Luke coughed to cover his laughter. Jett just shook his head at the cheesy chicken. Tess rolled her eyes.

Mom, however, beamed. “She’s such a nice girl. Her mother was just telling me at garden club about how she works weekends, volunteering at the library. Isn’t that lovely?”

“Lovely,” I echoed, nodding.

Verdant was nice, well-read, and educated, just as my mother had said, but neither of us had any interest in another date. She was the kind of girl who was in the market for a doctor or lawyer, not dirty gardeners their rich moms found for them at garden club.

The ability to remain naive of her audience was truly one of my mother’s greatest qualities. She had no idea she was the odd duck in the blue-blood garden club she attended, grandfathered into attendance simply because my great-grandmother had started the club in the first place. My mother was innocent, blissfully unaware that they looked down their proud noses at her, humoring her with dates for her sons with their daughters, knowing full well that their daughters wanted nothing to do with the unrefined Bennet brood. Well, with the exception of Marcus. He was a prize stud—and utterly unattainable. He’d humor Mom by attending the dates with clinical detachment and polite endurance, just as he handled the rest of his life. I didn’t think he’d slept with a single one. It was easy for me and Jett to fool around—none of the rich girls wanted a gardener or a retail manager for anything more than a night. But Marcus knew he was firmly in the marriage market, and as such, those girls would take a turn in his sheets as a sign of impending nuptials.

Lila rolled into my mind like a fog, licking at my awareness until forming fully, a vision in white, the stark red of her hair, the stern line of her mouth. Ambitious and in control was Lila Parker, a woman who wanted the best of the best, the top of the rock, the cream of the crop. She was luxury embodied, luxury and blatant power. It sounded in every tick of her heels, held up by the square of her shoulders and the stiffness of her spine.

I wondered what she would look like soft and languid, imagining that the only chink in her armor, her only vulnerability, was when she was being loved down, silky red hair on expensive white sheets, those cool eyes liquid silver, molten with desire behind heavy lids. Her alabaster skin flushed with pleasure, those lush, wide lips of hers bruised and swollen from insistent kisses.