“Mom,” Hunter groaned.

I laughed. “It is entirely my pleasure, Mrs. Fitzpatrick.”

When Cillian clasped his callused hand around mine, I looked up and my heart missed a beat. His beauty was as cruel as his expression. I didn’t remember ever seeing someone so brutally indifferent, my own father included. For all his sociopathic tendencies, Troy Brennan adored my mom, Sam, and me. Cillian Fitzpatrick looked like nothing could get to him, tanks and bombs included.

“Miss Brennan, what have you gotten yourself into?” he sneered, baring his perfect teeth.

I gathered he had very little faith in this arrangement. Refraining from kicking his balls in public, and feeling the reassuring pressure of Hunter’s palm, I grinned. “Are you asking or insinuating something?”

He chuckled, like I was an adorable toddler repeating a bad word. “She answers. Nice touch. You’re already exhibiting more personality than my brother has shown in his entire nineteen years.”

“She has more personality than you can find in all your European-heiress flings combined,” Hunter countered. “And being a dick doesn’t count for personality. It’s a muscle. So technically, you’re a meathead.”

“Hunter! Cillian!” Their mother gasped, but there was no real force or authority in her voice.

My mom used to chase Sam and me down the park when we misbehaved, and we still had a step in the penthouse we couldn’t look at because it reminded us of the lengthy timeouts we’d spent on it as a naughty spot. She loved us endlessly, but when she chided, we listened. I noticed that Gerald watched this exchange with a suppressed smile, like he was enjoying the turn of events.

The last person I was introduced to was Aisling, whom I kind of remembered anyway. She seemed like the only nice person in their clan when I was a kid.

“Hi.” I thrust my hand in her direction. “I’m Sailor.”

“I know.” She blushed, looking down and taking my hand. “You’re friends with the Penrose sisters, right?”

“Right!” I could feel my eyes lighting up. “They’re here with me, actually. Do you know them?”

I knew Aisling was a year younger than me, seventeen. She went to a private school outside the city. Word around Boston was that the Fitzpatrick couple had really wanted a girl after Cillian, and when Hunter was born, his mother tried to conceive as soon as she could to get her precious daughter.

Aisling bowed her head shyly. “Kind of. I know the three of you helped shovel snow from the entrances of that senior housing complex last winter and saved someone’s life. It was all over the local news. I thought it was really cool.” She turned completely scarlet.

I could feel Hunter’s gaze darting to me in surprise.

“You did that?” he asked.

“Some people give back to the community, ceann beag, believe it or not,” said Gerald.

The men in Hunter’s family were really starting to grate on my nerves.

“You can hang out with us, if you want,” I offered to Aisling, who took the opportunity to look me in the eye for the first time. She touched her cheek.

“Oh, I wouldn’t want to butt into your evening…”

“Nonsense!” I all but pulled her by the hand. “Trust me, everything is more bearable with the right people around.” My eyes darted pointedly between Cillian and her father.

I was sure everyone at the Roosevelt Hotel could hear our giggles as the two of us ran to my friends, arm in arm, escaping the men of the Fitzpatrick family, and poor Jane, whose eyes I could feel on our backs.

“Traitor,” I heard Hunter mumbling behind me, and I laughed sadly, knowing he was going to betray me as well.

With a prettier, more suitable girl.

The event started out smoothly enough.

Belle, Persy, Aisling, and I took our plates and ate in the corner of the room, talking animatedly. First, about Laura Hartfield, a girl who used to go to school with Persy, Belle, and me and was at the event. She was twenty-one and currently draped on the arm of a fifty-something, overweight businessman, a diamond the size of my fist twinkling from her finger.

“Now, Kanye ain’t saying she a gold-digger.” Belle’s cat-like eyes followed their movements through slits of disapproval. “But she ain’t messing with no broke.”

“She could love him,” I pointed out.

Persy and I were always the two to calm the gossip monster down when Belle spoke her mind about other people. The only filters Belle was familiar with were Instagram-related, even if most times she was dead-on.

“How convenient of her to fall in love with a middle-aged gazillionaire who has no hair, but possesses teeth the size of bricks, four chins, and is rumored to have given his ex-wife three estates and a hundred mill in a divorce settlement,” Emmabelle chirped.

All three of us turned our heads to glare at her in alarm.

“C’mon.” Belle laughed, shaking her head. “The only way she’s getting off these days is with Vinnie the Vibrator.”

“That’s sad. I’d never marry someone for money,” Aisling mused, taking small bites from her mini quiche.

“That’s because you have too much of it,” Persy blurted, blushing immediately under her makeup.

Emmabelle shook her head. “No. I’ll never marry for money, either, and I work weekend shifts at Forever 21 and rummage our neighbors’ recycling cans for empty bottles to make an extra buck.”

“Me either, never.” Persy smoothed her dress over her thighs.

All eyes darted to me. I continued picking at my sautéed broccoli meticulously, wishing for a better food choice. For a 5k meal, they sure didn’t bring their A-game in the kitchen. Despite my scrawniness, I cared about food.

Finally, Belle poked me in the ribs. “Well?”

“What?” I frowned.

“If you haven’t noticed, there’s a spontaneous pact going on over here among the four of us: never be like the Laura Hartfields of the world; only be with guys for love, and make sure we all keep our promise. Are you in, or are you out?”

The prospect of being with anyone, let alone for something materialistic, seemed as likely as living on Mars.

“Yeah.” I threw a broccoli into my mouth, chewing without tasting it. “Of course. I’d never be with someone for anything other than love.”

“Let’s shake on it, then.” Persy reached her hand to the center of the table. We all placed our hands on hers. It was super awkward, but in a funny kind of way.

“To being awesome,” Persy exclaimed.

“And real,” Aisling added quietly.

“And never settling for an asshole to get a pair of Louboutins you can get at the butcher shop.” Belle laughed throatily.

Aisling peered between us with confusion at the last statement. When our mirth died, they shot me an expectant look, waiting for me to throw my two cents into the pact.

I thought about something I wanted—one thing I wished for my true love to have.

“To being with someone who loves you just the way you are, and vice versa.”

We squeezed our hands together. It felt like the end of something.

It felt like a new beginning, too.

After the pact, Aisling confessed that she had very few friends at her all-girls school, and she was happy to graduate after this year and move somewhere new.

Belle made an executive decision to invite her to our weekly Friday-night hangouts, an invitation both Persy and I were happy to extend.

Whenever I glanced at the Fitzpatricks’ table, it was jam-packed with visitors coming to congratulate and shake Gerald’s and Cillian’s hands. Aisling said it was about a new refinery they’d opened in Maine. She added that it had been giving her father a headache and not going as planned.

Hunter was perpetually ignored. He picked at his food and checked his phone. Whenever his mother tried to talk to him, he either pretended not to hear her or offered her a one-word answer. I tried to keep my guilt to a minimum level and avoided texting him. Here was a guy who’d said he wanted to bed me just because I was the only woman around he could get his hands on, and I still felt bad for him.

I excused myself to go to the restroom. It took me ten minutes to push all my skirts up my waist before I peed. As I rearranged the heaps of fabric around me, I heard voices outside my cubicle.

“…came with Troy and Sparrow Brennan’s daughter. Sally? Stephanie? Something with an S.” One woman clucked her tongue.

“Sailor. Her brother is hot, though.” Another laughed.

“Adoptive brother, and he is too much of a daredevil. Rich, handsome, but bad pedigree. No, thank you.”

“I saw her ad on a bus downtown. You think they’re together?”

“Sailor and Hunter? No way. He is basically sex personified, and she is…well, a great ad for contraceptives.”

Laughter. Lots and lots of laughter.

“Mousy,” the first one agreed. “But they came in together, and there’s a rumor going around that they live together.”

“Maybe he lost a bet,” the second woman tooted, delving through a bag of makeup by the sound of it.