Tangled Like Us (Like Us, #4)

by Krista Ritchie

I shouldn’t have punched Farrow.

Again, shouldn’t have punched him.

And you fucked it, Thatcher.

I possess the unfortunate inability to run away from my own mortification.

Thatcher suddenly rips the frilly lace right off its seams. In one motion, it’s gone. My ovaries just exploded.

Thatcher is like a sacred text. I’m tempted to rush through the pages, but something has compelled me to draw out each line, each word. Reading so slowly and carefully so as to never miss a syllable. So a single book, a single person, could last me forever.

I won’t devalue her achievements just to find value in myself. My mom is brilliant and beautiful. And so I am. Just in my own way.

I’m not a sad little cub about to be eaten. I’m a motherfucking lion.

I don’t have all the right curves in the right places. I am chubby. But I love my belly rolls, and I adore my love handles and my flat pancake-like ass that’s dimpled with cellulite.

The ego of my dad alone could fill the entire Milky Way.

“Just date Moretti,” Oscar suggests so suddenly, and the room explodes in two exclamations: “What?!” “Oscar?!”

Thatcher. Thatcher. Thatcher. His name is a heartbeat in my head.

“If I’m too heavy, you can set me down,” she says conversationally. “I don’t mind.” My chest tightens, and I narrow a stern look on Jane. “I could bench press you all night.”

“You’re meant to be in my arms, Jane.” She pulses against me and sets her laced fingers along the back of my neck. “I…um.” She shakes out her scrambled thoughts. “We’ll be experts in the art of fake-dating in no time. Don’t you think?”

She knows sex and her body well, and it’s flat-out attractive.

“It seems we are dreadfully tangled, you and I.” Couldn’t agree more.

“I want to know all about you, but I can’t ask fast enough—and when I think about you, I wonder what your hands have held. What your eyes have seen.” My pulse has skyrocketed, but I keep speaking. “What your ears have heard and where your feet have landed.”

“Ensemble,” I tell him. Together. All four of my brothers repeat the word. And then Eliot grins, mischievous twinkle in his eye, and he says something I’ve heard him recite a thousand-and-one times. But tonight, it’s never felt truer. “‘Let me play the lion too…I will roar.’”

Anyone who thinks I’m less of a man because I’d rather uphold all of who she is, including her dominance—they can go stand on their own dick and spin around in twenty circles.

And ladies and gentlemen, behind me is a sword, a cannon blast, a shoulder to cry on, a stroke of hope—my mom.

“Didn’t you throw wine on your mother-in-law’s blouse when you first met her?” My lips rise, remembering this story.

“Was it for the fame or the sex?” “Neither,” I say, not even hesitating. “It was just her.” It was always just her.