Page 6

“You don’t need to sound so fucking smug about it.” I turned back to look at my brother Rhett. Taller than me by half an inch, his hair was darker, almost black and where my eyes were hazel, his were a dark brown. He surveyed me, assuming an air of boredom calculated to piss me off.
“What’s taking so long?”
“Why do you care?”
He gave a lazy shrug. “I don’t.”
“Dad does, though.” This came from Grayson, sitting behind his enormous mahogany desk, his fingers steepled together, frowning at me. He got our mom’s coloring. Dark blond hair and light blue eyes. Like shards of ice. Just like Mom.
“Well, he’ll just have to fucking wait. There’s a lot more to it than either of you assholes led me to believe.”
Grayson’s frown deepened. “What are you talking about?”
“The fact that Theo Harrington got totally ghosted the minute the guy heard he was enquiring on behalf of Henry Rivers. And something about a guy called Maxwell Ballantyne.”
“Bullshit.”
I shot Rhett a derisive look. “Ask him yourself.”
“I thought having a connection in Esperance was supposed to pave the way for you. All the groundwork was supposedly laid already.”
“So did I. That’s why I offered to take care of it.” I shifted my gaze back out the floor to ceiling window. A week and a half kicking my heels in Esperance had given me nothing more than hours and hours of boredom, alleviated by the briefest interaction with a snow-haired princess that I was unlikely to see ever again.
“Are you even listening to a word I’ve said?”
No. “Sure. Something about Dad, something, something, millions of dollars, something very important.”
“Asshole.”
“Maybe if we knew why he was so desperate to get his hands on a hundred acres of swamp land north of the shittiest little town I’ve ever been cursed to spend my time in, I’d make more of an effort.”
“Well, we don’t. So, you’ll just have to head back down there and try harder.”
“Great,” I said, with mock enthusiasm.
* * *
This was getting me nowhere, fast. Harrington was doing his best, but this guy was a stubborn old goat and apparently, once he’d set his mind on something, there was no turning him. Which pissed me off to no end because I was pretty sure that all I needed was one meeting with him and I could close the deal. Just one meeting. Two minutes. But he wouldn’t even agree to see me.
Standing in the condiment aisle of the Esperance supermarket, staring at a row of berry flavored jellies, I was formulating a plan to force a meeting. Not that I was going to barge into his office or anything aggressive like that. The man required careful handling. A chance encounter should do the job. I could just bump into him in the street. That’s what I could do.Strawberry or raspberry?Yeah, I was having a little difficulty staying on task. Boredom and lack of interest will do that to a guy.
But you can’t really just bump into a guy and say, hey, how about you sell me that swamp land no one else will buy? No, I was going to have to do a bit of groundwork first. I blew out a breath of frustration. That just meant more time in Esperance.
Not strawberry jelly. I didn’t like the way the pips got stuck in my teeth. A woman cleared her throat and when I turned to look at her, I saw she was looking back at me with a puzzled frown on her face. Then I realized I had been standing in front of the jellies for a ridiculously long time and most likely looked like a lunatic. Blueberry. That would have to do. I grabbed a jar and shoved it into my basket.
Wandering to the top of the aisle and around the next, I thought maybe retreat was the better part of valor. I could ring up my old man and let him know there was no deal. The guy wouldn’t budge. Advise him he needed to move on. There was nothing for us in this little corner of North Carolina. Just imagining his response had me cringing and going back to how I could engineer this chance meeting.
“Well, which toothpaste, Belle? I can’t choose for you.”
I stopped dead in my tracks in front of the canned soup, because I recognized that voice. It was edged with thinly disguised frustration right now, but I felt the effect of it heating my blood and skittering down my spine. She was here. Esme.
There was the sound of a little girl replying, then Esme’s voice again. “Baby, if you can’t decide which one, you’ll have to take the one from home to camp with you. So, it’s this one, or this one.”
I came around the top of the aisle in time to see her holding out two tubes of toothpaste to a little girl, maybe about four or five years old. The little one had brown hair tied in two braids and an angry look on her face. There were three other kids with her, all waiting with varying degrees of impatience for the little girl to decide.Must be a nanny,I figured.Wow, she really must love kids.
The sight of her pulled the breath from my lungs, just like it had the last time. All soft skin and silky hair. Leggings again, but with a pink singlet top this time, that skimmed over her slim frame deliciously. It was actually weird how such a simple outfit could look so sexy, but here we were.
She looked up at that moment and caught my eye. Her eyes widened, her lips parted, and her cheeks went an incredibly pretty shade of pink. This was no sophisticate, used to dealing with men like me. Somehow, that made her even hotter.