Abigail shakes her head, and I can feel the disappointment coming off her in waves, even as she glares daggers at me. “You never do, but sometimes, I wonder about you, Ross.”

I begin to argue. “I’m just having fun—”

“Yo, Ross, that was epic! Get your ass over here!” My best friend and buddy, Kaede, calls from my locker, laughing.

“Go and have your little laugh with your friends . . . at Violet’s expense.” The accusation burns, but she’s not remotely done. “But I expect you to give Violet a sincere apology after school . . . or else,” Abi threatens, letting me know she’s going to tell Mom, who can be absolutely ruthless in making me apologize whenever I get too out of line. I might be an asshole to most, but not to my mother.

Once she’s sure I understood her threat, Abi walks off in the direction of the girl’s bathroom in search of Violet.

As I watch her go, I keep telling myself that Abigail’s full of shit.

I didn’t take it too far, did I? It was all in fun, and Violet’s fine. Hell, she’s probably plotting her vengeance right now. She’s good like that, exciting, challenging, likes to give as good as she takes. But I’ll apologize to keeps Abs off my back. Probably have to guard my balls so Violet doesn’t rip them off, though. She can be a badass bitch when she wants to be.

For some girls, that’d be an insult. For Violet, it’s a compliment.

*

Present day

“Another gossip spread from In Style News magazine!” my father, Morgan Andrews, seethes, slapping a glossy tabloid rag down on the board room table and sliding it in front of me. He stabs a hairy finger at words printed across the top while leveling a scowl that could cut through a mountain at me. “When the hell are you going to grow up, Ross?”

“When hell freezes over,” my youngest sister, Courtney, who doubles as our father’s assistant and my antagonizer, cheerfully supplies. Dressed in a tight black skirt, white dress shirt, and matching glossy heels, she’s perched on the edge of the obelisk-like board room table, her arms crossed over her chest and a huge smirk on her face.

I don’t have to guess at what’s got her so chipper. She never misses an opportunity to witness Dad laying into me. Even in a professional setting.

She calls it karmic revenge for all the hell I gave her as a kid.

I call it Annoying Little Sister Syndrome, even if I was a bit of a shit to her when we were younger. Nothing serious. I’m not a monster.

But I might’ve convinced her that chicken nuggets were made of zebra meat once upon a time, which wouldn’t have been so bad, except she was going through a phase where that was one of the few things she ate. After days of only eating cheese sticks, she finally told Mom what I’d said and I’d been forced to apologize and tell her the truth, and I’d been grounded from chicken nuggets myself for an inordinate amount of time.

And that’s only one instance of the childish shit I pulled with my sisters.

Fun times, I think fondly. Before everything got so damn serious.

“What am I guilty of doing this time?” I ask my dad wearily, afraid to look down at the page.

Being somewhat of a local celebrity is weird. When I was younger, the media would try to get pictures of our family because my dad is a bigshot in the business world. And then overnight, when I turned eighteen, I went from ‘rebellious wild child football star’ to ‘hottest bachelor on the market’, and that’s a damn weird thing to hear about yourself when you’re barely out of high school and feel like a kid muddling his way through college. My love life, sex life, and private life have become fodder for consumption and it’s exhausting. Always on show, always be pulled together, always represent, always be an Andrews . . . like I give a single, solitary fuck about what some past her prime trophy wife in the grocery line thinks about me when I can’t even run to the store in grungy jeans because it’d cause some sort of scandal that would hurt my family’s company.

Like now.

“Look and see for yourself,” Dad growls.

Anxious, I slowly peer down at the attention-grabbing headline.

Notorious Playboy Ross Andrews Nicks out of Nightclub with Wife of Mega Pastor.

The alliterative words are positioned over top of a blown up shot of me and a woman. In the picture, you can see me trying to hide her face, but in doing so, I gave the photographer free reign to take clear pictures of my disheveled mug and wrinkled dress shirt that’s got one too many buttons open at the top.

“The hell?” I gawk in disbelief, remembering the night.

I’d met a woman in the club who said she was lonely and wanted someone to talk to. I’m no fool. That’s totally code for only wanting one night, and she was hot in a broken doll sort of way. And we had talked. She’d been touch feely, the one to undo that extra button, but that was it. Later, as the night wore on and we both realized that nothing beyond conversation was going to come of the evening, she became adamant that she had to go home and no one could see her at the club, so I snuck her out the back . . . and accidentally into the waiting lens of the press. I’d done my best to help hide her face, though I didn’t know why.

“I didn’t know who she was or that she was married!”

“It’s your business to know!” Dad snorts, pacing the room back and forth like a caged tiger. I can see his mind whirling just as fast as he makes laps from the window to the wall. He turns around to address me once he reaches the front of the table, placing both hands upon it and leaning forward. “What the hell were you thinking, Son? A pastor’s wife? Joeden Snow’s, no less?”