you’re still upright after the long weekend.” Gage slapped Flynn’s back.
The long weekend was to celebrate the finalization of Flynn and Veronica’s divorce. It couldn’t have come soon enough, but Flynn hadn’t felt like celebrating. His divorce marked an epic failure that piled onto the other failures he’d been intimately acquainted with lately. In no way would Gage and Reid have let the momentous occasion pass by without acknowledgment.
Acknowledgment in this case meant going out and getting well and truly “pissed,” as Reid had put it. And honestly, Flynn had had fun letting go and living in the moment, at least for a weekend.
“I always land on my feet,” Flynn grumbled, still tired and, yeah, probably a little hungover from last night. He should’ve stopped drinking before midnight.
“Good morning, Fleming.” Reid sauntered in next. “Morning, Parker.” Reid had refused to leave his accent in London. He kept it fine-tuned for one essential reason: women loved it.
Where Flynn was mostly an insensitive, shortsighted, hard-to-love suit, Gage was friendly and well liked, and Reid...well, his other friend was a split between the two of them. Reid had charm in spades but also had a rough edge from a past he’d always been tight-lipped about.
Flynn figured he’d tell them when he was ready. At this rate probably when one of them was on his deathbed.
“Well, well, well, what have we here? Three of Seattle’s saddest rich boys.”
Sabrina strolled in with her signature walk, somehow expressing both childlike wonder and sophisticated capability. Her slim-fitting skirt, blouse and high-heeled shoes proved she was 100 percent woman. Sabrina had a fun-loving attitude but liked everything in its place. She was the only one who’d balked at the promotion that Flynn had had to talk her into. She put others ahead of herself often, which was so converse to who Veronica was it wasn’t even funny.
Sabrina saw the world as a sunshiny bouquet of happiness even though Flynn had cold hard proof that it was a cesspool.
“Whoa.” Sab’s whiskey-smooth voice dipped as she took in Flynn. “You look like last night handed you your own backside.” Her eyebrows met the frame of her glasses as she studied Gage and Reid. “You guys don’t look that great either. Were you... Oh my gosh. It’s final, isn’t it? It’s done?”
“He’s single with a capital S,” Reid confirmed.
Her smile was short-lived as she approached Flynn. “Are you okay?”
“I’m fine.”
“Are you sure?”
That question right there was why he hadn’t told her about the finalization of the divorce. He wanted to drink away his feelings on the topic, not discuss them.
Flynn sent a glance over her head to Reid and Gage.
Little help, guys?
“You wouldn’t have wanted to accompany us even if we invited you,” Gage said.
“What’s that supposed to mean?” Her frown returned, but she aimed it at affable Gage, which was fun to watch. He finished stirring his own coffee and sent her a grim head shake.
“Darling.” Reid looped an arm around her shoulders. “Don’t make us say it.”
“Ugh. Did you all pick up girls?” She asked everyone but her eyes tracked to Flynn and stayed there. “And why wasn’t I invited? I’m an excellent wingwoman.”
Flynn felt a zip of discomfort at the idea of Sabrina fixing him up with a woman—or being there while he trotted out his A game to impress one. He’d suffered a few crash-and-burns last night and was glad she wasn’t there to witness them.
Sabrina pursed her lips in consideration. “Did the evening have anything to do with you three reaffirming your dumb pact?”
“It’s not dumb,” Flynn was the first to say. Family and marriage and happily ever after were ideas that he used to hold sacred. He’d seen the flip side of that coin. Broken promises and regret.
Divorce had changed him.
“You’re single with us, love. Did you want in on the pact?” Reid smiled as he refilled his paper Starbucks cup.
“No, I do not. And I’m single by choice. You’re single—” she poked Reid in the chest “—because you’re a lemming.”
“I’m to believe you’re single by choice,” Reid stated flatly. She wisely ignored the barb.
“A pact to not fall in love is juvenile and shortsighted.”
“We can fall in love,” Gage argued. “We agreed not to marry.”
“Pathetic.” She rolled her eyes and Flynn lost his patience.
“Sabrina.” He dipped his voice to its most authoritative tone. “It’s not a joke.”
She craned her chin to take in all six feet of him and gave him a withering glare that would’ve shrunk a lesser man’s balls.
“I know it’s not a joke. But it’s still pathetic.”
She turned for the coffeemaker and Reid chuckled. “You have no effect on her, mate.”
“Yeah, well, vice versa,” Flynn said, but felt the untruth hiding behind his statement. Sabrina had enough of an effect on him that he treated her differently than he did Reid and Gage. As present as she was in his life, it’d always been impossible to slot her in as one of the “guys.” And in a weird way he’d protected her when he’d excluded her from last night’s shenanigans as well as the skiing weekend. Flynn was jaded to the nth degree. Sabrina wasn’t. He needed her to stay positive and sunshiny. He needed her to be okay. For her own sake, sure, but also for his.
“Heartbreak isn’t a myth,” Reid called out to her as she walked for the door. “You’ll see that someday.”
“Morons.” She strolled out but did so with a twitch in her walk and a smile on her face. Immune to all of them, evidently.
Sabrina had lectured Flynn as much as she dared. She’d pushed him to the point of real anger—not the showy all-bark/no-bite thing he’d just done in “the Suit Café” as she liked to call their private break room, but real, shaking, red-faced anger. Which was why she recognized the sound of that booming timbre when she passed by a closed conference room door later the same afternoon.
Definitely, that was Flynn shouting a few choice words, and definitely, that was the voice of Mac Langley, a senior executive who had been hired on at the beginning by Emmons Parker himself.
She bristled as more swearing pierced the air. She’d seen a glimpse of the old Flynn when the four of them had fled the funeral to go to Chaz’s for fish and chips and ice-cold beers. In that moment she’d realized how much she missed hanging out with him, and how his marriage to Veronica
