Fire in an Amber Sky Read online

  “This is going to kill her,” a male voice chimes. “What about all the guests? What about the food? We’re having filet mignon. I really like filet mignon. My mother is going to have a fucking heart attack.”

  My own heart beats out a few unnatural thumps. I recognize that voice, that hulking low, raspy tone as the one of my soon-to-be groom. My feet move forward without my permission. The heat pulsates over my head like an invisible hammer. My skin prickles with stinging beads of perspiration as the surroundings begin to fade. It’s as if I’m leaving my body, my ghost already moving on—ready to peer to the other side of this plastic curtain and knock over that first domino waiting to take my future down in a snake-like rally.

  “She would have wanted it this way,” Leah pleads, her voice maintaining its whiny appeal. I take a few steps forward. “She will never forgive you for taking her virginity—not to mention the next year of her life. Believe me, Little Miss I-Do-Things-by-the-Book does not have divorce on her bucket list. You’ll be doing everyone a favor if you call it off now. What are you going to do? Fuck her and think of me?”

  “I always think of you when I fuck other girls.”

  They share a laugh as their shadowed heads come together at the lips.

  My body goes numb. That Chinese chicken salad I wolfed down at lunch threatens to make a reprisal.

  My fingers grip the hem of my skirt as if it were weighted with lead, as if it had the power to keep me from floating into the sky like a helium balloon. I can no longer feel the heat, my body, the ground. It’s almost supernatural as I glide in their direction.

  I walk around to the side of the tent and find them together—Leah and Bradley—locked in a lover’s embrace. My heart seizes as if this anvil-over-the-forehead moment has the power to actually kill me. Here they are in full color, no longer the disembodied voices, the charcoaled silhouettes that had struck me as romantic a few moments before. Their lips meet as they begin a deep-throated kiss, the desperate kind—the going off to war kiss—leaving for a year kiss—the I’ll think of you at night kiss, and that’s the one that plunges the dagger deepest into my chest because it was going to be me that he was sleeping with while thinking of her. Here they are, Leah and Bradley, the cheaters.

  My heart drums through my ears in spasms. My feet feel as if they’re dissolving into the earth as I sway over wobbly knees.

  I have never been good at confrontations. I have never been much of a screamer, a drama queen, or a potential candidate to commit a double homicide, but my rules are bending. Hell, they are outright splintering, and suddenly I’m craving the snap of bones.

  I pick up the nearest ladder-back chair and hurl it at the two of them as if I were breaking up a fistfight.

  “Holy shit!” Bradley shouts as Leah lets out a riotous cry and something about her nose. Their commotion is short-lived once they spot me, and suddenly they’re quiet as church mice.

  “Macy.” Bradley extends his hand, the look of pity on his face. God, I don’t want anything from Bradley ever again, and for sure I don’t want his pity.

  “I hate you both!” I toss another chair and another until it’s raining plastic on the fuckers. “I hate you!” My voice rubs raw as I scream the words into the unblemished sky. The afternoon moon winks down on me with approval as if it were the only entity in the universe on my side.

  Leah stumbles forward with an arm in front of her, doing the blind man’s shuffle in hopes to deflect the furniture onslaught, but my next missile whacks her square on the nose, and this time I’m rewarded with what looks like a ketchup stain shooting across her cheek. “Take that, you lying little bitch! Hey, I know—maybe Bradley will masturbate at the thought of you getting your next nose job!”

  “Macy! Stop!” my mother cries from a distance, a maddening cry as if I were mowing them both down with my car, but I ignore her impassioned plea. “Enough!” Her voice whips through the thick heat like a lioness.

  “I will not stop!” I thrust my hands against Bradley’s chest, slap his ridiculously shocked face, and pull at his desperately thinning hair. “You are a cheater! And I fucking lied to you when I swore you weren’t going bald! You are an asshole, Bradley Lowell! And soon you will be a bald asshole! The two of you deserve each other!” I give another generous whack across his face.

  Leah jumps on my back, and I give a wild spin until she flies off, landing face- first onto the freshly mowed lawn.

  “Macy!” Mom pulls me back with that ridiculous clipboard clutched in her hand, the one she pours over with the meticulous care of a battle plan worthy of guarding national security. I pluck it from her acrylic claw.

  “We won’t be needing this,” I say as I hurl it at Bradley’s crotch, and his eyes expand, two instant suns of crushing white-hot pain. “That’s okay, Bradley. You never had balls to begin with!”

  “What’s going on?” Mom’s eyes glaze over with rage as she inspects the two of them cowering together—the broken nose, the busted balls, and she knows. Mom can do the cheating math with the best of them. “Oh, dear God—no.”

  “Yes,” I correct. “Leah wanted to tell me right away, but Bradley was willing to ride it out for a year. You know, let them eat cake because he’s too much of a coward to piss off his mother, the queen.”

  “Oh, for shit’s sake.” Mom slaps a hand over her forehead. “I’ve got a million calls to make.” She takes off for the house, stabbing her heels into the grass as if it were Bradley Lowell’s heart.

  “Wait, no!” Bradley holds out a hand with that desperate look on his face I used to think was so damn cute. Bradley has a boyish appeal, with his chubby cheeks, pinched nose, and his forever-sunburnt skin. Leah used to tease that with my red hair and his red skin our kids would be walking tomatoes, and now they won’t be walking anywhere because she just helped blip them out of existence.

  “Look, Macy—” Leah starts, and I’m quick to cut her off.

  “Don’t.” I lift a finger to the river gushing from her nostrils. “I’ve heard everything I need to hear. Now, you are going to listen to me. For years I’ve put up with your bullshit, your petty jealousy, your stupid competitions. Well, guess what? You win! And what a prize! A man who’s willing to cheat on his fiancée three days before their wedding!” My anger surges as I look to Bradley. “And you’ve been sleeping with other girls while playing the holdout card on me? Oh, Macy, it’s so hard to wait! Oh, Macy, we’re so pure and chaste—so much better than everyone else. Let’s get married before my dick falls off. I really do hate you both! You’re lying, conniving, and manipulative. I hope you rot in hell together!”

  I take off for the house while they shout my name from behind like a pair of pathetic injured birds.

  I hate them.

  Hell, I even hate the sound of my own name right about now.

  How could Leah, of all people, have done this to me?

  Him, I no longer give a shit about.

  Her, I will never forgive.

  * * *

  Present

  Jinx Enterprises is ironically what I envisioned college would be like. Lemons University was as bitter and monotonous as its moniker suggests, but at Jinx there is life, a vibrancy that school lacked because all anybody ever did was look forward to the parties, and here, this was the party.

  This entire multimillion—perhaps billion—dollar company was named after my uncle’s cat. A cat named Jinx. Which really explains a lot.

  The statue of a large black feline with glowing almond eyes stares down at the endless sea of hipsters, the self-righteous college dropouts—one of which I happily am at the moment. Girls infiltrate the grounds, looking as if they can be supermodels. I know at least two of these supermodel look-alikes are related to me through marriage, Stephanie who goes by Stevie and her half-sister Aspen.

  Uncle Cash and Uncle Carson give me the tour of the third floor where a bevy of said hipsters recline in futuristic-looking pods, and others work hard at sharpening their pool skills while the blipping beacon of video games gathers the throngs in the background. Cash and Carson have never let me attach the term uncle to the front of their names, but that’s how my mother refers to them, so to me that’s who they’ll always be whether or not I actually use the familial term.

  “This is the hive,” Carson says, walking through the area quickly as if we risk being stung. “A think tank if you will.” He looks to me and inverts those dimples of his with displeasure as if he’s in on the joke. Carson is handsome in his own right and has managed to turn the heads of all the female populace wherever we go. All of the Cannon brothers are dark-haired, blue-eyed, dimpled darlings. My mother shares their good fortune, but my father was Irish to a fault, thus my ruby locks and eyes the same verdant shade as the Cliffs of Moher—my father had whispered that to me once regarding my eyes, and I never forgot it. He somehow wanted to make up for the fact I was picked on at school for being the requisite ginger—and, then when he left us, damning me further as the redheaded stepchild. I somehow managed to escape the freckle clause at birth, but I don’t think I would have minded them. My mother always did say I have Cannon skin and an O’Conner heart—too big and far too fragile. I smirk at the thought.

  Two weeks have hacked by since that tragic yet invaluable afternoon I took off my monstrosity of an engagement ring and shut down what was panning out to be the biggest mistake of my young life. I didn’t just dodge a serious bullet; I dodged an entire submachine gun worth of misery—and, in the process, I shed my old self like a tattered coat. It’s as if a concrete divide was poured between that portion of my life and this new one that I’m starting in Los Angeles. As if I bisected into two completely different entities, the Old Me and the New Me. The Old Me was running scared twenty-four seven, easily hurt and far too worried about what others might think, but the New Me simply doesn’t give a damn.

  It was my mother who helped me secure a position at her stepsiblings’ company, Jinx, and the rest is dot-com history. But in no way does any of this feel real, more like some disembodied hippie dream I’m dancing through with my heart and throat full of butterflies and tambourines leashed to my feet. I’m half-afraid I’ll come to, and I’ll be right back under that heated tent, cradling that picture of my father in my arms. Something died in me that afternoon. And, if I had to guess, I would say it was that too big and far too fragile heart of mine.

  Another lackluster trait I inherited from the O’Conner clan is the ability to boil in a rage, fester like a blister just under the surface begging for a laceration or an explosion where apparently I feel the need to throw lawn furniture for relief. It’s an ability I’ve fought to twist off for a majority of my twenty-two years, but as of late, the New Me insists I nurse this attribute, stroke it like a beloved pet, and have it settle in my bones until I’m coursing lava-hot anger through my veins full throttle. The world can’t knife you in the back if you’re the one holding the blade. And the blade has definitely changed hands. I’m not Macy-Please-Let-Me-Be-Your-Virgin-Bride-O’Conner. I’m Macy-Go-Fuck-Yourself-O’Conner. My tolerance for the human population has dwindled down to zero. I’m not so much about trying to get people to accept me, to like me, as much as I’m simply fighting for a space in this world. Even the thought leaves a bitter taste in my mouth. I’m just ready to get on with the business of living and discovering who I really am—unleashing the girl I corseted with the strings of my burgeoning Pollyanna-hood and pulling the real me out, bloody and screaming with the lusty cry of a newborn. My first deep breath, right here at Jinx in the belly of the hive.

  “This is Lionheart central. Stevie’s office.” Cash points to the right. “Hey, Pepper.” He nods to a petite blonde who also looks as if she deserves a glossy spread in Maxim. “To the left, we’ve got Aspen’s creative den. And next to Aspen is her blonde ditz of a sister whose name I can’t even remember. She’s never here anyway.” His finger shifts to the end of the hall. “Lincoln Lionheart. He’s a bag of shit on fire. And, for the life of me, I can’t figure out how to put out the flames.”

  “Stay away.” Carson leans in as if this were the direst warning of them all. “He’s a snake in the grass. He’ll bite you every time.”

  I’m intrigued. A man worthy of two cheap clichés? I’m not sure which one I’m more impressed by, the bag of fiery shit or the snake slithering through the blades. A snake slithering through a bag of shit on fire. Now that’s a bit kick-ass if you ask me.

  Carson takes an unsettled breath. “I’ve never met a man more out for himself. He doesn’t have a heart. That last name is nothing but a lie—Lionheart,” he balks. “Look, I need to hit the gym and pump my guns. I’ll catch you in an hour.” He takes off running backward and half of the female population in the hive stops to gape at his athletic wonder. Carson is muscular to a fault, a testament to fitness, as if he sits around all day bench-pressing buildings. He’s heavily tattooed, artfully so, and holds just the right amount of a bronzed tan from his time spent in the ocean. He’s your garden-variety bad boy that every girl dreams of. The Old Me yearned to worship a guy like that. Bradley was as far away from a bad boy as you can possibly get, at least until I discovered he was just plain rotten.

  Cash leads me down a labyrinth until we hit a spacious suite where even the air is cooler. A gorgeous secretary sits outside a set of mysteriously closed double doors and touches her hand to her pearls when she sees my gorgeous uncle.

  “Mr. Cannon.” Her velum white teeth take a bite out of her bottom lip as we pass.

  He offers the briefest of nods. “And this is my office.” He opens the door, and I head into the wood-paneled room with a picture window that spans floor to ceiling revealing rolling green fields that surround a glass dome where they host a community vegetable garden. I made a complete revolution around that glassy structure once I arrived, certain I’d find where they hid the weed. I didn’t. “Human resources will try to assign you one of your very own later this afternoon.”

  “My what?” I step away from the window.

  “An office. Do you have somewhere to stay?” He pulls a water bottle from the mini fridge, but I refuse the offer.

  “I’m at the Davenport. It’s just until I find a place, maybe a roommate.” Or more accurately until my credit card pleads for mercy—not that it hasn’t already.

  “Your mother spares no expense. When her checkbook cries uncle, let me know, and I’ll let you crash with me at the beach house if you want.”

  My mother’s checkbook cried uncle about three weeks into my wedding planning. It turned out the Lowells were quite traditional as far as having the bride’s family heft the majority of the bill. Bradley’s grandmother, the new widow, paid for the cake, but his mother, the queen, dismissed all talk of the wedding as far back as last Thanksgiving as if it were a century away. I know for a fact my mother’s credit cards are still smoking from the damage, her credit score crushed under the weight of that Ringling Brothers big top she procured to keep us out of the sun.

  I consider the idea of staying with my uncle and wrinkle my nose without meaning to. Cash is a notorious womanizer. Just the thought of an endless La Perla panty parade makes me twitchy.

  “Wouldn’t I cramp your style?” I don’t need to ask. We both know it’s a solid truth.

  His dimples dig in again. Frowning with their dimples is a distinct Cannon trait. My dimples are a bit shyer to dip in quite the same way. They tend to invert when I give a lunatic-like grin or happen to experience a bout of extraordinary happiness, which explains why they haven’t been spotted in months.

  “Never. Feel free to stay as long as you like. Just give me a heads-up so I can have the place cleaned—sanitized, take your pick.” He thumps his pencil over his desk again and again. “There’s a board meeting in an hour. Ford mentioned he had a roster of potential positions you might be interested in. We’ll go over all of that with you. Most of the people here are pretty nice. Some of the people here”—he darts his pencil in the direction the Lionhearts have their offices—“are out for blood. I’ll tell you what—you infiltrate basecamp, and I’ll make it worth your while. Stevie and Aspen will love you. Befriend them, see if there’s anything suspicious—keep your radar up. Let me know what your gut says.” He shakes his head. “They swooped in and ate Jinx in the night. Ford didn’t even know what hit him. And now that Stevie and he are married, things have somewhat been restored, but the Lionhearts still own a majority of the shares.” His teeth graze over his lower lip, lost in thought. “Maybe stay away from the brother. He’s the most dangerous of them all. If there’s anyone standing in the way of buying back this company, it’s Lincoln.”

  “Is that what you want? To buy back Jinx?” I had heard of the takeover when it happened—when everyone else in the Western world heard the echoes of the implosion. My mother was shaken. My grandfather was mortified that a woman had played his sons. I had to roll my eyes on that one. But he was stung before. His second wife, the mother of the Cannon boys, ran out on him early in their marriage. My mother said there were whispers of an affair with a married man—a married man with the last name of Lionheart. My mother was able to put together the vengeful pieces, even if my brothers were not.

  My mouth falls open as a thought comes to me. “You want revenge.” It’s not even a question. Of course, Cash wants revenge. Men don’t take too lightly to having their balls sliced off and served to them cold for breakfast. It’s exactly how I feel about what Leah and Bradley did to me. Although, I couldn’t care less to infiltrate that basecamp. I don’t want revenge. I want distance—lots and lots of L.A. miles cushioning the space between us.