Complete Me (The Stark Trilogy)

me with the tiny motorcycle on my sixteenth birthday. Even thennearly ten years ago now-Uncle Jahn had understood me. I might have been the girl in pink with the perfect haircut and the best collection of shoes at my school, but underneath it all I wanted to slip on a pair of well-worn jeans, grab a battered leather jacket, and go a little wild.
    Dear god, I missed him.
    Jahn had been more of a father to me than my own ever had, and I wanted to smack all the people who’d hugged me today and murmured softly that he was in a better place and wasn’t it wonderful that he’d lived such a full life. That was such bullshit—he hadn’t even turned sixty yet. Vibrant men in their late fifties with friends and nieces who adore them shouldn’t drop dead from aneurysms, and there weren’t enough pithy Hallmark quotes in the world to make me think otherwise.
    Antsy, I shifted my weight from foot to foot. There was a bar set up on the other side of the room, and I’d positioned myself as far away as physically possible. I didn’t get drunk often, but right now the idea of losing myself in that haze was just too damned appealing. I wanted the sting of ice-cold vodka, and then the numbness that followed. I needed to get out of here, to let go. Hell, I needed to cry.
    But I was Howard Jahn’s niece—the only family present since my parents couldn’t be bothered—and that made me some kind of hostess-by-default, which meant I was stuck in this room. Four thousand square feet, but I swear I could feel the art-covered walls pressing in around me. I wanted to race out the patio door and leap over the balcony into the darkening sky. I wanted to take flight over Lake Michigan and the whole world. I wanted to break things and scream and rant and curse this damned universe that took away a good man.
    Shit
. I sucked in a breath and looked down at the floor, forcing myself to get my act together, if for no other reason than that the more wrecked I looked, the more guests would try to cheer me. Not that I looked particularly wrecked. When you grow up with a California state senator for a father and a mother who serves on the board of over a dozen well-known nonprofit organizations, you learn the difference between a public and a private face very early on.
    “This is so goddamn fucked up it makes me want to scream.”
    I felt a whisper of a smile touch my lips and looked up into Kat’s bloodshot eyes.
    “Oh, hell, Angie,” she said. “He shouldn’t be dead.”
    I’m not sure which one of us leaned in first, but we caught each other in a bone-crushing hug. With a sniffle, I finally pulled away. Perverse, maybe, but just knowing that someone else was acknowledging the utter horror of the situation had made me feel infinitesimally better. “The last two days have been a nightmare,” I said. “Every time I turn a corner, I feel like I’m going to see him. I almost wish I’d kept my apartment.”
    “No you don’t. He loved having you here. God knows why,” she added with a wry grin. “You’re nothing but trouble.”
    I rolled my eyes. At twenty-nine, Katrina Laron is only four years older than me, but that hasn’t stopped her from pulling the older-and-wiser card whenever she gets the chance. The fact that we’d become friends under decidedly dodgy circumstances probably played a role, too. We’d known
of
each other for almost a year; she was one of the students enrolled in the graduate-level finance class that Jahn taught every summer as an adjunct professor at Northwestern. The class was limited to eight students, and he befriended most all of them.
    Since I’d pretty much lived my last thirteen summers here on the forty-second floor, I’d gotten to know quite a few of the grad students, too. I’d rarely mixed with them, however. While I now work at my uncle’s finance company, HKJ Ltd., I’m happily entrenched in the marketing department, and the idea of sitting around chatting about international finance was enough to make me want to take a running leap at a brick wall.
    Kat, however, had two things going for her. One, she could talk about things other than finance. Like who the hottest guy on television was, or which of the latest wave of new clubs and restaurants were really worth checking out. And two, she’s totally freaking loyal, a little fact I learned after we bumped into each other once in Neiman Marcus—right after I’d surreptitiously dropped a pair of $15 clearance earrings in my pocket.