Three things became apparent over the next hour. The first was that none of the White Gloves were really drinking—nothing more than the occasional sip. The second was that the murmurs I’d overheard about Campbell weren’t an isolated incident. And the third was that there was no doubt among the Candidates that this was a competition—and no reluctance whatsoever to oh-so-sweetly compete.
I wondered how many of the girls in this room would deep-six lifelong friends, just to make an impression.
“You’re friends with Campbell Ames, right?” A White Glove appeared beside me. Lily and Sadie-Grace were mingling on the other side of the room. I’d lost sight of Campbell. “She’s causing quite the stir tonight. I knew she would.” The White Glove sounded pleased with herself.
“You the type of person who likes causing stirs?” I asked.
“I have a certain appreciation for chaos.” The girl shed her hood, revealing a head of dark blond hair underneath. “I know Victoria said no names, but I’m Hope.”
“I’m—”
“Sawyer Taft.” Hope finished for me. “Former auto mechanic, prodigal granddaughter of Lillian Taft, and the fifth-most-interesting Candidate here.”
During my Debutante year, interesting had been used mostly as an insult dressed up in compliment clothing. I didn’t sense any of that from Hope.
“Do I want to know how you know that I used to be a mechanic?” I asked.
Hope smiled. “In your shoes, I’d be far more curious about the four Candidates who make your backstory seem tame.”
I couldn’t help thinking that she didn’t know the full story.
Another White Glove appeared beside Hope. “Causing trouble?” she murmured. Unlike Hope’s, her hood was still in place.
Hope neither confirmed nor denied the accusation. “Nessa, Sawyer. Sawyer, Nessa.”
“No names,” Nessa reminded Hope.
“White Gloves don’t take orders,” Hope replied lightly. “Not even when the person issuing them is one of our own—and that includes the illustrious Victoria Gutierrez.”
It took me a moment to process the name, and then I felt like a bomb had been detonated in the room. I couldn’t hear anything but a ringing in my ears and the name that Hope had just very pointedly dropped. Gutierrez. Victoria Gutierrez.
I scanned the room for the White Glove who’d said that we didn’t need to know their names—the dark-haired girl who’d told me to pick my poison. Unfortunately, in this lighting, with most of the White Gloves’ hoods still up, she wasn’t easy to spot.
What are the chances that Victoria Gutierrez is related to the Victor Gutierrez who made a move against Davis Ames? What are the chances she’s related to Ana?
I tried to catch Campbell’s attention but couldn’t. A nearby White Glove turned. Not Victoria. Counting Hope and Nessa, that was three down. A fourth was facing me on the far side of the room. Not her. Turning, I saw a hooded girl exiting back into the bar. Glancing through the party, I was able to rule out two more based on height and build. That gave it even odds that the one who’d just left was Victoria Gutierrez.
I decided to take my chances. Once I made it to the main bar, my target wasn’t hard to spot. A scarlet robe didn’t exactly blend. I followed the hooded girl through the crowd. Despite the music—courtesy of the piano and the loudspeakers—very few people were dancing, unless you counted swaying and drinking to one of the dueling beats.
Victoria—if that was Victoria—sauntered up to the bar. It was in the middle of the room, elevated and roped off with red velvet ropes.
I tried to follow, but a bouncer stopped me before I could.
“I’m going to need to see some ID.” He was small and compact, with a humorless gaze and biceps he probably spent most of the day flexing.
“I’d be happy to show you my driver’s license,” I replied, “just as soon as you circumvent the fight that’s about to break out between Inebriated Frat Boy . . .” I nodded to our left. “His friend, Drunken Heir to the Family Fortune . . .”
The bouncer turned to look.
“And the guy they just bumped into for the third time, who we’ll just call Are You Boys Looking for an Ass Whupping?”
The bouncer turned back to me, folded his arms over his chest, and humorlessly demanded my ID a second time.
“Are you boys looking for an ass whupping?” someone demanded—loudly—from our left.
The bouncer made a beeline for the frat boys. Sometimes, it paid to be observant. I moseyed on by the ropes and helped myself to a barstool right next to the White Glove. I still couldn’t see her face. She was leaning forward, elbows on the bar.
“Can I get you something?” someone asked her.
I recognized the voice that had asked that question a second before my eyes settled on familiar hazel ones behind the bar.
“Nick,” I said. I hadn’t expected to see him here. I told myself that was why I felt a jolt, borderline electric, as the ghost of our single shared dance solidified in my memory. At the time, he’d been a fish out of water, the boy at the country club dressed in a T-shirt and faded jeans. Now he’d traded the jeans for shorts—or possibly a swimsuit. His T-shirt was threadbare and worn.
Soft, some part of me thought, imagining the feel of it beneath my touch.
The girl beside me chose that moment to let her hood fall back. Victoria Gutierrez. “Another half-dozen drinks,” she told Nick, commandeering his attention. “Same deal as before.”
“Pretty, colorful, and watered down,” Nick said, stealing a sideways glance at me. “Coming right up.”
He had the kind of voice that made everything sound a little ironic. When he turned to fill Victoria’s order, I tore my attention from the back of his head—and the back of the rest of him—and reminded myself that I’d come here to talk to her.
“You two know each other?” Victoria asked me once Nick was out of earshot.
“Something like that,” I said, refusing to allow him any more real estate in my mind. Instead, I searched Victoria’s features for some resemblance to the Ana I’d seen in pictures. Their hair was different, but they had the same eyes—same shape, same color.
“He’s cute,” Victoria commented offhandedly. “If you go for the rough-around-the-edges, angry-at-the-world type, which I suspect you do.”
I didn’t go for any type. I preferred flying solo—and Nick had reason enough to avoid girls like me.
“You asked him to water down the drinks,” I observed evenly.
“We’re not looking to get anyone drunk,” Victoria said.
“You just want them to think they are,” I inferred. “It’s amazing how people start to act drunk as soon as they think they’ve had a lot of alcohol.”
“You’re a perceptive one, aren’t you?” Victoria almost but didn’t quite smile. “Enjoying yourself tonight?”
Eyes on her. No looking behind the bar, Sawyer.
“By some definitions,” I said, and then I cut to the chase. “How old are you?” If she was a senior in college, she was probably too old to be Ana’s baby, but I had to ask.
“Twenty-one.” She arched an eyebrow at me. “Why don’t you ask me what you really want to know?”
I wasn’t sure what she was expecting—maybe for me to ask for the inside track on how to prove myself worthy of the White Gloves—but I took her up on the invitation to be blunt. “Are you related to Victor Gutierrez?”
“Are you asking on your own behalf?” she said mildly. “Or on behalf of Campbell Ames?”
It took me a second to parse that response.
“I hope she knows that business is just… business,” Victoria said lightly. “Whatever my father’s intentions or grand plans, I assure you, they have nothing to do with me.”
Nick appeared then with the first three bright-colored drinks, setting the martini glasses down on the bar in front of her.
“I’ll be back for the others,” Victoria told him. She glanced at me. “And for you.”
As she retreated, I lost my excuse not to look at Nick. I let my eyes travel in his direction, but reminded myself that if he’d wanted to contact me in the past month and a half, he could have.
“Long time no see,” I said.
“Last I checked . . .” Nick grabbed a rag and ran it over the bar between us. “. . . you’re not old enough to be on this side of the ropes, Miss Taft.”
I wondered what Emily Post had to say about telling a guy to take his sarcastic use of the word Miss and shove it up his—
“Oh, yeah,” Nick continued, in a way that made me pretty damn sure he was trying to get a rise out of me, “you’re not really big on rules—or laws. Are you?”
It was hard to tell how much of that was a compliment—and how much was an insult.
Nick had played a key—and largely unwilling—role in Campbell’s plan to take down her father. The four of us hadn’t exactly endeared ourselves to him, given that the plan had involved him being arrested.
Twice.
Then again, it wasn’t like he’d been forced at gunpoint to say yes when I’d asked him for that dance.
It wasn’t like he hadn’t enjoyed it.
“Pretty sure you’re not old enough to be back here, either,” I commented, giving Nick a look. “Legally. By the rules.”
“I’m not drinking.” Nick flashed me a smile more akin to a poker player laying down a winning hand than any kind of invitation. “I’m serving.”
“Not very well.” Inebriated Frat Boy slid in at the bar beside me. Based on his intact appearance, I assumed the bouncer had managed to defuse the fight in time. “How many rounds do I have to buy to get a little service around here?”
“You can have a little service once I have your keys.” There was nothing overtly challenging in Nick’s tone or his stance, but it was clear as glass that what he’d just said was nonnegotiable.
“My keys?” The frat boy leaned forward in what I could only assume was meant as a loom. “You think you can tell me not to drive?”
“I think,” Nick replied, “that anyone who orders more than three beers in an hour gets to give me their keys. House rules.”
I could have told the frat boy not to bother arguing—and not just because of the line of tension now visible in Nick’s jaw. His brother was in a coma because of a drunk driver. Campbell’s
father.
“I want to talk to the manager,” Frat Boy blustered.
Nick arched an eyebrow at him. “That would be me.”
If Frat Boy had been in possession of even half the sense God gave a goose, he would have seen the glint of warning behind Nick’s hazel eyes.
“Then I want to talk to the owner.”
Nick placed his elbows on the bar and leaned his weight onto them. “Also me.”
Now it was my turn for raised eyebrows. “You own this place?”
Nick cut a glance toward me and shrugged, his shoulder muscles pulling at the confines of his shirt. Frat Boy slammed his keys down on top of the bar.
Wordlessly, Nick took them. “What can I get you?”
I had to wait a full minute before he circled back around to me.
“Since when do you own a bar?” I asked.
“The owner put it up for sale a few weeks ago.” Nick began making Victoria’s remaining three drinks. “I had a friend who worked here. Nice guy. He had a new baby. Couldn’t afford to be out of a job.”
“So you bought the bar?” If I’d been talking to Walker, that might not have surprised me. But Nick? “Where did you . . .”
“Get the money?” Nick saved me the trouble of saying the m-word myself. “Your grandpa paid me off. You know what they say about blood money—it really does burn a hole in your pocket.”
Blood money. I shouldn’t have been surprised that the Ames family had paid him off. The senator’s guilty plea would have opened them up to all kinds of liability on the accident that had put Nick’s brother in a coma—not to mention the cover-up.
“Davis Ames is not my grandfather.” Of all the ways I could have replied, that was the one that pushed its way past my lips without so much as a by-your-leave. In the past month, I’d thought a lot about what the revelation of my true parentage meant with respect to my relationship with Lily, with John David, with Campbell and Walker.
I hadn’t thought about what it might mean for my relationship—or lack thereof—with Nick.
I’m not related to the person who put your brother in that coma. That blood money? It has nothing to do with me.
“Right,” Nick replied tersely. “Forgive me for speaking an inconvenient truth.”
“The truth,” I said, my voice low and every muscle in my body tight, “is that my mom lied. I’m not an Ames.” I swallowed, and the only thing that let me continue was the fact that the noise level in this place was so high. “I’m an Easterling.”
Nick stared at me. For the first time since I’d recognized him standing behind the bar, I felt like he was really seeing me, and I reminded myself that when it came to the opposite sex, no good came of being seen.
“Easterling,” Nick repeated. “Isn’t that . . .”
Before Nick could press me further, Victoria reappeared. With one last, long look at me, he turned to her and nodded to the drinks he’d just made. “I’ll put these on your tab.”
Someone else came up to place an order then, and whatever had been brewing between Nick and me—if anything was—receded, like a boiling pot set back to simmer.
Like a dance where neither person said a word.
Good, I thought as he turned his back on me. It’s just as well. I didn’t come here to see him. I needed to focus on Victoria. I doubted I’d made much of an “impression” tonight. This might be my one and only White Glove soiree.
My only chance to ask, “Are you related to Ana Gutierrez?”
“Why all of this interest in my relatives?” Victoria retorted.
“Ana Sofía Gutierrez,” I reiterated. “She’d be in her thirties now. Your sister, maybe? Or a cousin?”
Before Victoria could reply—or decidedly not reply—someone pushed between the two of us, forcefully enough that I stood up from the stool I’d been sitting on.
“Where are my keys?” Frat Boy had returned. Based on his volume and tone, I had to wonder if he’d drunk the entire last round he’d purchased himself.
No way was Nick giving this guy back his keys.
“Call a car,” I advised him. “Or get a ride.”
The second he turned to face me, I knew that drawing his attention my way had been a mistake. He reached out, brushed the hair out of my face. I tried to step back, but his sweaty palm settled on my neck, holding me close.
“Hands to yourself.” Victoria surprised me. Her voice was steel. Not pleasant—not even pretending. “Ask before you touch. Got it?”
Frat Boy ignored her. “What’s your name?” he asked, his grip on my neck tightening as he brought his mouth closer to mine. I could feel his breath on my face.
I could smell it.
“Ask before you touch,” I said lowly, “is a very good rule.”
He was probably expecting me to push him away, but I didn’t grow up at The Holler without learning to use expectations—not to mention momentum—to my advantage. As he leaned closer still, I hooked my ankle through a barstool, jerked it between us, grabbed his arm, and pulled.
Two seconds later, Frat Boy was sprawled on his stomach, and my heel was digging into his back.
“Nice,” Victoria told me appreciatively. I felt and heard Nick leaping over the bar but didn’t turn to look at him as he came to my side.
Let him wonder what the hell had just happened.
Let him remember that I wasn’t just some poor little rich girl.
I applied a tad more pressure to the drunken a-hole beneath my foot and offered Victoria a smile. “I try.”