The One Who Loves You (Tickled Pink #1)(3)

She makes her displeased noise. There are actual picketers in Knoxville—being handled by someone three levels below me, but still there—so I have a verifiable reason to slip away. And while I don’t talk to my sister often, I will 100 percent take a call with her over whatever it is Gigi is planning on dropping on me next.

I’m already doomed.

At this point, it can’t get much worse. Maybe if I stall, she’ll be struck with a rare bout of amnesia and forget all my sins. “Hello, this is Phoebe.”

“Phoebe, love,” the deep baritone of Fletcher Barrington, ex-boyfriend currently at the top of my shit list, replies in my ear, “you’ve been avoiding my calls.”

I pull the phone away and glance at the caller ID, confirming that my phone does, in fact, think Tavi is on the other end. “What did you do with my sister’s phone?” I hiss.

“Darling, never underestimate an heir to a telecommunications empire.”

It takes a second for me to catch up, which is a bad sign. “You spoofed her number so I’d answer.”

“Desperate times, desperate measures.”

“I have nothing—”

“I heard a rumor your grandmother’s rewriting her will. Give me back my grandfather’s watch, and I’ll tell you what I know.”

How convenient that he’d have a rumor about my grandmother when he wants something from me. “I don’t have your grandfather’s watch.”

“I’m serious, Phoebe. Give it back, or I will make your life hell.”

“You overestimate your importance in my life. Enjoy your time pretending to be the hero here. Everyone falls from grace sooner or later.”

“You think you’re low now? Your real fall is coming sooner than you know, darling.”

“I’m shaking in my Louboutins, Fletcher. Shaking.”

“And what happens when Grammykins hears the true reason you were passed over for the international marketing position?”

My veins fill with glaciers, and my clammy palms betray the outward calm I’m suddenly struggling to hang on to. “Goodbye, Fletcher. Might want to hit the gym. You’re going to need your right fist in shape to keep you warm at night very soon. And if you don’t want the world descending on your busboy lover, you’ll back off. Two can play this game, and you know I will.”

I hang up on him.

I’d tell myself the lie that there’s no way he knows the inner workings and secrets of the executive-level drama at Remington Lightly, except I also know better than to underestimate an enemy.

Especially an enemy working at a family corporation with its own drama.

I need to go on the offensive. I sink onto the velvet couch in the gallery outside Gigi’s dining room, perfectly positioned for her to sit and gaze at her favorite painting—a lone woman leaning on a cane and surrounded by beasts pawing at the ground, an impressionist-style piece of art that she had commissioned not long after Gawgaw passed—and I fire off a text to my assistant.

Antoinette—I need the doormat files first thing in the morning. We’re going to war.

How dare he threaten to blackmail me?

Who does he think he is?

You’d think he’d know who I am by now.

You’re letting your grandmother eat by herself. That’s who you are.

I snap upright again, smooth down my skirt, check my lipstick and earrings as I pass a gilded mirror on the way back into the dining room, and stroll back inside as though I’ve just hung up.

I’ve already angered the beast enough. “Honestly, Gigi, some people can’t do anything themselves. An employee was threatening to—Gigi?”

She’s not in her chair.

But—oh God—“Gigi!”

Her wineglass is upended. Plate skewed. And her Jimmy Choos–clad feet are visible on the floor beside her chair.

I dash up the length of the table, tripping on the carpet runner, until she comes into view.

Her face is mottled purple, her mouth gaping open, eyelids shut, hands resting on her neck. “Oh my God, Gigi, are you choking? Did you have a heart attack? Gigi? Gigi!”

I shake her.

She doesn’t open her eyelids.

“Help!” I scream. “Help!”

I’m suddenly shoved aside while Niles leans in to give her mouth-to-mouth. It’s slow motion and all too fast at the same time.

Gigi’s larger than life. She drives me crazy. She’s demanding and catty and shrewd.

She’s everything I want to be when I’m a seventy-year-old billionaire widow.

And her butler is hefting her limp body off the floor, fisting his hands under her breastbone, and pumping her.

“That’s not how you do CPR!” I scream.

The last syllable is still hanging on the air when a chunk of Kobe beef comes flying out of Gigi’s mouth, hits my collarbone, and falls down between the lapels of my suit jacket, landing in my cleavage and dropping into my bra.

Niles drops her again and bends over her mouth, and a lifetime that lasts mere seconds later, Gigi gasps on the floor.

I’m sobbing.

I didn’t know I knew how to sob, but I’m sobbing as I drop to my knees and grab her hand. “Gigi.”

She has blue eyes.

How did I never pay attention before to the fact that she has blue eyes?