were hunched over the desk going through paperwork that Olivia would bet dollars to stilettos was some organizational plan the efficiency expert middle triplet had come up with to squeeze an extra half percent of productivity out of the brewery.
While Miranda and Natalie were the exceptions to the all-Sweets-are-crazy rule, she was the Sweet who proved the rule. Still, when she needed to bitch, there was nothing like the triad.
Miranda looked up from the paperwork on her desk. “You look like you’re about to set fire to the place. Lunch didn’t go well?”
“Lunch was fine; it’s Grumps Garcia who isn’t.” She flopped down into the seat next to Natalie, who hugged her beloved clipboard tight. “Why did I let Luciana talk me into moving into the cabin behind his house?”
“What?” Both sisters exclaimed at the same time, their identical blue eyes round with surprise.
God, she really needed to think before she spoke. That was not how she wanted to drop the news to her sisters. “No offense, but Uncle Julian’s just doesn’t have the space for one more person.”
There, that totally sounded better than “my best friend offered up the cabin behind her super-hot brother’s house and my hormones wouldn’t let me say no, even though I should have because he is a total ass.”
Ass. Oh God, his was still amazing. It filled out his uniform pants like they’d been custom made. She shifted in her seat, pressing her thighs together as discretely as possible. Crap! Stop thinking about Mateo’s ass.
“We’ll make room at the house,” Miranda said. “We always find a way.”
Here her sisters were trying to clean up her mess of a life, just like when they’d been growing up, and all she could think about was Mateo. You could take the girl out of Salvation, but you really could never take the Salvation out of the girl.
“True, but the cabin is already there,” she said. “It’s vacant. Plus Luciana won’t charge me any rent.”
Natalie’s eyes narrowed. “Why are you worried about paying rent?”
She dropped her chin to her chest. What was that she’d just told herself? Oh yeah, no talking without thinking.
“Spill it, Olive Breath,” Miranda said.
Oliva sighed. Time to put all of her humiliations out on the table. “I lost my job.”
“I thought you’d quit,” Natalie said.
“They asked me to quit—but that’s not all.” Olivia slumped back against the chair, taking a second to gather all the pebbles that had been glued together into a giant boulder that had rolled over her life and smashed it to bits. “I made some really crappy investments and lost most of what I’d made modeling, which wasn’t a shit-ton to begin with because you don’t even want to know the number of times when a designer paid in clothes instead of cash. So I’d gotten the marketing job to pay my bills, never worrying about the morals clause in the contract.”
Her chest tightened and she swallowed back the bile thinking about her ex always brought up. “Have either of you heard of My Ex’s Pics?” She paused while her sisters shook their heads. “Me neither, until my then shitball of a live-in boyfriend, Larry, posted naked pictures of me to it. I can’t get the site’s owner, some assprick who hides behind a fake name, to take them down and my lawyer says everything was totally legit because I gave the pictures to Larry as a gift and he, in turn, sold them to this revenge-porn site.”
Tits and ass. She could never get away from being more than two boobs and a butt for some men. Sure, she’d chosen to go into modeling, but that didn’t mean there wasn’t more to her than how she looked. “I had to tell my very conservative boss about the photos. He made noises about how sorry he was as he handed me a box to put all my stuff in and asked for my key to the office back.” Anger, white-hot and immediate, burned its way up from her toes. “I went home ready to murder Larry and let the jury fry me if they wanted, but our condo was empty. He’d liquidated everything in our bank account. He’d sold all our furniture plus most of the designer clothes I still had from the old days and then disappeared off the face of the earth. Turns out he owed some bad people a lot of money and when my investments went south, so did his credit rating with the bookie, so he didn’t have any use for me anymore and he’d skipped—which turned out to be lucky for me, because I’d look like shit in an orange jumpsuit doing twenty to life for murdering the bastard.”
She barely had time to suck in a shaky breath before her sisters’ arms were holding her tight, squeezing away all of the bad things she’d experience, all of the hateful words burned into her memory and all of the heartbreaking disappointments that she’d left unsaid. Things may have changed for her sisters, with their new focus on the brewery and their boyfriends, but one thing hadn’t—the bond of the Sweet triplets. No one and nothing could tear that apart.
Olivia hadn’t realized just how much she’d missed being with her sisters until that moment. She returned the hug before Miranda and Natalie took their seats again.
“So here I am, the crazy Sweet triplet who fucked up her world all over again.” She gave a hoarse chuckle. “Just like when I brought the documentary crew home with me one Christmas and left before New Year’s with practically the whole town waving pitchforks and burning torches in my rearview mirror.”
Now that had been a disaster. She’d meant to bring positive attention to the small town and had ended up making it a laughingstock—especially the mayor.
“Your world is not fucked-up,” Natalie declared. “It’s just Sweet-i-fied.”
“You’re home now and everything is going to work out.” Miranda rubbed her stomach and her gaze turned soft when she glanced at the framed photo of Logan on her desk. “I know it doesn’t seem like it but we Sweets seem to find our happy endings in Salvation. You’ll find yours too.”
“Tell that to Grumps Garcia,” Olivia said.
“Oh God, what did you do to offend Mateo now?” Natalie asked as she smoothed back a stray hair that had the gall to escape from her bun.
“Me?” Oh that was rich, considering his snarly attitude about everything. “What makes you think I did anything?”
Both sisters stared at her for a second, slack-jawed.
“You are the girl who told a certain short movie star with cultish leanings that you’d rather eat nothing but broccoli for the rest of your life than audition to play the part of his real-life wife.” Miranda laughed. “Face it, Olive Breath, you aren’t known for keeping your tongue.”