Page 1 of Her Brothers' Best Friends

Chapter One

“They’re going to kill me, Andrea.”

Lindsay Brenner paced the floor of her bedroom and had to hit one hand away from her mouth with her other hand to stop her from biting her nails.

“Well… not physically, I’m sure,” her best friend Andrea Dawson said from where she was sitting on Lindsay’s bed. With her dark hair rolled up into a messy bun that framed her face, Andrea snacked on a bag of chocolates, her legs swinging as she munched away. “We’ll just replace the bottle you broke, and they won’t know the difference. How much does it cost?”

“It’s actually dirt cheap, but—”

“Linds, even better, because I thought you were going to have to break your trust fund to replace it.”

“That bottle of scotch has sentimental value to them, Ans. When they were in the military, there was this sergeant who gave them an especially hard time, but it was kind of a love-hate relationship, and when they left, he gave them a bottle of cheap scotch and told them they had to drink it on Christmas Day if he died that year. I can replace the bottle, but he wrote them a handwritten note that said,Drink it when I’m dead, which he stuck to the bottle. Even if I write another note, I won’t be able to dupe them into thinking it was the origin because I couldn’t replicate the original, which means they’ll know. Arg.”

Lindsay was so mad at herself, she’d kick her own butt if she could. She’d been buying last-minute Christmas presents and wanted to check the year of a particular brandy that one of her uncles enjoyed drinking the year before, but then she managed to knock over the bottle of scotch that her adopted brothers kept in the bar downstairs.

Every year that they came home, they looked at the bottle and shook their heads that the man was still alive.

“It meant something to them, Ans, and I just broke it. And they’re arriving home today.Today. In a few hours for Christmas Eve. What am I going to do?”

Born after her parents had adopted Leo, Aaron, and Micah, she looked up to her brothers as if they were gods. She adored them even though they’d been scaring away any potential boyfriends since she was thirteen years old.

“I’m going to disappoint them, and I can’t handle that. I need to fix this.”

Andrea moved the bag of chocolates from her lap onto the bed and came to her.

“Okay, we can’t write another note because it would have to be a good enough forgery, and that note has subsequently drowned in cheap Scotch, which means we have to..." Andrea tapped her lips as she drew a blank. “I can’t think of anything, but that doesn’t mean you don’t have the answer somewhere in your head. Think. What do we know so far?”

“We know that their best friends, Shaw Farley, Chris Olson, and Rhys Morgan, were given the same bottle with the same note because they were in the military together and had the same sergeant."

“Oh my god.” They both said it in unison.

“We can’t,” Lindsay said, giving in and chewing on her nail. As usual, just thinking about her brothers’ best friends evoked two feelings inside her. One of utter embarrassment and one of utter rage. Basically she loved to hate them. All three of them.

Before she got into a state, which happened every time that they crossed her mind, which was more often than she cared to admit, she concentrated on the trouble she was in, and that certainly put things into perspective for her.

“We can, and we’ll get away with it,” Andrea said, her eyes gleaming. “Now, let’s plan this damn thing.”

“You’re saying I need to go and stealtheirs, but what about my brothers?”

“Leave them to me.”

“How?”

“Kidnapped, of course.” Andrea smiled.

“What?”

“I’ll snag them from the airport, and then—what? No, that’s not going to work. How about this? You call them and tell them you, them, and your parents are having an intimate Christmas Eve get-together in a cozy little cabin somewhere far out and that they need to go directly to the cabin from the airport.”

“It’s perfect because my parents' cruise is delayed and they’re unreachable and only arriving tomorrow, and I won’t have to involve them in this madness, thank goodness.”

“Exactly.”

“And while my brothers aredetained,I’ll need to try and get the bottle from their friends and replace the one I broke, and they won’t know the difference.”

"Yes, and then once your brothers leave, we can find someone who can do a perfect forgery of the note and buy the bottle of Scotch, and they will never know what actually happened. Piece of cake.”

“But how do I get the bottle of Scotch from their friends?” Lindsay said more to herself. “I’ll have to steal it, which means stealth mode, and my stealth mode is non-existent.”

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