Amalie sets down her menu and bats her lashes. “It’s not up for debate, Pierce. I just got a promotion and a raise, it’s my treat.”

I can give her that. I’m not used to letting her, or any other woman I take out, foot the bill. It annoyed the hell out of me that Rian tacked the four seventy-five onto the check for the paint repair, which is crazy since she haggled me down 20 percent. It’s not as if I need to cash the check, anyway. “Fine, you can pay. How’s Lex handling that?” I sip my craft brew, enjoying the hoppy, bitter flavor.

“My promotion?”

“Yeah. You’ll be working more hours, won’t you?”

“I’ll actually be putting in fewer hours. And I have two days a week where I can work from home, so it’s a good transition.”

“Didn’t he want you to come work for the Mills Hotels?”

She twists a lock of hair around her finger. “He would set up a desk beside his in his office if he could, but I really enjoy what I’m doing right now. I love him, but I don’t know how productive I’d be working in the same office. We’ll see what happens in the future. I need some time to be engaged before I go switching jobs again.”

Prior to her current job, she worked for her ex-husband’s family—in the magazine division of their massive media corporation. It’s understandable that she’s a little sketchy about working with her fiancé’s family.

“How are things with you and Dad?” She looks like she wants to hide behind her menu for asking.

I shrug. “They are what they are. As far as the firm is concerned, I’m just taking a few months off.”

She bites her lip. “Mom says he’ll get over it.”

“Eventually. In a decade or so, I’m sure he will.” I fucked up recently. In a very big way. The fact that my sister is actually speaking to me is a miracle. I feel horrible about the error I made and how it’s affecting her.

Her nose wrinkles. “Have you seen the dolls? The ones that company came out with?”

“Unfortunately, yes.” I’d like to bleach my brain and erase the visual forever.

My father is the creator of Amalie Dolls. They’re those horrible plastic dolls with the strange blinking eyes that little girls like to play with. But they’re not regular dolls, they have a chip and now, with modern technology, an app. You can program them to interact. It’s so weird what sells, and for almost twenty years they’ve been incredibly popular.

The basis for them had been my sister, obviously. Over time, as Amalie grew up, the line grew with her, morphing into something far more expansive than a single blond, blue-eyed doll in the image of my sister. There are Amalie Dolls of every ethnicity, hair color, eye color, and skin tone. You name it, it exists.

Earlier this year, my father decided he wanted to broaden the market and make “life-sized” Amalie Dolls. In all honesty, the move was a bid to keep the Amalie Doll trend alive. For the past several years, despite the continued attempts at expansion and new developments, sales have been slowly, if not steadily, falling.

I work as a partner in the law firm my father hired to manage his business. After college, I went to law school, because that’s what my father wanted me to do, never mind that I had zero interest in law. I specialized in patents, because again, that’s what my father felt would be best for my future with the company. I’m very detail oriented. Most of the time. Except when I was pushing the paperwork on this one through, I was a little distracted. It was right at the same time my brother, Lawson, decided we needed to jump on buying the house I’m currently renovating. He’s a fly-by-the-seat-of-his-pants guy, so it was all very last minute. I’d pulled a couple very late nights, so I was light on sleep and prone to making mistakes. Usually they aren’t quite this big, though.

While I’m good at my job, I didn’t have to put in a lot of years or time to earn my partnership in the firm. When your family drops millions into legal counsel, there’s incentive to make them happy, and me being a partner made my father happy. It also means that I’m responsible for his account and not a whole lot else. Nepotism at its finest.

So I should be able to manage the few accounts I handle. I should’ve paid more attention to the wording in the patent, but because I missed one crucial detail, things went sideways. A porn company found a loophole in the patent, and the life-sized dolls took a very different, very X-rated turn. Hence the reason I have some time off while that mess gets sorted.

“You have to admit, the dolls were a genius move on their part.” Her eyes light up with mischief. “I might get one for Lex before they’re pulled from the shelves.”

I’m sure my face must reflect my horror. “Dad would lose his mothereffing mind if you did that. You can’t support the company that turned a children’s toy into a blow-up sex doll.”

Amalie rolls her eyes, as if I’m an idiot for even suggesting this. “You make it sound so much worse than it is. Besides, how would he find out if I bought one? It’s not like he has access to my credit card statements.”

“I don’t know how you can be okay with dolls that look like you being used for personal pleasure.” The thought actually makes me nauseous.

“They don’t really look like me. They’re just blond-haired and blue-eyed blow-up dolls.”

She’s wrong about that. Those dolls look eerily like my sister, which is why I was so disturbed when I discovered what had happened with the patent. Wording is always paramount.

“Anyway, enough about that. How are things going with Lawson? Is he driving you crazy yet?”

I laugh at that. “He’s a hard one to rein in sometimes, but so far it’s been fun.” Particularly the renovation part.

Amalie smiles. “Good, I’m glad to hear that. He needs somewhere to focus all that energy, doesn’t he?”

“He sure does.” My younger brother has lots of ideas and not a lot of direction. Like me, he works for our father, except on the marketing side of things. Mostly it’s him posting pictures of the damn dolls on social media, and coming up with ways to push the app.

In his spare time, which he seems to have a lot of, he’s been dabbling in the real estate market for the past few years, specifically in the Hamptons, where he lives year round. Since going on hiatus, I’ve taken on a more active role in the renovation side of his venture, where I’m able to foster the more practical aspect of my detail-oriented skill set.

Hands-on has always been where I excel the most. Back in high school I loved reading blueprints and seeing how things fit together. Unfortunately, that wasn’t an approved career path. Not when my father had worked so hard to take us from lower middle class to elite. When Amalie was born, we lived in a tiny three-bedroom house. By the time she was six, we lived in a mansion.

“We’re supposed to sell a property I’ve been working on this weekend.” I’m actually pretty excited to see what it will go for.

“Will you reinvest in another one?”

“That’s the plan.”

Amalie tilts her head a little. “You really like this, don’t you?”

“Yeah. It doesn’t even feel like work.” At first the time off from the firm felt like a punishment, but then I started working with my brother, getting my hands dirty, but in a good way. “As much as I don’t like that Dad’s still pissed at me, I think my screwup might not be the worst thing in the world.”