Page 1 of Revenge On Her Dad's Best Friends

Chapter One

Perfect.

The final element of Calista Saunders’ grand and daring initiative, revenge on her dad’s best friends, was poised for takeoff.

The catsuit she’d ordered from an adult online store, Dick’s Dolls and Dildos—because Dick is the owner and dolls and dildos were what he sold—arrived that morning, setting everything into motion all at once.

Having no idea how to deal with latex but knowing the garment needed to be thoroughly washed before she donned it, Calista spent some time watching a few videos online to learn what to do. It was gently washed in room temperature water with baby shampoo and then hung out to dry. Easy.

It was time.

She stepped out of the bathroom, hair and body wrapped separately in thick fluffy towels after her all-encompassing whole nine yards and then some shower from shaving to scrubbing and everything in between. Her skin sparkled she shone so bright.

“Did I tell you, you’re nuts?”

Her best friend in the whole wide world, back from an expedition in some jungle in South America collecting someunearthly—in Calista’s opinion—specimens, sat crossed-legged on Calista’s bed, eating from a bowl of cherries she’d snagged from the fridge.

“Yes, Tabby. Six times in the half-hour since you arrived. But I’m still not getting it. What do you mean I’m nuts?” Calista shrugged in mock confusion.

But saying she was nuts was putting it mildly. If her friend were measuring the level of her insanity by the size of a nut, then she hated to break it to Tabby, but her level of nuts was probably more the size of a planet. She wasn’t going to admit it, though. Not even to Tabby.

But she couldn’t stop now.

Once she got to speak her mind, which, put succinctly, was,Hi, remember me? And then,Thanks for forgetting me; she planned to walk out the door and never waste another thought on Zachariah Smith, Reece Fischer, and Bradford Evans ever again. Not one single thought.

She was going to move on with her life and no longer obsess about the men who had abandoned her as if she’d suddenly become persona non grata, with a massive X on her forehead fordo not look at,talk to, or touch“Are you sure this is a good idea, Cal? They don’t seem like the kind of men who are going to go,Haha, nice one; you got uswhen you just show up. They seem kind of dangerous. Those suits of theirs may cost tens of thousands of dollars, but they hide nothing. Beneath it all, they seem really quite scary. Sexy but scary. Gorgeous but scary. Insanely rich, but oh so scary.”

“First of all, it’s a brilliant idea, and they deserve their just desserts. No, they deserve no desserts, they deserve only justice. And second, I’m not scared of them. I grew up with them.”

“You did not grow up with them. You grew up with me; we were always together, Cal. Always. Together. And I know for a fact that you only saw them a total of five times because I was with you each time.

“They’re not the typical warm fuzzy best friends of your dad, who you get to call uncle because they give you piggyback rides and come around for barbecues every weekend. They barely even smiled at us,” Tabby said, took a breath, softened her eyes, and carried on.

“This is because your dad’s death day is coming up, isn’t it?” she asked gently.

“No. Yes,” Calista said, biting her lip. There wasn’t anything she could keep from Tabby Martinez. They grew up in houses opposite each other and were joined at the hip before they could walk.

“At this point, I don’t even want to know why they just discarded me like yesterday’s trash—”

“Oh no, babe, you’re not trash. You’re the prettiest fucking gram of antimatter there is, and they could never afford you, even with all their billions.” Trust her scientist friend to compare her to being as expensive as antimatter.

Calista gave Tabby an upside-down smile and made a heart sign with her fingers. Tabby was always the one to talk her out of everything, but no one else besides her parents had her back better than Tabby.

“Ditto,” Tabby said.

She was right about them, though. Zachariah Smith, Reece Fischer, and Bradford Evans had been her dad’s best friends, but they led completely different lives. They were self-madebillionaires, while her dad steadfastly chose love, marriage, and a job as an administrator at a textile company. Hank Saunders just wanted to live an ordinary life. His best friends from kindergarten wanted more. They wanted everything.

Her dad gave his family the best life he could. They were comfortable, never wanted for anything—too outlandish, that is. They lived a middle-class existence, drove practical cars, and took yearly vacations to the beach. They were ordinary folk and happy.

She also remembered that no matter how hard his best friends tried to hand him millions of dollars for no reason, her dad refused to take it. He didn’t need it because he was happy with what he had and not a penny more.

Tabby was also right about the number of times she saw them. They’d always been there for the most monumental times of her dad’s life: when they lost their house in a fire when she was five years old; when her mother was diagnosed with cancer when she was thirteen; when her mom died when she was fifteen; when her dad met with an accident when she was eighteen, eleven months and twenty-eight days; and when he died a week after she turned nineteen at his funeral.

That had been the last she’d seen them. Five years ago, and not a single word from them since then. Which was odd, considering she’d been standing right there, with all three of them, in the hospital room with her dad, moments before he passed, but not without making the men he loved like blood brothers promise they would look after his little girl because she had no one now.

What did Zachariah Smith, Reece Fischer, and Bradford Evans do instead?

They put ten million dollars into her bank account and renounced her.

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