Page 45 of The Wicked

“Wow, really?”

“Really.”

She selected another rose, a pink one, and put it beside the red one she’d already placed beside my plate.

“Here, you totally get an extra rose. Hope you have an awesome date.”

I didn’t miss the long glance she gave Garrett as she moved to the next table, and I couldn’t even blame her for it. While my look could best be described as “rumpled” after our skydiving session, the wind had taken his hair from “tousled” to “artfully dishevelled.” He’d topped the grey T-shirt with a leather jacket, and every single woman in the restaurant had stared at him when we walked in. I felt like an imposter.

“Is this a date?” I asked.

“What else would you call it?”

“Stockholm syndrome?”

“Have you ever been to Stockholm?”

“I haven’t travelled much.” Only as far as the Bahamas if we were talking overseas. “How about you?”

“I went to Stockholm once.”

“For work?”

He shook his head. “I spent a long weekend there with the family on our way to Sälen. Skiing,” he explained when he caught my blank look.

Of course. Skiing. I hadn’t grown up poor, but Garrett was in a whole other league. Plus Grandpa had been too much of a penny pincher to ever go on a family trip to Europe. EJ and Marianna used to take fancy vacations, but thanks to Grandpa’s inheritance challenge, we’d all been budgeting carefully for the past six years.

Just thinking about the will made me seethe. If Darla was right—and I couldn’t see any reason for her to lie—then a member of my family had gotten ahold of the codicil and made it disappear. The truly tragic part? I had no idea who. Every single member of the Baldwin household had a character riddled with flaws.

Easton the Third—Paulo called him Easton the Turd, which was far more appropriate—was the obvious culprit. He’d been mentioned in the codicil too, and by destroying it, he’d have gotten away with all of those bail-outs from Grandpa scot-free.

Who was next on the list? It was a toss-up between Marianna and one of the twins. The twins had more of a motive—they’d needed me to do the work building up LKB for them. But they were alsoreallydumb. Would they have managed to find out about the codicil, locate Grandpa’s hidden safe key, and sneak in to steal the right document? Even I didn’t know where he’d kept the key. Asa Phillips had brought his own when he opened the safe for the will reading.

Anyhow, Marianna had never liked me, plus she was a devious snake. She wouldn’t have wanted to lose a cent of EJ’s inheritance to someone she didn’t even consider family. Justine, EJ’s first wife, had felt the same way, and she could have gotten Parker to do her dirty work. Parker had both the opportunity and the brains to get into the safe. As for Uncle EJ, he could have acted on Marianna’s orders—it was clear who wore the pants in that relationship—or simply cancelled out my share of the family trust to increase his own.

Whichever way I looked at it, I couldn’t trust any of them, and living at The Lookout had become more uncomfortable than ever.

“Sara? You okay?”

“What? Huh?”

“You zoned out there.”

Darn it. “Sorry. I just have a lot on my mind.”

“Want to talk about it?”

And send the hot guy running for the hills in the middle of a date? Nuh-uh. Although a pack of mountain lions was more fun to hang out with than my family. Wait, did mountain lions hang out in packs? Or was that just regular lions? Not that thiswasa date.

“It’s better that I don’t.”

Garrett gave a one-shouldered shrug. “Take your time. Thisisa date, by the way. Are you having dessert?”

I checked my watch. Seven thirty. “Oh, I shouldn’t. We have a long drive back, and thisisn’ta date.”

“You keep telling yourself that, Cinderella. Do you have a pumpkin coach to catch today?”

“You know I don’t.”

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