Friends With Benefits. Margot Radcliffe

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       CHAPTER FIVE

      ALEXA WOKE UP with a pounding headache, knowing she’d totally fucked up. She grabbed at her phone on the pillow beside her, cringing at the eleven missed calls and ten urgent text messages from her uncle.

      After her parents died, Uncle John had raised her with unconditional love and support and all she ever wanted was to make him proud. She’d been an okay student, but as soon as Uncle John told her she’d only have the casinos one day if she applied herself, she’d gotten her shit together and graduated at the top of her business class in college. He’d given her a purpose at a time in her life where she’d felt rudderless, and it was absolutely killing her that she was basically crapping all over the opportunities he’d given her.

      His first text was a link to the local paper, so she tapped it with enough trepidation that a pit of dread opened up in her gut. Glaring at her in bright white light on the homepage of the Las Vegas Gazette was an enormous picture of her and Carter in Elysium’s stairwell. Her legs were wrapped around him and they were basically sucking each other’s faces off. In that light, the rest of her uncle’s text messages, which were some variation of FIX IT, made much more sense.

      She groaned, a sound from deep in the bottom of her chest. And she’d thought yesterday had been a shitty day.

      Calling her uncle, she prepared herself for his disappointment and the reiteration of his earlier directive to clean up her image. It was exactly what he delivered.

      “I’m calling Carter, too,” her uncle expounded, fuming. “The Carter Hayes I know has more respect for women than to put them in compromising positions like that. He should be ashamed of himself.”

      “I think—” she started, in an attempt to explain that neither of them had been thinking straight, but her uncle wasn’t interested in excuses or equivocations.

      “You need to fix this, Alexa, or we’re both out of a lot of money,” he grumbled.

      “Understood,” she told him, her heart clenching with the thought of hurting the investment her uncle had worked his whole life to build. “I will take care of it.”

      “Please do,” he instructed, some of the steam going out of his bluster. It wasn’t like her uncle to be mad, but seeing his niece semi-nude in his daily newspaper would probably put anyone in a less-than-gracious mood. “And Alexa, if anything else like this happens, the deal we had about Halcyon is out the window.”

      Her heart squeezed at the thought of losing Halcyon, too. “I promise I’ll make it right,” she reiterated. “Please just enjoy the rest of your vacation.”

      She expected her uncle to hang up, but he stayed on the line.

      Finally, he spoke again. “You and Carter, of all people, know that there are cameras everywhere in a casino. What the hell were you thinking, dear?”

      Alexa so did not want to have this conversation. Especially since the moment she’d walked into that stairwell she’d known there would be a camera. She just hadn’t given a shit.

      “We got into a fight. It didn’t, um, end like I expected it to,” she explained lamely.

      Uncle John chuckled softly and some of the panic in her chest subsided. Business or not, he was still her uncle.

      “Well, seems like this is a problem you two could work on together.”

      Alexa blew out a breath. Unfortunately, he was right. After that photo in the news, Carter was her only solution.

      Running a hot shower and scarfing down some pain relievers, she tried desperately not to think about just what had happened last night. Carter knew everything about her, stayed up late with her after her parents died and she couldn’t sleep, been her confidant about guys, her trusted friend as she’d learned how to run the casinos. And they were one bad breakup away from losing all of it.

      She changed for work into a charcoal skirt and an aqua sleeveless blouse, hoping she didn’t look as awful as she felt. She had no idea what she’d say to him now. Maybe, “Hey, I know we almost boned, but I got scared because I’m an emotional kindergartner, so do you mind if we just get fake-engaged instead?”

      The drive to the bakery and then to Carter’s was short, but thankfully gave her enough time to think of a plan of action. If heavy and shameless groveling was, in fact, considered an actual plan.

      His house was ultramodern; the standard Southwestern adobe tile roof and white stucco didn’t interest Carter. Instead he’d designed a three-story building with sharp angles of steel, glass and countless windows. Five stone columns reached from the ground to the top floor, the middle floor cantilevering out into the air over the floor beneath.

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