Beautiful Elixir (Beautiful Oblivion #3) Read Online Free PDF Page A

hush.” My mother brandishes a limp wrist. “You’ll be there every single day front and center. Warren and Charles are headed to Japan for a few weeks; you can help hold down the fort. Caleb here couldn’t do it all by himself. Surely he needs a woman’s touch.”
    And I know exactly where he would like for me to touch him.
    “I refuse to be his secretary.” I give a satisfied smile at Caleb whose grin hasn’t stopped expanding since my stepfather opened his pie hole.
    “I already have a secretary,” he assures. “I can teach you the legal ropes. Mentor you. This will be a great way to spend your gap year.” His smile dims a moment. “Very productive.” His eyes hood heavy when he says productive, and that tender spot between my thighs clenches. I can see visions of office sex dancing in his eyes.
    “Goodnight, you two!” My mother sings while pulling Chuck off as if he’s the oversized catch of the day—a big, wet carp.
    Caleb leans in. The warm scent of his cologne wraps around my defenses. “It looks like we’ll be seeing a lot of each other very, very soon.”
    His eyes latch onto mine, and we have our own standoff, something that borders love and hate.
    “I don’t need a mentor. I don’t need a job. I most likely will not be following in my douchebag of a father’s footsteps, so the very last place you’ll be seeing me is your office.”
    I take off for the house before I change my mind about everything.
    I just spilled so many damn lies at his feet that I almost shouted Yahtzee!
----
    C ome Monday , I sit and stare at my laptop in disbelief. Keith was right. He was not having it. He was going to end this shit, break me of my wild juvenile ways. He’s already left dozens of threatening messages, and it’s not yet eight in the morning. Keith Stearns has been driven to the brink and so have I. My eyes are glued to the screen. I want to switch it off, gash a hammer through it, but I can’t look away. It’s finally here. The end of me. Whoever is messing with us had driven me to the edge of insanity. I’ve long suspected that Keith himself was relying on juvenile pranks to make me look like an asshole. His ego is bruised over the fact I finally had the balls to leave him. He denies he’s culpable to any of this. I deny it. And round and round we go. This madness has taken us to places I didn’t know either of us were capable of.
    But today, the shit has hit the fan. My father will hear of this and laugh in my mother’s face. Their divorce was nasty. My sister and I took sides—she my father’s and I my mother’s. This would confirm that my mother screwed me up, that I was just a product of her insanity, her trailer park, Fake Fifth Avenue, Nouveau Riche money pit that came without morals or scruples. Those were the very words she flung at him after discovering he had slept with numerous women on the side. Their divorce was very ugly. My sister and I reluctantly chose sides. I burned two familial bridges, and, now, my mother would hate me too.
    I don’t smash my laptop to smithereens like I want. Instead, I pack it up in my thirty thousand dollar Birkin bag and speed all the way down the hill to the glittering building that houses the Westfield and McCarthy law offices. I take the elevator up the phallic extension to the top floor and brush right by the blonde window dressing filing her nails outside of Caleb’s office. It’s Zoey, and as much as I want to be disgusted by this, I’m too unnerved, too unhinged from the latest unimaginable revenge in my ongoing dissolution from Keith to acknowledge or scathe her properly. I barrel past her without so much as a hello.
    “You can’t just go in there!” She screeches after me, wielding the nail file in her hand, the stench of polish remover thick in the air.
    Caleb rises, looking every bit as startled as she is. His widening eyes match the denim sky in the oversized window behind him. His white dress shirt is rolled up at the elbows. His