Page 16 of She Doesn't Have a Clue
“Should I give him something to look at?”
And then—then—his teeth grazed her earlobe before biting softly and giving it the lightest tug. She let out a sound that was borderline inappropriate for the bedroom, much less a ballroom full of wedding guests. It was craven, lusting, halfway to an orgasm, and Jake’s chuckle against her skin nearly pushed her over the edge.
“Please don’t… don’t do that,” Kate huffed.
“You don’t like it?” Jake asked.
She rather liked ittoomuch, which was the problem.
Chapter Nine
“Here we are,” Kate announced hastily as she spotted her place card, gold script on thick linen card stock. Unfortunately for her, she apparently had a place of honor at table one, directly across from the bridal dais where Spencer was, indeed, staring daggers at her and Jake. She ducked behind the tower of tulips, obscuring him from view. She still had Kennedy’s champagne glass, but she wasn’t about to give Spencer the opportunity to pounce and lecture her again, so she quietly set it beside her plate. Maybe they wouldn’t notice.
The wedding party had taken their seats as well, including Spencer’s awful brother, Eric, and his boring college-roommate-turned-lawyer, Ian. Kate shifted her position before almost making eye contact with Juliette Winters, the ferocious second-in-command of Kennedy’s marketing team. The woman was an absolute shark, as formidable in meetings as she was on the dating scene. Kate had no desire to give Juliette any more reasons to hate her tonight after the book tour debacle six months ago.
Next to Juliette, in the maid-of-honor position, was a woman in a dress Kate recognized instantly, thanks to its boxy fit. It was the woman from the garden, only this time Kate was close enough to identify her.Cassidy Smith, Kennedy’s cousin from the banished side of the family. No wonder she couldn’t afford a better dress. Kate had met the poor girl a few times over the years at Kennedy’s parties, and she’d always seemed on the verge of a nervous breakdown about something. She’d at least cleaned up her eye makeup so it was less raccoon, more Alice Cooper. Who had she been talking to out there, and what had they been discussing that had made the other person mad enough to slap her? Kate could hardly ask Cassidy, even though she was burning up with curiosity.
Jake took the seat beside her, breaking into her suspicious thoughts as he looked over the table decorations. “Kennedy must be a big fan of pink.”
“Dreadful, isn’t it?” said a young man in a bright red dress shirt, flopping into the seat beside Kate and slinging his jacket over the chair beside him. “It’s like being inside of an enormous vagina.”
Jake choked on a poorly timed sip of wine, spraying red across the soft pink of the tablecloth in an unfortunate pastiche that seemed to only underscore the point. “I wasn’t thinking that,” he said. He looked around the table with fresh eyes. “Though, now I can’t… unthink it.”
The new arrival waved an empty wineglass at a passing waiter. “Hello? Refill?”
“I think you’ve had enough until we get to the main course, Richie, don’t you?” said an older Black man in a navy blazer as he took the seat beside Richie. Kate glanced surreptitiously at his place card, where the nameSteven Moyerwas etched in gold. Kate dug her fingers into Jake’s arm to keep from gasping out loud. Richie and Steven. As inshe’s pushed me to this, Richie.
“I’m Steven, the family’s real estate lawyer,” he said, shaking Kate’s hand in a formal grasp. “And this is—”
“Richie, the black sheep cousin, and you are Kate and no name, fantastic, we’re all friends now,” said the younger man, draining half his freshly filled wineglass in one sip and making a face. “God, is this really the best that Auntie R would let them pull from stock? It tastes like cooking sherry mixed with grape juice.”
Kate’s knowledge of wine ran to the “silver bladder bag in a box”variety, but she thought the wine tasted fine. Then again, that might bewhyshe thought the wine tasted fine. She sipped slowly as the waiters brought out the main course. Richie picked at it, complaining about Kennedy’s banal choices of chicken or fish, criticizing the plating and the undercooked potatoes as he drained another glass and a half. Kate would have preferred something far less dainty herself, with less fork selection and a paper napkin.
“The, uh, photos are a nice touch,” Kate said, her attempt at polite conversation with a man she was rapidly realizing was deeply unpleasant to share a meal with. She waved at the photos embedded in the surface of the tulip vase. “Very… retro?”
“They’re of Uncle Gordon and Aunt Brielle’s wedding,” Richie said in a bored tone. “Kennedy’s parents, may they rest in peace, blah blah blah. From when they got married here. Ken has dreamed of having her wedding here just like they did ever since she was a little girl. She used to carry their wedding album around and make us re-create scenes from the wedding. I was the only boy, so I always had to play Uncle Gordon. Of course, that was before Auntie R basically banished us from the island under the guise of ‘preservation.’”
“If there’s one thing your aunt is good at, it’s spin doctoring,” Steven said with a shrug. “She has the majority of the board in her pocket, too, so she can get away with it.”
“Perfect little people-pleaser Ken really got her back, though, didn’t she?” Richie snorted into his wineglass. “More cutthroat than the Bitch Bull herself, going behind her back to the board like she did.”
“There’s no telling what Rebecca will do about it now, though,” Steven said. “Hell hath no fury like a Rebecca Hempstead spurned, and she’ll bring all hell down on us for it.”
Kate thought of Mr. Sheffield from the portrait gallery, whose entire family business Rebecca ruined over a broken engagement.
“You don’t seem particularly fond of your aunt,” Jake observed.
Richie snorted once again. “Who would be? She thinks because she’s made so much money with her little stock market ploys that suddenly she’s the only Hempstead worth cashing the family trust checks? It’s allGreat-Grandpa Russell’s fault, really, willing everything straight to Ferdinand and decreeing some ridiculous inheritance restriction that only the eldest of the eldest can manage the trust. That’s some old-fashioned bullshit. But it was Grandpa Ferdinand who really put the ice pick in the family back, cutting out his own siblings because they dared to question the will. And now we all suffer the consequences, bowing and scraping at the divine altar of Rebecca to give us our share.”
“You have to ask Rebecca for your inheritance?” Kate asked. She hadn’t run across the specifics of their trust during her late-night, ill-advised Google rabbit-holing, but there had been enough litigation among the Hempsteads to power a small village of lawyers.
“It’s more complicated than that, actually,” said Steven. “According to Russell Hempstead’s will, upon his death the entirety of the Hempstead fortune would be placed in a trust, with the eldest child of the eldest child in charge of overseeing and doling out those funds to the family. However, he put an… interesting stipulation upon the release of any such funds.”
“Interesting,” Richie muttered. “More like sadistic and humiliating.”
“I believe his intentions were good,” Steven said with a frown. “He’d seen many of his peers and their heirs fall to infighting and wasteful living over the fortunes they had amassed in their day. Russell came from farming stock, and he believed in the power of hard work. So he put in a clause—any Hempstead could request their inheritance at any time, up to one million dollars each, but only if they presented their plan to use that money in a significant and impactful way to contribute positively to society.”
“Like curing cancer?” Jake asked, bewildered.