With Damian, you have to be honest or very clever, or he’ll be three steps ahead of you.” He frowns slightly, like he’s both impressed and annoyed by the fact. “He’s a game master, like our granddad. Honestly, he’s the most like Granddad of all of us.”

“And what about Harlan and Savannah? They’re twins, right? Are they a lot alike?” I never would’ve known that they’re twins, to look at them, but Jameson told me so before I met them.

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