Chapter 1

Kathleen

Do you see her over there in the three piece suit? No, no, not the sweating lady with a cough. I'm talking about the much younger, much more attractive person who looks like a spoiled prince on the verge of getting her way again. The one with the kind of androgyny that makes you melt and question everything you've ever encountered about gender, she's that hot.

Yeah. Her.

That's Ira Mathison. And I hate her.

Sounds childish, doesn't it? I admit being around her makes me immature as hell. Whenever I see that smug face, all I can think about is screaming that she's really not all that.

I wish I didn't have to see her today. I told my dad that this was a terrible idea. Not that the Mathisons don't have their shit together. By all accounts, they're doing fine, even for an empire run by a divorced couple and their only child. That old balding guy there is Donovan Mathison, Ira's father. He's not a bad guy, I guess. Hell, I like his ex-wife, Carolyn. There's a woman who knows her worth and doesn't take shit from anybody. My role model.

Somehow, though, those two seemingly decent people managed to raise an insufferable shit. See? She's noticed me. Now she's coming over here, and…

"Morning, Kathleen." If Ira had a fedora, she'd be tipping it. "Haven't seen you around in a while. How are you doing?"

My assistant sneaks through the door with my coffee. Annie isn't much younger than me, but you would think a decade separated us from how demure she is. A lot of people mistake her for my little sister even though I'm the only child in this branch of the Allen family tree.

I take the coffee from her, grateful to have something to occupy my hands with. When I'm annoyed, I get fidgety, and I don't need Ira to see me anxious around her. We may be on the same side during this meeting, but I don't need her holding my nerves over my head.

Because she totally would.

"I'm decent." At least that's the truth. Things could be worse, but things could also be way better. I only have so much patience. "Are the Anderssens here yet?"

Ira looks at her watch as if that will answer my question. "We still have fifteen minutes."

I can already tell that this is going to be a long day. The Anderssens, a power couple who own multiple properties in the city, are looking to do something with a downtown hotel. Just so happens that the Mathisons are up the ass of hospitality. So, it makes sense that Donovan and Ira are interested in buying The Ace if only to add it to the many hotels in their domain.

When my father approached me about it, however, I thought he was nuts.

"Donovan and I had drinks the other night," he said two weeks ago, lying back in his leather chair smoking a cigar and drinking his nightly brandy. He was in his office, one of the coziest spaces in the family house on the outskirts of town. We're one of the only wealthy families who keep our roost in the city limits. Most of the others have houses up in the nearby hills, farther out in the mountains or other states – meanwhile, they keep penthouses, apartments, and small manors in the city. I moved out a long while ago to set up residence in the cutest three-bedroom overlooking the river… oh, right, my dad.

Where was I?

"The Mathisons want to buy The Ace, but they're not just going to overhaul it like they do everything else. They want to turn it into a cultural center. Part hotel, part museum. That's where he brought me in, see? They want to buy the property, but Donovan wants us to help with the remodel and get the public on board. They're particular about their historical sites."

Sure, a historical site. Just because a couple of presidents stayed there in the 19th century…

"This is a huge chance for us. For you. I don't have time to deal with this on top of my other projects, so I want you to take control of our side."

I was excited at the time. My father has trusted me more when it comes to the family business ventures. Right now, I run the show at multiple art galleries, since the Allens are all about the cultural arts. My mother, before she moved to Germany, used to joke that my father's family had three hands: one dipped in museums, another dipped into art galleries, and the third patted themselves on the back for enriching the cultural prospects of the little guy. The most annoying kind of philanthropist.

Regardless, I was pretty stoked to take on a project like overhauling the museum part of The Ace. I may only be twenty-seven, but I have a double degree in business and art history. I am a master of grant writing. I single-handedly, I shit you not, recovered government funding for the local libraries in one of the low-income neighborhoods around here. Nobody else was going to do it, and I wasn't about to stand around to see more kids go without books and educational internet access while the local fat cats (that I personally know) smoked cigars. Sure, I could've cut them a check. Except this was better for their long-term bottom line, and I try to be a bit more active than taking a passive interest in donations. I mean, who do you think I am… a Mathison?

"So, anyway," Ira says as I attempt to turn around and dither somewhere else for fifteen minutes. "I trust that you're ready for the meeting?"

I look over my shoulder, right into those troublemaking hazel eyes. Ira cleans up well, but I know how much she stinks beneath those nice threads. "What the hell do you think? I haven't spent the past week piecing together proposals and investments because I'm bored."

"No. Hardly. I don't expect a woman like you to be bored."

"What does that mean?"

She shrugs as if nothing about me matters. "Calm down. I know you haven't dropped the ball on this. I'm just giving you a hard time."

It would be reassuring if it weren't so damn condescending. She's so good at that. Talking to you and making you feel ten times dumber about a subject than you did before. Like I don't know I work my ass off! Just ask Annie. She works ten hours a day cleaning up after me. If it weren't for Annie, my schedule would be a total mess.

Just to make matters worse, the jerk winks at me before turning around and conferring something with her father. A wink. A fucking wink.

A wink shouldn't bristle me. A wink is nothing. More condescension.

More… whatever it is she sometimes does to me.

God, I can't stand being around her. When she's not making me want to gag on her toxic smugness, she's making my knees tremble from those quick looks and quicker grins.

I can't believe it. Even after twelve years, I'm still hot for the shithead.

Hang on, let me back up a minute.

Once upon a time, when a horny teenage girl named Kathleen was getting as much action as she could, she went to a gala hosted by Donovan Mathison.

Ira was there. Ira Mathison, the seventeen-year-old heartbreaker that every queer girl in our academy was throwing themselves at. Rumor was she had the tongue of a god. Of course, to a stupid girl, a "good tongue" meant anything that I could at least feel. Since Ira is two years older than me, I hadn't seen much of her at school outside of the soccer games I was often dragged to. Ira never stood out to me until I saw her up close at her father's gala.

Even back then she was clean-cut and masculine. Nah, she's not a bodybuilder, but she's got some nice, cut muscles that make most women – and dare I say, men – salivate. Even before I committed to the term bisexual, I knew there was something aesthetically pleasing about Ira, someone who has always been at home in her body, in her sexual and gender expressions. I've never seen her in a skirt, and I doubt I ever will. Still, when you like masculine lovers, regardless of what they're packing, you take note. You wonder, Is she that good with her tongue? What about the other shit? I hadn't been with a girl yet. I was only fifteen, for fuck's sake, although that didn't stop me from being on my fifth boyfriend and having a reputation of my own.

Anyway, since our dads were friends, my father went out of his way to introduce me.

I had met Ira before, but that was before puberty when she was a scrawny kid who looked no more interesting than a beanpole with shaggy hair. Post-puberty Ira, on the other hand, was a prince ready to sweep a girl off her feet. Nowadays, she goes by two sets of pronouns, but back then, it was only she. Her. Burgeoning woman. It wasn't lost on me that this androgyne a whole two years older than me (and therefore, really cool,) had often stared at me out of the corner of her eyes, even when we occupied two different hallways at Winslow Academy.

So there was this babe. Ira Mathison, the one everyone said was sweet and handsome and well talented if you know what I mean. One of my friends said she was lab partners with Ira's ex-girlfriend. "She makes her come twice in a row," she exclaimed more than once. I was lucky to come from my hand at that age, never mind who I was dating. I didn't have my first assisted orgasm until I was a freshman in college.

Do you see where I'm going with this? When I shook Ira's hand that night at the gala, I batted my eyelashes and made sure one of the sparkly black straps of my dress fell off my shoulder. Oh, trust me, she looked at it. And then she looked at my body as if she were going to devour it whole. The exact kind of shit I ate like catnip.

A half-hour later, she asked me to dance. Her hands were firm on my frame, though we danced a respectable distance apart. We didn't say anything. I think she barely knew my name, and I didn't care about any of her details. All I cared about were her eyes on my chest and her hand on my ass.

We were horny teenagers, okay?

Another half hour later, we were in a coat closet making out like bunnies. Or is that humping like bunnies? Either way, I was feeling things I rarely felt with anyone else. Like the burning need to fuck.

It was gonna be quick and dirty. Ira wore easy-to-remove clothing, and she was already unbuttoning her dress shirt before I could get down on my knees and taste pussy for the first time in my life.

Guess what? It's a good thing I forwent that because it turned out that our dear Ira Mathison had been visited by the uterus goblin ten minutes before our dance. All over her underwear, no less.

That's right. Ira Mathison, everyone's bachelor darling and you will call her a bachelor, not a bachelorette, mind, almost got menstrual blood on my face when we hooked up as teens.

I shouldn't hold it against her. Happens to the best of us. God knows I've been caught by surprise when taking a new lover back to my place or the five-star hotel suite I fully intend to use as my temporary love shack. But being the very mature youths we were, I ran out of the closet, mortified, leaving her behind with shame and embarrassment.

We didn't see each other for two years, not until I graduated from school and went off to college. Neither of us brought up that night. We haven't talked about it since. Sometimes, I wonder if she even remembers that it was me she had that experience with twelve years ago.

It's humiliating. This prince has only gotten hotter with age, and now here I am at ten on a Friday morning with a hot coffee in my hand and memories of making out with Ira in my head.

"Kathleen!"

I nearly drop my coffee. There's that booming, commanding voice in my head. I turn, meeting Ira's gaze from across the large conference table.

"They're here," she says, settling in a chair next to her father. "You ready?"

Fuck her. I'm never ready when she's in the same room as me.