Page 1 of My Three Rivals

CHAPTER1

Tegan

“Why don’t you tell me why you’re really here?” Bizzy asked, her dull, gray eyes following my blank face from across the chipped, wooden desk between us.

Stale cigarette smoke lingered in the air between us, the stench hitting my gut and making me nauseous. Except for her law degree and designer top, Beatrice “Bizzy” Woodsley hadn’t changed much since childhood. She wasn’t even that good at hiding it, as if she wanted everyone to know that she had been born on the wrong side of the tracks and still managed to become someone.

I have to admire her confidence,I admitted silently, but it didn’t encourage me at that moment.

“Tegan?” my cousin pressed. “What’s going on?”

“I don’t have any money to pay you,” I began. “But I think I need your services.”

Bizzy exhaled and sat back, her line-backer shoulders an odd contrast in the teal silk she wore, a swirl of stained platinum sliding out from behind her ear to curl around her chin. “Well, with an opener like that, I can’t wait to hear this, Tegan,” she chuckled sarcastically, but I read the disappointment in her eyes.

My own heart tightened, but I maintained the stoic expression on my face.

“You know that I inherited the Five, right?”

Bizzy rolled her sooty eyes heavenward.

“Everyone knows you got the vineyard when Emerson croak—er, died,” she replied, catching herself before she could speak in her usual, crass manner. To her credit, she blushed and looked at the table again. “Sorry, are you my client right now, or my cousin?”

“You don’t have to watch your manners around me,” I reassured her, and Bizzy snorted.

“So, what’s the problem now? Didn’t you get everything you wanted? You were after that vineyard as soon as your grandmother kicked the bucket.”

Was I detecting a note of animosity?

My eyes narrowed, and I also sat forward, shaking my head. “That’s not true. I only ever wanted the vineyard because of Gran. She was what made Five Penny so amazing. It definitely isn’t the same without her.”

Bizzy nodded in agreement, relaxing her shoulders and sinking back against the worn ergonomic chair. Twisting her robust figure in the seat, she peered at me. “So? What’s the deal then? You got your vineyard. What are you doing here?”

I swallowed the urge to tell her that Five Penny was failing miserably, even before last year’s frost, which had ruined the annual production. My half-brother, Emerson, had done a great job of doing absolutely nothing to maintain Gran’s beloved property and our ancestral birthright.

Will should have known better than to leave it to Emerson. He should have known that shit-for-brains was going to run it into the ground.

Shame rushed through me as I thought of my late half-brother, barely dead a month. But even in the wake of his passing, I couldn’t help but feel resentment toward him and my father, William, for what they had let Five Penny become. Gran had to be spinning in her grave. And my broke ass was only making matters worse.

But I couldn’t squeeze blood from a turnip. I couldn’t produce wine without harvesting the grapes, and I couldn’t harvest without paying the employees. I couldn’t pay the employees without any money, which I should’ve been getting from the production, which I wasn’t getting!

The unbreakable circle created a familiar swell of anxiety in my gut, but as always, I kept it to myself. There wasn’t anything that Bizzy could do to help me there.

“No one likes a girl who can’t control her hysterics, Tegan,” I could almost hear William say, his cocky smirk barely hidden under his mustache. “Pretty as you are, you’ll run them all off with those moods of yours.How are you gonna land a decent man if you can’t keep your emotions in check?”

Another unbidden shiver of shame slid through me. It wasn’t natural to feel this much anger toward those that had passed on, and yet I hadn’t mustered a single tear when Will had died. Emerson, shady and seedy as he was, had elicited more feelings out of me when he had overdosed than the man who had “raised” me, even though I had fully anticipated such an end for my half-brother. Then again, I had spent more time with Emerson than I had Will—and not by choice.

“Tegan, I can’t help you if you don’t tell me what’s going on,” Bizzy informed me, bringing me out of my spiral and back into her unkempt, smoke-lingering office, if only for a minute.

Raising my head, I met her gaze evenly, my lips parting as I tried to explain what was going on. “There seems to be some problem with the distribution of the estate—or at least that’s what I think this letter says. I don’t understand it.”

I pushed the paper I’d received toward her, and my cousin reached across the table, her nicotine-stained fingers reaching for the paperwork in my hands. It was hard to believe that Bizzy and I were related at all, our physical appearances so unlike the other. Bizzy was big-boned with an accent reminiscent of my mother’s southern roots, despite having been born and raised in Sacramento, just like me. Her dyed blonde hair always looked perfect, and she was always up on the latest make-up trends. She really was beautiful.

I, on the other hand, would avoid the hair salon and trim my split ends over the bathroom sink of whatever Airbnb I was renting and ignore the pained reflection in the mirror altogether. I didn’t even own a decent bottle of foundation, and I’d bought my hairbrush at a Dollar Tree three years ago.

Bizzy’s brow furrowed as I studied her face, pondering how many hours she took to get ready in the morning. “Well? What is it?”

My cousin’s face darkened more, and she tapped at the page.

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