Page 6 of Bitter Rival

Too messy. Too complicated. Too much of everything.

She saunters across the patio and walks up one of the rows of the vineyard, trailing her hand over the vines, and my mind reverts to her comment about stealing her lingerie. What kind does she wear? Silk? Lace? Feminine? Racy?

Fuck. I scrub my hand down my face and groan. Any man with half a brain would turn away from the window, but I continue watching like some kind of creepy voyeur.

She’s talking to Pete, the vineyard manager who is smiling like a doting father, completely captivated by whatever she’s saying. I can only hope he’s smart enough to steer clear of her tender trap.

I have no actual proof that she’s anything like her mother but how could I assume otherwise? She’s here, isn’t she? And she obviously manipulated my father into giving her half of everything.

No matter how you spin it, one thing is certain—Daisy Larsson is trouble.

My phone rings and I swipe the screen. “How’s it going?” Grayson asks.

“How do you think it’s going? I’m stuck on this vineyard with Jezebel’s daughter.”

“You make it sound like you’re serving a prison sentence.”

“Close enough,” I mutter.

“Your father was a bastard, I’ll give you that, but no red flags came up in her background check,” he points out.

Background checks only give you limited information so all we learned is that she doesn’t have a bad credit history or a criminal record. That we know of.

“Only because we found virtually nothing on her. Which is a sure sign she has something to hide. She probably goes by some alias we haven’t uncovered yet.”

“Or there’s nothing suspicious and you’re just assuming she must be covering something up.”

I’m not sure why he’s defending Daisy.

Grayson and I have been friends since our freshman year at Stanford and cofounded a fintech startup together. I know enough about his family dynamics to know damn well that if the shoe were on the other foot, he’d be just as suspicious as I am.

“What twenty-something in the Western world doesn’t use social media?” I counter.

“I admit it’s rare but it’s not a crime,” he says, still playing good cop to my bad cop. “Maybe she’s busy living her best life. She’s a pretty big deal in the art world.”

I’m not sure where he came up with that but he’s giving her far too much credit. “She takes Polaroids of teenagers,” I scoff. “That hardly makes her Annie Leibovitz.”

He laughs.

The truth is that I don’t know what her portfolio entails because only a few of her photos can be found online.

“I don’t want people screenshotting my photos. My work is meant to be viewed in books and exhibitions and in print,” she said when she was interviewed in some artsy magazine where she talked about her work and how she preferred 35mm cameras over digital. “And I don’t want pervy men saving them.”

To be fair I can’t fault her for that. I work in technology, and I even have issues with how information on the internet is abused. But that’s as far as I’ll go in agreeing with her on anything.

“On another note, we’re nearly at the finish line,” Grayson says. “I can’t fucking wait until we close on this deal so we can move on. The past year hasn’t been a lot of fun.”

We’ve spent the past year preparing our startup for a sale while also juggling the demands of our investors and running the company, so yeah, it hasn’t been a lot of fun.

But it will all be worth it in a few short weeks when we close on the sale with Royce Capital and we both walk away with $200 million. Not bad for two guys who built a startup from the ground up.

“Just so you know, I’m inviting myself up for the holiday weekend. Do you have a spare room in your crumbling mansion, or should I book a place?”

“You can stay here.”

“In that case, I’m sending you a housewarming gift.”

“I don’t want any of your gifts.” Grayson’s gifts are usually over-the-top, highly impractical, and nothing I would ever want.

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