Page 31 of Bargain With The Boss (Crescent Cove: The Moguls #2)

My sister always had an affinity for greens.

I wondered if she and Syd would get along as fellow plant mamas.

Not that it mattered anymore.

“That aura is getting more red.” She tipped her head.

“I’m here for—wow.” I noticed the shelves. “He didn’t catch that was wrong?”

“Pretty sure he was just glad he knew how to use the drill. He kinda forgot about the level part. Said he could eyeball it.”

I pulled out my mini level on my keychain and set it on the shelf and it immediately started sliding.

“Yeah...Caleb is really good at a lot of things. Home DIY isn’t one of them.” She took Milo from me and set him at another play desk near the back sliding door. “How about you do the dino puzzle?”

“Okay.” Milo lifted the puzzle and dumped the pieces all over the table top.

She grabbed a tarot deck off her desk on the way back to me and dragged me over to her reading spot.

“Lu, I do not need a reading.”

“Shut up. Maybe I need to do the reading for you, think about that?”

I frowned. “What?”

She crossed her eyes making me laugh before she pushed me down on her client couch and went around to her side. She started shuffling. “What I mean is sometimes people end up coming to me because I need to be the one to help.”

“You’re my sister.”

“Which is a double reason. Lucky asked Caleb to have a guy’s night and that lined up with me asking you over here. Because obviously you needed your sister.”

I arched my brow at her.

“Look, the universe has a plan sometimes. Little plans, big ones…” She started flipping cards on the table. “Definitely big ones.”

“What?” I’d let my sister read my tarot cards a handful of times—usually when I had a helluva lot more drinks in me than half a shandy.

“Dang, these are some cards.”

I didn’t know what the colorful cards meant. I did frown at the one I did recognize. The Death card.

“I’m not sure all of these are yours.” She pushed them aside then flipped a few more. “Ah. I knew it was a woman.”

I stood and paced away from her.

“An important one, if you get your head out of your ass.”

“Is this sisterly intuition or the cards?”

“Well, I am your sister and reading you. And does she have red hair?”

I turned around. “Stop. You can’t know that.”

She grinned. “It was just a guess with all this wand action.”

“I don’t know what that means.”

“Well, I do. It means a lot of fire and then I was drawn to this deck, and the Lovers card has a hot redhead.” She flashed the card at me.

“The thing is the Lovers card isn’t necessarily about simple love.

It has a lot to do with choices and that first hot sexy times, but I pulled an Eight of Pentacles with it which means you gotta work at it.

This isn’t something that will come easy. So tell me who she is.”

I sighed and walked back to the sofa to sit down. “Sydney.”

Her eyebrows shot up. “Jude’s sister?”

“Yeah.”

“Oh...Well, that makes sense. She’s got a lot on her shoulders and then there’s you being a defensive shithead.”

“Hey, how do you know it’s me?”

“Well, that reaction says yes.” She pulled her feet up under her colorful skirt as she leaned in, planting her elbows on her knees. “So, tell me. It feels like there’s some of your past bullshit in here.”

“It’s not bullshit.” I was about to stand up again when she gave me a hard stare. I collapsed back against the cushion.

Was it?

“Xavier, you’ve got baggage. We all do. You think it was easy when I hooked up with Caleb?”

“From what you said that part was easy as hell.” I winced. “Please don’t elaborate.”

She laughed and swiped up all the cards and started shuffling again.

“Sex is easy and natural. And fun.” She waggled her eyebrows.

“It’s those pesky emotions that come up.

Our parents fucked us both up in different ways.

Me, because they didn’t accept me. You, because you had to live up to all those expectations. Then, Sarah.”

I gripped the arm of the couch.

“If you don’t let it go, that is going to follow you forever, you know.” She set the deck down, stood, then came around the table to sit beside me. “You and Sarah weren’t right for each other. We weren’t talking a lot back then, but even I knew that.”

“It was just the lie. And Syd lied to me the same way.”

“Did she?” She touched my arm and the instant balm of calm that hit me always threw me off. I didn’t really understand my sister or the gifts she had. “Was it really the same?”

“She came here to ruin things for Jude. All with an end goal of getting him to tuck tail and go back to Seattle. She had her fingers in all of our files. In our money, for fuck’s sake.

We have enough problems with Maitland, we don’t need someone sabotaging us from the inside.

For God’s sake she even made friends with the enemy. ”

“The enemy?”

“She’s friends with Claire Maitland, Arthur’s daughter.”

“Do you even hear yourself?”

“I know it sounds insane, but what else am I supposed to think? Her mother wants some big merger to go through and the only way it’ll happen is if they show a united family front for the marketing shit. I don’t know.”

“You don’t know?”

I was quiet for a second, knowing it was going to sound bad. “I overheard her telling Jude about it.”

“Oh, you idiot.”She smacked me in the back of the head.

“Hey.”

She got up and left me alone. She came back with the drinks and pushed one at me. “Eavesdropping never ends well. Did you listen to the whole conversation or just run off half-cocked?”

“I don’t do anything half-cocked.”

She gave me a hard stare.

“Impulsive is different.”

“Sure it is.” She took a long drink from her glass. “Give me the whole story. Even the embarrassing parts.”

As I told her about how we worked together for the last few weeks, my sister laid cards on her table.

She made little humming sounds to let me know she was listening.

Gave me a little smirk when I told her I drove hours to see Syd in Lake George.

And finally, the first lie that sent me into this rage.

At the admission that she lied about birth control, Luna looked up.

“Okay, I understand why that would freak you out.”

“If she would have just told me, we could have handled it together.”

“Why would she think that?”

I frowned. “What do you mean?”

“You knew each other for what? Two weeks? She’s got this monster of a mother who sent her to do her dirty work, and she is obviously hyper independent. Sure, she’d expect the impulsive hot dude she slept with to help solve her problems.”

“Whose side are you on?”

She laughed. “Hers. Well, the hyper independent part. I handled my own business and certainly wouldn’t ask a guy I just slept with to fix a mistake. It was probably knee-jerk to say she was cool.”

“It took two to make the mistake, why wouldn’t I help?”

Luna threw her head back with a harsh laugh. “Yeah, okay. Have you met the average man? They just like to put it in the hole, they don’t care much what happens after that.”

“Jesus, Lu.”

“What? Most men are that way. She doesn’t know you. Not really. Her hormones understood you were a good time, but that’s a far cry from linking a future up with you. And if her life is in shambles—which it sounds like it is—panic is a real thing.”

“Why are you still pulling cards?”

“I’m pulling cards because it is how I process. I don’t know Sydney, but I can tell you that your thing with Sarah might be the same on paper, but it’s not in reality. You don’t know what her headspace was. Because, duh, you guys need to have a conversation. Not just go off raging like a jerk.”

My chest tightened. I had reacted. Seeing that Plan B box had been like a kick to the face.

There wasn’t even time enough to find out if there was a baby.

“There’s still what she did to Jude.”

“Now that one is between her and Jude.” She rattled the ice cubes in her glass. “If you can say you haven’t made a mistake in your life—which hello you can’t—then maybe you might want to give her some grace.”

“That’s a fuck ton of grace, Lu.”

She laughed. “And yet, did she sabotage anything?”

“I don’t know.”

“Maybe you want to figure that out first.” She opened her already huge blue eyes wider. “Talk to her. So says the cards. And your brilliant sister.”

Milo came over and handed me a donkey.

Luna laughed. “So says Milo, too.”

I laughed. “A bit on the nose isn’t it?”

“The universe is funny that way.” She stood and took my glass from me. “I’ll finish dinner while you fix my husband’s handiwork.”

“On it.”

The anger dissipated some after talking to Luna. She had a way about looking at things. And while I didn’t take a lot of stock in tarot cards, I did in my sister.

Maybe I was wrong all along.