Page 25 of Love Me Tomorrow

Appropriate, maybe, considering the fact that Savannah’s days are about to be numbered.

“Looks like I had a visitor while we were eating. God knows Jordan probably let them in—the asshole’s got a sadistic sense of humor.” Toeing aside a bouquet that’s been left on the floor, my eyes narrow when I see a pocket-sized card resting beneath the flowers. I drop to my haunches and pick the card up, turning it over to see if anything has been written on the front.

Nothing. Totally blank.

“Someone crushing on you?” Gage asks good-naturedly, dropping down beside me. We’re the same height, the same build. Save for the number of tattoos I’m rocking and the beard I haven’t gone without in close to a decade, we’re identical. Nearly. “Or am I gonna have to break out the cuffs and wrangle your stalker behind bars?”

The idea of Savannah being arrested for stalking is so ludicrous I almost laugh out loud. I don’t, but only because if I do, there’s a good chance I might choke on the cloying scent that’s verging on downright nauseating.

Gage is right. It does smell like a funeral home—which would be funny, if it weren’t for the fact that my temper is close to boiling. The Roses . . . nothing they do is subtle, especially not when it comes to the family business. Not their drama, nor their successes, and definitely not their inability to accept defeat.

Last I heard, Edgar Rose’s younger brother Bernard was cut off from the family fortune after he placed Rosalie’s—the newest ERRG restaurant here in the city—as his part of the pot in a poker tournament last year. The media ate that shit up real quick, doling out the kind of headlines that’ll be branded on the memories of New Orleanians for the next century and a half.

“Not a stalker,” I grunt, digging my thumb under the envelope’s flap. “I can guarantee that.”

My twin knocks his knee into mine. “Aw, is this what wooing looks like in the twenty-first century?”

If being wooed entails me being pushed and prodded into selling two of my rental properties, then yes—I’m being wooed with such finesse I’m shitting unicorns and goddamn rainbows by the hour. Be still, my ever-pounding heart.

“Do you seriously thinkI’m being wooed?” I ask, sarcasm lacing the words.

Out of the corner of my eye, I see Gage look pensively from bouquet to bouquet. He cocks his head. “Not the method I’d take—you know I’m more of a wine-and-dine-’em kinda guy—but I can’t knock the hustle. This couldn’t have been cheap.”

For people like me and Gage, who grew up with very little besides the clothes on our backs and an ambition to make a difference in the world, a dozen bouquets is an over-the-top waste of money.

For an heiress like Savannah Rose, all of this is chump change.

Another reason why it’s a good thing she ended whatever we could have had before it even began.

I may be doing well for myself now but I’m well aware of the number of years it took me to get to this point in my life. Savannah, on the other hand, has been fed by the proverbial silver spoon since birth.

Refusing to acknowledge the anxious jitter in my knees as I stand up, I peel back the envelope’s flap and pull out the card. Angle it so that only I can read the words scrawled in her feminine script:

To being the best of neighbors. Yrs, Savannah Rose.

“What’s it say?” Gage demands, sneaking out an arm to make a grab for the card.

The bastard is quick on his feet, but I’ve always been faster—even after the accident.

I spin out of his reach, shoving the card back in its envelope and then sticking it in the back pocket of my slacks. My twin lowers his gaze, and it’s hard to miss the debate warring in his expression before he launches forward, hooks a hand in my shirt collar, and trips me up with his feet.

Bastard.

“We don’t do secrets, remember?” he mutters. “You got a problem with something means that I have a problem with something.” Before I have the chance to elbow him in the gut, he’s snagged the card from my pocket and sashayed—straight upsashayedlike a goddamn ballerina—over to the front desk. I note the stiffness in his shoulders when he shoves aside another bouquet and picks up yet another card, waving it in the air, before he’s even read the first. “Fess up, bro, you’re being wooed. Courted. Whatever you want to call it.”

I shift forward on my feet, intent on ripping that new card right out of his grasp. God only knows what that one says.Agree to the deal, Owen, and your twin will never have to know that you told him nothing about my proposition. Or maybe,Sell us the two rentals and ERRG won’t make your life a living hell, the way it did for good old Bernard Rose.

Really, the possibilities are endless.

I grimace. “You don’t want to know.”

“Have I met her before?”

“You could say that.”

His gaze tracks the roses strewn all over the parlor, then drops to the two cards he’s holding. Indecision sparks in his expression, as though he’s torn between letting me have my privacy and saying to hell with it and finding out for himself. “Do I like her?”

I let out a rough laugh that rings hollow in my ears. “You did.”

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