Page 1 of A Smooth Operator

Chapter 1

Remi

"Why is she here?" My girlfriend, Marina, wondered aloud when Echo walked into the private room at Paint the Town Red, my nightclub in downtown Memphis.

We were celebrating my sister Lani's twenty-fifth birthday, and she'd invited a whole hell of a lot of her friends, including Echo Devlin, who was technically a part of Lani and Marina's group of friends. Well, sort of.

Echo used to be the DUFF! The Designated Ugly Fat Friend.

Lani had to adopt her in middle school because my father was fond of Echo, who had then lived on the Drake estate with her aunt, our housekeeper. Dad admired Echo for achieving straight As despite the challenges she faced at home. She had grown up in a trailer park in Orange Mound. Her mother had overdosed and died. I didn't think she knew who her father was. Her aunt had taken her in when she was eleven, albeit grudgingly. I doubted Echo had had a great childhood. But that didn't change the fact that she was a hanger-on. Lucky for her, Lani was friendly; otherwise, Echo wouldn't be at my club.

"She's Lani's friend, Marina," I evaded because I didn't want a whole discussion around Echo 'cause Marina was always making fun of her.

I wasn't a big fan of Echo either. Never did like parasites—and that's what she was. First, she'd hung around Lani and her friends and now had managed to get a job in my father's biotech company. Dad said she was smart; not from where I was sitting. Because if this girl had any brains at all, she'd know she wasn't welcomed here.

"She keeps staring at you like she's starvin', and you are lunch," Marina muttered slyly. "You know she's always had a thing for you."

Yeah. I knew. Hell, we all did. But she wasn't the first of Lani's friends to have made a play for me. For Christ's sake, I was dating Marina, wasn't I? But Echo had never been overt. She had only watched from a distance. She'd say a breathy hello and nothing more. She irritated the hell out of me.

My father drove Lani up the wall with his constant praise for Echo. She was a scientist and she was so smart. I wasn’t buying his talk about her super high IQ; I suspected she was just another charity case for my father. The great Dallas Drake always helped everyone out. I had a great dad—no complaints. He let me do what I wanted, never pushing me into anything. When Lani couldn’t figure out what she wanted to do, he hired her, much like he did Echo.

"She's so out of place. Look at what she's wearing," Marina sneered.

Echo wasn't ugly—at all. She was dull. She didn't wear makeup, had glasses, and her clothes were all either beige or black. She wasn't fat any longer. Now, she was curvy. She was quiet and cheerful. I felt guilty for how I treated her when we were teenagers. I was two years older than her—and I'd been just as bad as the rest of them. I didn't do that shit anymore—at least not out loud.

"Enough." I removed my arm from around Marina and rose from the couch. "She's a guest, Marina, and this ain't high school, yeah?"

Advice you should take to heart as well, Remi.

Echo may not have dressed like Marina, a.k.a. hooker of the month, but she didn't look out of place. She was in a shift dress, a loose number that came to mid-thigh. She had sexy legs, I noted. Someone said something to her, and she turned, and I all but groaned when I looked at her ass, which was juicy as hell. Her sandals were laced-up, making her legs look like they went all the way up and down.

I didn't want to hit that! Not at all.

With her makeup-free face and dark hair tied around her brown face in a ponytail, she looked all of eighteen. I was sure she got carded fucking everywhere.

An arm wrapped around me, and I grunted when I saw it was Tommy, my best friend—or rather, he used to be. Now, he was just a bad habit I couldn’t shake. Tommy and I had grown up together, and he was now dating Lani. I didn’t have a problem with that; Tommy was an okay guy, and our families had been friends forever. If there was one thing I took issue with, it was that Tommy had decided to live the good life and not make something of himself. He worked in his father’s pharmaceutical company in a well-paying nepotism job designed just for him. He couldn’t understand why I stepped away from the family business to open a nightclub and two restaurants. In his mind, when you had family money, you didn’t work hard—or at all.

Like Tommy, Lani worked at my father's company, doing something nondescript, which she fully intended to give up as soon as Tommy popped the question, which she was hoping would be tonight. I'd seen the ring and knew she'd be pleased with the five-carat monstrosity.

"How's it goin', Drake?"

Tommy was already in his cups. I hoped he'd switch to coffee if he was planning on nailing the grand finale of the party by asking Lani to marry him.

"You need to cut back on the drink, buddy," I told him.

"Hey, it's my girlfriend's birthday. I'll drink if I want to," he guffawed.

Echo was walking by us then when Tommy grabbed her arm. "Hey, Devlin, babe. How's it hangin'?"

"Tommy. Remi."

I watched as she extricated herself from Tommy's grasp. She hadn't been comfortable being touched by him. What the fuck? It was harmless. Maybe she was a prude.

"Echo. How's it goin'?" I said politely.

"Good." She looked around and saw Lani dancing with friends. "I have a headache and an early morning. Can you let Lani know I wish her the best?"

"Lani won't even notice you're gone," Tommy scoffed. "I don't think she noticed you came."

---