Page 52 of Devious Gambit

“What are you going do?” I asked him.

“About what?”

“Your future. Obey your family and live in misery or follow your dream?”

His breath tickled my neck as he stewed it over. “You know the biggest irony is that the only sibling that actually wants to work for the firm is unlikely to rise high up the ladder.”

“Who?”

“My sister, Erin,” he clarified. “She’s born with cerebral palsy. Been in a wheelchair since she was five years old.”

“I’m sorry,” I said, “but why would that mean she’d unlikely rise up the ladder.”

“The Luxon clan don’t think she could handle the pressure of running such a large business.”

“I bet you she could, if they gave her a chance.”

He pressed his lips against my temple and kept them there for several seconds. “I think she could too,” he spoke into my skin. “She’s got a degree in business already and works for the firm in a management role, but…she’s not quite what they envisioned for the future of Luxon stinky soap.”

“No. She’s better.” I felt myself getting excited thinking about an iron-fisted woman, bound to a wheelchair, running a multimillion dollar business.

“You’re an only child, ain’t ya?” she asked.

“Can you tell?”

“A little. Are you going home to Detroit for Christmas?”

I felt a twinge of pain when he spoke. This was a sensitive point for me, as I had nowhere to go. Everyone was busy with their partners and families. “I heard KVU was putting a Christmas spread on for students stranded here, so I thought I might go to that.”

“You’re not going home to see your mom?”

I shook my head. “She’s got a new family, besides I’ve got a shift at Stads the day after.”

“And what’s Van Damme doing?” His nickname for my cousin Tris.

“Spending it with his girlfriend.”

“You don’t want to be a third wheel.”

“I’m not invited.” I hated talking about my life. “What are you doing?”

“What I always do. Fly to Chicago, grin and bear my family for Christmas day, then fly back to finish off the last of the college bowl games, then Cody and I fly to Hawaii to spend some time in the Maui sun. We booked our flights and accommodation months ago.”

“You’ll go diving?”

“Yep. We’ll hire a boat and head out. Cody’s not into diving as much as me, he goes mainly for the beach life and the chicks. I love it deep down in the water because it’s a completely different world. It’s peaceful and quiet, yet there’s so much life that we know so little about.”

I sighed when he said my favorite words ‘peace and quiet.’

He pinched my thigh. “Trust me, you’ll grow flippers and become a mermaid, you’ll love it so much down there. Except when a shark tries to gnaw your arm off,” proceeding to gently bite my arm.

I asked, “But you love it so much that you actually want to make a career out of it?”

“I just like the idea of studying life, instead of studying profit and loss num-” He stopped mid-sentence when his phone beeped. His phone continuously popped and beeped all the time anyway, but this was a different sound, like an actual message. He reached for his phone and opened the message. “Fuuuck.”

“Is everything alright?”

“Someone got my number,” he stated and showed me what he was looking at. It was footage of a girl revealing her breasts saying, “If you want to suck these, drop me a line.”

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