Page 133 of Devious Lies (Cruel Crown)
Nash found me hiding it under the bench in the center of the maze, paranoid Virginia would find it and tear it in half. Leaning against his dad’s iron shovel, he eyed the guilt etched on my face and held out a gloved hand.
My shaky fingers dropped the note into his palm. I prayed he wouldn’t toss it. Instead, he offered me a look I didn’t understand and told me the gap beneath the Hera statue made a better hiding spot.
If that Nash walked up to me now with a brown paper sack and a handwritten note, I’d gobble the peanut butter and jelly sandwich with a smile on my face and recite the note over and over until the words etched themselves in my soul.
This had everything to do with pride, but it also involved self-preservation.
I refused to taint my memory of Nash.
His phone rang, sparing us both. Otherwise, who knew the lengths he would go to in his quest of feeding me? He muttered something about Singapore and left me to sketch while the others ate. An hour later, he still hadn’t returned, but everyone had joined me in drawing portrait mockups.
“What did he say to you?” Ida Marie’s hands flew across her pad. She hounded me, for the eighth time, over one of my many arguments with Nash. Except, she didn’t know it had been an argument.
Plus, so much time had passed, and we hadn’t gotten in each other’s faces in a while. Come to think of it, the last time was the Soup Kitchen Incident. Or when I spat the sandwich at his foot if you counted that, which I didn’t on account of A—the distinct lack of witty comebacks on my part and B—my embarrassment over rummaging the sandwich from the trash and devouring it.
A secret I’d take to my grave.
My coffin had better come padlocked.
Who are you trying to fool? You fight him every time he tries to feed you.
“I already told you. He basically told me not to step out of line again,” I lied.
Sort of.
Was it a lie?
He had screamed it with his eyes the whole time, and I was almost certain he had said it, too. I didn’t even remember what the argument had been about. Just that he looked like he wanted to bend me over his knees and teach me a lesson, and my body hadn’t exactly been opposed to the prospect.
Ida Marie handed me a 4B charcoal pencil to fill the palm. I kept the pencil loose and slanted in my fingers as I shaded. Chantilly had us creating mockups for exclusive artwork to be placed in the upper-level suites.
None of us were well-known artists, but she had wasted a ridiculous amount of the budget on importing bamboo panels from China with a tariff that made me want to pull out her teeth and feed it to the gap-toothed Rottweiler that hung around Maggie’s tent city.
Mags, I corrected.
She loved me for slipping Stella my extra bread roll and our mutual obsession over murals. If she knew what I thought of Nash’s nickname for her, she would probably forgo the extra hours of sleep on the weekends and stop allowing me to babysit Stella and Harlan. Not that the tent city posed any dangers, but real mothers worried.
Virginia, on the other hand, never had.
I swapped the 4B for the 9B to color in the middle finger.
Ida Marie set down her sketch and scrunched her nose at it. “It’s awful.” She sighed, tore the sheet of paper from the sketchbook, crumpled it, and started again. Between us, a mountain of discarded sketches towered like a forgotten game of Jenga. “It’s just that Nash Prescott looks at you like—”
Chantilly walked up to us. “He looks at her like what?”
“Like he is disappointed in the entire design department,” Ida Marie lied. “You know, for going over budget on the furniture we ordered. Emery picked out the rugs.”
I bit my tongue before I blurted out the rugs had been on sale, and with the exception of me, everyone had exceeded the furnishing budget. We both knew Chantilly possessed the nose of a shark, and she sought news of me and Nash like a shark sought blood.
“Nash is right.” Chantilly straightened out Ida Marie’s balled up sketch, rolled her eyes, balled it up again, and tossed it into the trash before returning her attention to me. “Do not embarrass me. You may have Delilah Lowell’s protection, but as C.E.O., Mister Prescott outranks her.”
“Sir, yes, sir.” I mocked a salute. If she wanted to treat Nash’s company like it was the military, by all means, I would indulge her, but I would make her feel ridiculous about it.
“I mean it, Emery.” She stalked off after Cayden called her name.
“She hates you.” Ida Marie’s unhelpful remark hung between us. A knife with a dull blade. “Antagonizing her won’t help.”
“I know, but I lack the impulse control to stop. She hated me before I even spoke to her, and I don’t like bullies.”
