SweetHarts (5 Book Box Set)

by Kira Graham

  My woman is like a bloodhound when she catches a scent, and unless I am very careful, she’s going to catch on to me very fast.

  “Huh! Famous last words of a dead man walking,” he snorts, laughing when I grunt back. “Okay, fine. I’ll call old man Donalds in the morning and have him figure something out, but you have to promise me that you can handle your normal workload on top of whatever Rose throws at you. You’re the only one of the other brothers that I can rely on when it comes to closing deals,” he sighs, his tone affectionate rather than scathing.

  Probably because he knows that the reason he doesn’t allow anyone else to close deals is that he’s an OCD motherfucker with control issues.

  “I can do it,” I vow, knowing that I will do anything if only I can have a shot at the woman I want.

  “Are you sure you want to go there, man? I know you don’t want to hear this, and I understand why, but I don’t want to see you hurt, Zeus. Rose is—”

  “Not in love with Chilli,” I cut in, knowing deep within my gut that I’m right.

  She’s been searching for love and clinging to something that isn’t going to work, because she belongs with me and no one else. Rosetta Sweet is my woman, and I’m going to make it so, no matter what I have to do.

  “Then consider it done,” Adonis sighs before hanging up and leaving me alone with my thoughts.

  Oh, I do, I think, smiling darkly.

  I’m coming for you, Sweet, and if there’s one thing you can bank on, it’s that I don’t stop until I win.

  MISCHIEF

  Chapter One

  Rosetta

  Rejection.

  The word is three syllables long, nine letters in total, and short enough to be nothing more than a simple noun that names an event.

  But to me, it feels more like a verb, an action that is constantly in progress, and means more than just nine stupid letters. It’s synonymous with death, and yeah, I know that’s dramatic, but it’s how I feel. I feel as if months of my life are just gone, as if I’ve lost something that I cannot comprehend moving on from. It’s grief and sorrow all wrapped up into one tiny little text message that shattered my world and ended everything.

  Hopes. Dreams. Plans. All gone so fast that sometimes I sit alone in the dark and wonder just how it all happened so quickly. One minute, I was head-over-ass in love with Achilles Hart, bound and determined to make him love me back, and the next—poof! Done. Dusted. Ended.

  Death.

  My dreams of finally marrying the man of my dreams died so fast that I don’t think there’s a widow in the world who can’t in some way relate.

  “Cheese and rice, Rosetta! Would you stop yodeling over there, and help me with the chicken?” Mom yells, cutting short what I was hoping would eventually become a screenplay.

  Huffing, I set down my tape recorder, a gift from my sister Cleo, and hop off my stool to go over and help Mom remove the three roasted chickens from the oven, their weight almost bowling me over before I manage to wrestle the ten pounds of poultry to the island, where she’s set out at least seven other death-defying dishes ready to poison my family.

  Mom’s an excellent mother, a better wife, and one of the best devout Catholics I have ever met—just ask her, as she brags about it all the time. But what she isn’t is a good cook, and I can prove that right now by describing the chickens I just removed from the oven. There are three in the roasting pan, all in varying states of readiness, but none of them looks even close to what I would call edible.

  One chicken is a sickly yellowish-white color, the skin so pale and slimy-looking that I feel my stomach turn at the thought of putting it anywhere near my mouth. It looks about as appetizing as a rubber boot, and the pinkish juices leaking from beneath its un-crisped skin tell me that it’s nowhere near cooked—and, what’s more, that it could probably jump up and cluck its way out of here but for its lack of head, feathers, and feet.

  The second is a strangely unappealing mauve color and smells sickeningly like wine. Red wine. And unless my eyes deceive me, Mom forgot to remove the little packet that usually contains the giblets. Jeezus.

  The third, and my pick of plate-warmers, if I should be so lucky as to choose which kind of food poisoning I want, is a confusingly blackened husk that resembles a lump of charcoal with wings, and that smells as if someone took a blowtorch to it.

  All of them are apparently crowning achievements for Mom, though, because she crows over them and preens as if she’s just produced some kind of Ramsay-esque perfection in this place that my sisters—and sometimes even Dad—refer to as Hell’s Kitchen.

  I won’t even talk about the sides that Mom’s prepared, because frankly, I don’t know what any of them are. And I don’t want to find out, either. Mom can’t cook. She can mother you, scare you with her sex talks, and scar you with pictures of STDs that she downloaded from the internet. Hell, she’s even halfway decent to talk to when you have a problem and don’t know how to get over it. What she isn’t, though, is Martha Stewart, and right now, I want to tell her that so badly that I have to grind my teeth to keep the words in.

  “You still pining for that boy?” Mom asks, cutting into my last-minute excuses to skip dinner and thereby save my own life.

  “Mom.”

  “No, really, Rose. Tell Mommy—are you still pining for that meathead Chilli Hart, or have you gotten over that nonsense and moved on?” she asks, her eyes focused on me with the strength of the Death Star as I meet her gaze and gulp.

  I said that Mom is good to talk to sometimes. But today is not one of those times, and I will tell you why! Mom has this thing that she likes to call honesty, while the rest of us liken it to a brutal massacre from which we end up crawling away, bloody and beaten. She doesn’t pull her punches, on account of, and I quote, “I can’t lie to Jesus about who I am, so why should I bother to try with you?” Her words. Words that I have built my entire life around, not only as an attorney, but also as one of the youngest females to ever make partner in Georgia history.

  She’s my role model, as gross as that sounds, but one thing that I do not want to do is experience the same sort of honesty that I employ on a daily basis with others. Mostly because I care about my feelings and know that my mom doesn’t.

  “Mom, I told you, I do not want to talk about this,” I mutter, gathering my red hair into a messy bun on the top of my head to take some of the heat off my neck.

  I’m still dressed in the bright pink power suit I bought yesterday, thanks to a shopping spree that did nothing to help with my depression, and, while it clashes with my hair, it makes my ass look spectacular. Not that I have anyone to show my ass to now that Chilli—

  Dammit, Rose. Just don’t think about it, I tell myself, feeling another blazing bolt of fury bubble up.

  I won’t think about it. I just can’t. To think about the fact that I stalked Chilli Hart for months and basically threw myself at the man, only to have him reject me, would mean thinking about his text and the heart-ripping truth it contained.

  Then I’d have to think about the fact that I’m a pathetic loser, and after that, I’d be forced to face the hard, undeniable truths of just how nuts I must have seemed to everyone around me.

  “Well, I do! You spent months loving on that boy, and then poof—it just ended. Why did you and Chilli break up again?” she asks, adding gravy to the boat while her eyes keep boring into mine.

  The thick, lumpy mass doesn’t so much pour as plop into the boat, and the unappetizing aroma emanating from it turns my stomach so hard that I have to swallow and make a mental note not to go near it once it’s on the table.

  Ever since my sister Cleo got engaged to Adonis Hart, Chilli’s older brother, and basically locked me into a lifetime contract of seeing Chilli every day, we’ve had family dinners at my parents’ house every other week or so. No matter how many times we’ve outright begged Mom not to cook.

  Athena Hart, the Hart matriarch and probably the best cook in the entire state, usually
cooks big family meals like these, but with Mom being Mom and therefore as competitive as hell, she insists on feeding us every two weeks, despite our pleas to the contrary.

  Which means that tonight, I get to see the entire Hart clan over “dinner,” and I get to lay eyes on Chilli, no matter how much I want to avoid seeing him ever again.

  I hate him. No, I don’t. I detest him. I loathe him and his family so much that I truly struggle with these dinners when I can’t get out of them.

  “Rosetta!”

  “Mom! I said that I don’t want to fucking talk about this, and, for your information, we didn’t break up! We were never together,” I tell her for the millionth time, rolling my eyes heavenwards when she frowns.

  “But I thought you liked him. Didn’t you plan the wedding—”

  “Dammit! It was just a loose set of hopes that I scrapbooked,” I grumble, trying not to flush because I know that’s a lie.

  I did sorta kinda call a wedding planner and set a few wheels in motion, and I might have also possibly ordered a cake that I spent an entire night eating, while crying and watching Misery and fantasizing about hobbling Chilli Hart.

  I was a little drunk, but, in my defense, caramel buttercream goes perfectly with a bottle or two of bourbon.

  “Honey, I have a closet full of wedding invitations.” Mom points out tactlessly, her lips twitching when I flush and mutter a curse of denial.

  “It was a phase. Jesus, mom. Do you have to be so thoughtless?” I groan, falling back onto the stool while she covers up various plates of food and bustles around collecting ingredients for the one thing she does do perfectly in the kitchen. Dessert.

  My mom may cook as though she’s out to kill someone, but she bakes like Rachael Ray, and, as much effort as it takes to get through one of her dinners by pretending to eat the food, her desserts make it all worth it. About the only person in my family who outdoes Mom on sweets is my sister Cleo, the pastry chef who failed at business but makes such a mean caramel fudge that it would make angels weep.

  “Honey, thoughtless would be pointing out that you spent a week at home in a wedding dress, stinking to high heaven and wailing intermittently while eating donuts and watching that Shark Tank show,” she says gently, her uncontained cackling completely ruining the softness of her voice.

  Especially when she snorts so hard that I hear a soft toot wobble through her ass cheeks. See, that’s the thing about my family: we’re all assholes. The Sweet clan may be loving, and we may all have murder buddies—that’s sort of like when you go on a field trip at school, and the teacher assigns you a bathroom buddy, except that in my family, we’re so messed up that we’ve buddied up in the event of an accidental murder situation. My murder buddy is Cleo, but only because Sin is too crazy, Alex is the most likely not to kill someone—what a baby—and Tee is so violent that there’s no way the crime scene would be easy to clean up.

  Anyway, like I was saying, we’re assholes. We love each other, but we’re just not what you would call tactful when dealing with each other. I have two aunts, two uncles, and three cousins—Tee, Alex, and Sin—and with Cleo marrying the oldest Hart boy, I now also have five quasi brothers and two parents-in-law, who just make the situation crazier.

  And by crazier, I mean that everyone knows that I was in love with Chilli, but instead of ignoring it and pretending that I didn’t get my ass dumped, or as dumped as it’s possible to get considering that he was what the police would call a victim of stalking—what a crock!—people keep asking me how I’m doing with getting over our breakup.

  We didn’t break up! I got a text from the man telling me that he’s in love with someone else! That’s called getting your ass rejected. Which I hate calling it, but ever since I started seeing a therapist, I’m sort of obligated to face reality.

  Reality sucks, by the way, especially when my mom keeps pointing out just how spectacularly I failed at love. Technically, though, I didn’t even fail, because the truth is that I was never really in the game to begin with. Chilli Hart never saw me as anything more than a friend, which totally sucks because I’ve had some truly amazing wet dreams about the man.

  “I was in mourning, Mom. I was entitled to take a week off work in order to grieve,” I mutter, holding in a groan when I hear the front door slam, only to be followed by the pitter-patter of feet running for the kitchen.

  “Guess what?” Cleo yells before she has even fully entered, her blonde hair flying when she skids to a stop and starts to hop in place, her excitement completely drowning out the sound of her car backfiring—as it always does, because it’s a piece of shit.

  Her fiancé Adonis had the thing towed to a scrap yard a few months ago, but Cleo somehow found out about it, tracked down her “baby,” and managed to con the owner into returning it to her despite the fact that an inspection declared it not only unsafe to be on the road, but also a hazard to both the public and Cleo herself.

  Another backfire makes both Mom and me startle, before my sister grins and starts to dubstep to whatever offbeat tune is playing inside her head. Today, she’s dressed in the ugliest mustard-colored skirt that I have ever seen, a pair of Doc Martens that are green and so scuffed that I shudder to think about whose feet were in them before she bought them from the homeless shelter, and a pink scarf that not even a bag lady would wear to keep out the cold.

  It’s as ironic as heck that Cleo is a fashion disaster who shops at Goodwill, because her fiancé is anything but. Adonis is a self-professed metrosexual with an addiction to “looking good” because, according to him, when you’re hot, you owe it to the world to frame it as best you can.

  “I said, guess what?” she screams again, falling into a moonwalk that looks more like an uncoordinated shuffle that would make Michael roll over in his grave.

  I don’t want to guess what. In fact, I want to find a way to somehow disappear, because while Cleo is an awesome person, she has about as much tact and consideration as Mom. Which is to say, she has none. The last time she got this excited and asked me to “guess what,” I was stupid enough to ask, and she informed me that she’d walked in on Chilli Hart boning some random surfer chick who’d been teaching him to surf with the same surfboard that I myself had given him. Back when I was “stalking” him.

  Can it even be called stalking when you know, deep down in your heart of hearts, that you’re perfect for each other? Methinks not. But whatever. The point is, I don’t want to guess what, because the last time I did, I got an answer that I didn’t want, less than three hours after I’d had my heart ripped out.

  “Oh, Jesus, Rosetta! I gave you that tape recorder to use in private, in order to get your feelings out. I didn’t give it to you so that you could recite all that heartfelt drivel into the thing in public. Have some class,” Cleo mutters, giggling when I flip her off.

  “You did it, too! Remember the morning we came over for breakfast, and you were whining your ‘screenplay’—about stories and not having any of your own—into this very same recorder?” I ask, the lawyer in me rising to the fore when she starts to shake her head, already denying it despite the fact that there are at least three other witnesses, myself included.

  “Did not! Mom, tell her I never did anything that pathetic!”

  “She never did anything that pathetic,” Mom tells me pointedly, lying so hard that I just know she’s going to hell.

  Well…technically, I think she’s already going there, seeing as how our neighbor’s dog just recently went missing, and Mom’s been humming around the house, crowing about how nice and quiet it’s been lately.

  But I digress!

  “You big fat liars! This is the same recorder—”

  “Oh, blah blah blah! I said, guess what? I heard Hart tell Z that Chilli told Paris, who told Lovey, who told Creed, who told Hart that someone saw Tee come out of Ares’ house, and that she was defs doing the walk of shame!” she crows, her knees dancing so hard that I feel it’s my duty to watch closely, just in case she kicks her
self in the face. “Do you know what this means? It means that maybe they’ll get married, and then it’ll start a domino effect, and then your dreams will come true, Rose. We’ll be the Sweetharts.”

  Tire screeching—and yes, I mean that, because my thought processes come with sound effects. Because I’m that cool. My head gives off a banshee screech when the words leave Cleo’s lips, and everything inside me goes stone cold. Not because I feel hurt at the mention of a silly dream that I had months ago, when I was in love and too stupid to be realistic, but because I hate it when Cleo makes predictions. Because they always come true. Always.

  It’s this weird thing in our family, and something that has even Dad avoiding her at sticky times, when he’s trying to escape fate. Cleo just knows things sometimes. Like that time she woke up and told me not to go on the school field trip, because gas. Granted, the horrible death and ominous feeling I got from it turned out to be nothing more than Grey Avers letting off the mother of all farts on the bus, but things did go badly as a result. The driver, responding to the hysterical screams of children trying to exit a moving vehicle—in order to escape the stench—hit the curb, popped a tire, and then almost killed us all when he clipped a guardrail.

  To hear Mom tell it, I escaped a fiery death, and it was only the hand of God that saved her baby. And so for me, and then for the rest of my family, it became a kind of thing. If we don’t want bad news, we avoid Cleo like the plague, and if we just can’t wait for life to happen to us, we sometimes outright ask her whether she has one of her feelings.

  I should have known that when she kept telling me to move on from Chilli, she wasn’t getting anything good from our vibe.

  “Rosetta Sweet—I swear to God, girl, if you don’t stop talking into that damn, confounded recorder thing, I will break it,” Mom yells, ruining what I think may be the start of a very good story.

  I’d call it Cleotapra’s Curse, and I’d dress her as a female Indiana Jones. Minus the unbrushed hair, because my God, women are supposed to be genetically geared towards looking presentable—