Page 11 of Hate Mates

“Microtech.”

“I said what I said.”

“How can I not let it get to me? I mean look at me…” I fling my arms out wide, nearly backhanding a crystal lamp that’s probably worth more than my car. “Yesterday, I had a calm, normal life. I woke up and went to a job where I worked side by side with the man I loved, only to…to…”

“Walk into a conference room and find him drilling that sad, little gherkin into his chief financial officer?” she finishes, tossing her phone on the cushion with a flip of her hair.

I throw my head back with a groan. “What am I going to do? Fletcher wasn’t just my boyfriend. We lived together. We worked together. The man was my boss, for Christ’s sake. How is it he cheats, and I’m the one who gets punished?”

I’ll never forget the cold look in his eyes. He couldn’t even bother to pretend to be sorry. Instead, he stood there starknaked and informed me his position in life required more than what an office assistant could give him. Then, he fired me and kicked me out of his house.

In less than an hour, I lost everything.

My anxiety spins in drunken circles as she turns toward me, tucking her long legs underneath her and draping her arm over the top of the couch. “First thing you’re going to do is stop sucking off Donny J.” A swift, sneak attack gives her a firm enough grip to yank the bottle out of my hand. “The second thing you’re going to do is stop thinking what that noodle dick did to you is the end of the world and start realizing he did you a favor.”

“I’m not sure you’re aware, but there’s no 401k involved in panhandling.”

“Would you forget about money for a damn minute?”

“Says the girl with a twenty-million-dollar trust fund.”

She sets the bottle on the coffee table with a shrug. “It’s thirty-million, but that’s beside the point.”

My laugh comes out way too shrill. “No, that'sexactlythe point. You’re rich and confident and blonde. You’ll never have to worry about any of this.” I shake my head. “I love you, but you have the world eating out of your hand. All it does is kick me in the ass.”

“Izzy…”

“I’m serious. You have all this.” I gesture around the opulent mansion. “With my parents gone, Fletcher was the only family I had. He made me feel like more than a charity-case sidekick.”

“The fuck…?” she thunders, her astonished head wobble causing the diamond hoops hanging from her ears to swing. “Izzy Hawthorne, you are no one’s charity?—”

A loud crash from the kitchen cuts her off, immediately drawing me out of my pity spiral. My eyes widen, all the woe-is-me truth vomit I just spewed encouraging the tequila to follow.

As if this day couldn’t get any worse.

Maeve gives me a dismissive wave. “Ignore him. He’s probably looking for some twenty-thousand-dollar bottle of bourbon he stashed in there ten years ago.”

He could be in there mining for diamonds, for all I care. The fact he’s here at all is the problem. It’s the equivalent of a Molotov cocktail being thrown on a raging dumpster fire.

Only the dumpster fire is me, and the Molotov cocktail is Lennox Carver.

My cheeks heat. “I thought you said he was flying to New York for the week?”

It’s the only reason I accepted her invitation to crash at the mansion.

I don’t blame Maeve for being twenty-eight and still living under Daddy’s roof. The Carver estate is twenty-thousand square feet of luxury and excess only one percent of the population will ever see, much less own. I once told Maeve it looked like a medieval castle. She’d rolled her eyes and said castles had fire-breathing dragons guarding them. I was too chicken to tell her hers had just pulled up in his Bentley.

Lennox Carver is an intimidating, perpetually pissed-off man with the face of a god and a jawline that could cut glass. While he played a starring role in all my co-ed fantasies, he also scared the shit out of me. So much so, I planned my visits around his work hours just so I wouldn’t have to interact with him.

Apparently, today was a miscalculation.

There’s another crash then I hear him slamming cabinet doors like they owe him rent. I keep my eyes averted, hoping whatever has angered the god of Silicon Valley keeps him confined to the kitchen.

“He was supposed to,” Maeve says with a shrug.A fucking shrug.As if that information wouldn’t have been important to communicate before I stripped down to my skivvies and got shitfaced on his quarter-of-a-million-dollar couch. “But theinvestors for his new pet project fell through.” She tips her head in his general direction. “Obviously, he’s taking it well.”

“Maybe I should go.”

“Where…?” she challenges, folding her arms across her chest in that subtle-as-a-brick way of hers. “‘Two-pump Fletch’ changed the locks on his house, and nine dollars won’t even get you a room that rents by the hour.”

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