Tease (Cloverleigh Farms #8)(2)

“I’m going to be broke forever,” I moaned, shoving cans of hair products around.

“No, you won’t. You started a business. That means costs up front, but you’re good, Felicity. You’ll make money. What’s all that noise?”

I slammed a drawer. “I’m in the bathroom looking for something.”

“Not the scissors, I hope.”

“You deal with stress your way, I deal with it mine.”

“Felicity MacAllister, do not cut your hair. It’s just one app.”

“But it’s the most important one for getting catering gigs and you know it. Engagement parties, showers, bridal luncheons—all those are booked through Dearly Beloved. Even people planning non-wedding events use that app.”

I headed out of the bathroom and down the stairs. I was still in my pajamas—an oversized T-shirt I’d had forever that said, Come to the nerd side. We have Pi—but no one was home anyway. My dad was obsessive about his Saturday morning golf game, my stepmom, Frannie, ran a bakery downtown and was always out of the house before dawn, and my seventeen-year-old twin sisters Emmeline and Audrey were lifeguards at the public beach this summer. On Saturdays they had to report by eight a.m.

I had a fourth sister, Winifred, who was twenty-four—Millie, Winnie, and I were from our dad’s first marriage—but Winnie lived in a downtown condo, right next door to her boyfriend, Dex, a firefighter and single dad.

Everybody was out there having a better life than me.

“You’ve got like two thousand followers on your Instagram,” said Millie, ever the optimist. “That’s a lot.”

“Not really. And that’s not the same as a review.” Down in the kitchen, I opened the junk drawer. Spying a pair of scissors, I smiled gleefully. Then I picked them up, opening and closing them several times, my blood rushing faster. “Reviews are what bring in new business. I’ve been working my ass off to gain traction, and this just set me back at the starting line—no, it’s worse than that! At least when I started out, I was on neutral ground. Now I’m on soggy ground. I’m sinking!”

“You’re fine. Do you need me to come over?”

“I’m not fine. I’m humiliated and penniless, I’ll never be able to move out of Dad and Frannie’s house, and I can kiss the idea of getting a cookbook deal goodbye. I have failed at my dreams, Millicent. But at least I found the scissors.”

“Don’t do anything rash!”

I set my phone on the counter, grabbed a hank of hair in front of my face, and chopped some off. “Too late.”

“No! Stop cutting your hair!” Millie shouted loud enough so I could hear her.

“Relax, I’m just giving myself a little trim.” Enjoying the surge of adrenaline, I cut some more, right across the bridge of my nose. “Bangs are in.”

“Not bangs! Anything but bangs!”

“I gotta go. I need a mirror.” I hung up on her and took the scissors into the first-floor bathroom, where I haphazardly hacked off more of my long dark hair. I stuck to the front at first, but once my heart was really pumping, I decided to take some off the back too. I hadn’t done this in so long—I’d forgotten how freeing it was.

Gathering it together in one hand, I positioned the scissors carefully. The blades came together again and again, severing the strands with a satisfying metallic slice.

Slice. Slice. Slice.





Several minutes later, the rush faded as I stared at my reflection. Sad clumps of hair littered the sink. “Oh, shit.”

I tried to even out the bangs but only succeeded in making them shorter and more blunt. “Shit!”

The worst thing was that I should have known better. I’d been stress-cutting my hair since I was six, since the night I overheard the horrible thing, and it never ended well.

It felt empowering for a couple minutes, but it was never worth the trouble I got in once grownups saw what I’d done. Although, after my dad and Frannie got married, she’d sometimes sneak me over to the salon so a professional could attempt to mitigate the damage before my dad saw it, and she never got mad at me. She always understood.

But once I was a teenager, I refused her help—it was my stress, my hair, my problem. I wanted to handle it on my own, and it wasn’t like I was a beauty queen in the first place. A funny haircut wasn’t going to make much difference to my social status—the kids in the marching band and Chemistry Club weren’t too judgmental about outward appearances—and my bloody noses were more embarrassing than my uneven bangs anyway.

But this put a major crimp in my plan to surprise everyone at the reunion tonight with my elegance and sophistication.

Maybe I could wear a hat. A jaunty beret, something that said ‘I am still quirky, but I have more confidence now, and I don’t care what you think of me.’ Something that would force mean girls like Mimi Pepper-Peabody to remark, “Wow. You’ve come a long way since high school.”

God, I wanted that to be true.

I mean, I was practically going on thirty. Weren’t you supposed to have your shit together by this age? At twenty-eight, my dad had two kids and was serving his country as a Marine. Frannie was running a pastry shop and planning her wedding. Even Winnie, four years younger than me, had a solid handle on her life, including a job she loved and a sexy firefighter boyfriend. Millie was four years older, but she was established in her career and owned a house. Even the twins had jobs, boyfriends, and normal haircuts.