by Serena Bell
“That was his worst crime, Trey. Not being foolish. Being stubborn. And even though I may not have been the businessman you wanted me to be, I think I can say I was the man I wanted to be. If you tear down Beachcrest, will you be able to say the same?”
The truth of it hit him, then. He was going to tear down Auburn’s inn. He was. Because through all of this, he’d never wavered in that conviction. He’d agreed to their deal because it was good business for him to do so. He’d kept his word and followed through on his half of the bargain because that was what he did. He’d heard her out and seen what she’d had to show him. But he’d never intended to change his mind.
Meanwhile, she’d broken through his defenses. She’d gotten him to talk—about his childhood, his father, even Karina. She’d heard about parts of him that he hid from the world. She’d made him break his own rules, turned him upside down so giving her pleasure felt more important than chasing his own. She’d made him laugh, and she’d made him feel alive.
And he was going to reward her by leveling her fucking inn to the ground.
If he did, there would be no more jockeying for position, no more banter, no more shopping together, no more conversations, no more bike rides—
No more Auburn coming apart in his arms, giving herself over to him with complete and total trust.
“Sit down, Carl!” Auburn said, suddenly there beside him, cheerful and buoyant. She was wearing the sexiest little sundress he’d ever seen. White with yellow flowers. Teeny-tiny spaghetti straps. A short and flirty skirt. He wanted to flip it up and see what she was wearing underneath.
“I’ve been sitting and lying down for days,” Carl grumbled.
“Which is exactly right for someone who’s just had a heart attack,” Brynn said, coming back to life again and settling their grandfather into a lawn chair.
Auburn tried to tuck a blanket around him, but he pushed her off. “Over my cold dead body!”
“Don’t say that,” Brynn shushed.
“I’m just reminding you that I can always exercise my prerogative to die if you give me a hard time.”
Auburn gave him a fond, exasperated slap on the shoulder and left the blanket on the ground next to him as she passed out Ziploc bags to Tyler and Jake, who’d returned from Starbucks and joined the growing crowd on the curb. “For candy,” she said. “If it’s okay with your mom.”
She’d brought tubes of sunscreen, too, and water bottles, and blankets for the kids to sit on until the parade started. The fishermen came out and sat in beach chairs side by side. They were in good moods, bargaining with the boys for a share of the candy haul, teasing Auburn about having served granola that morning, a sub-par breakfast experience. Dewann put an arm around Rick’s shoulder and left it there.
An older couple came up the sidewalk and stopped to talk to Auburn. After a moment, the man—sixty-something, with sideburns that were only one step removed from mutton chops—drew Auburn aside, and they stood and talked for a few minutes. Whatever the subject, it was serious; he could tell from the set of both their shoulders. Until hers slumped.
“Can you hand me that sunscreen?” Brynn asked, and he made himself look away from a conversation that could not possibly be any of his business. He handed her the tube, then helped her coat the boys—he did arms and she did faces.
He saw that Auburn’s conversation had finished up. She was standing still, staring into the distance, and he didn’t like her expression. Like someone had told her that her dog had died. He wanted immediately to put his arms around her—but he wasn’t sure how that would fly. Or how he would explain it to Brynn, who was watching him with sharp eyes.
He walked over to where Auburn stood. “Who was that?”
She could have told him it was none of his business, but she said, “Keegan Horan. A VP at Tierney Bay Bank and Trust. And the bearer of bad news. No jumbo mortgage for me.” She said it lightly, but he could see how much it bothered her. She sighed, heavily.
“What does that leave?”
“Diana Cooper. Bootstrap. Or getting help from family or friends.”
Some emotion was rising in his chest, hot and fierce. “Not Patrick Moriarty. For God’s sake.”
She crossed her arms, and the sucked-a-lemon look deepened, as did the furrows in her brow. “In what version of the universe is that your choice? After you put me in this situation?”
Suddenly they were squared off, across a gulf as wide as the one that had opened that first afternoon in Carl’s hospital room. He glared, and she glared back, and it was like they were the only two people in all of Tierney Bay—no chairs lining main street, no kids waving flags, no dogs wagging tails, no blue and white t-shirts and red hair ribbons. Just the two of them.
And the one thing he did have control of.
He knew he was about to detonate a truth bomb, that what he was going to say would change everything between them, for better or for worse.
But things had already changed between them—and even though a huge part of him still wished he’d had the strength not to touch her, not to complicate this already fraught situation, there was no avoiding that fact.
“No,” he said. “I can’t make you refuse Patrick’s money. But the rest of it really is my decision. I decide whether or not I sell you Beachcrest. This has all been a cute game, but it’s my call what happens next, and that’s the bottom line.”
Her mouth fell open, and he braced for impact.
26
She felt suffocated, suddenly, and the image that came into her head was the apartment where she’d lived with Patrick. Expensively decorated with furniture, paintings, and knickknacks that had been chosen by someone else. Big enough to put all of Beachcrest’s square footage inside it, and yet so goddamn small that by the end she hadn’t been able to breathe at all. Her own gilded cage.
She wasn’t an idiot. She knew what was happening. She’d let things get physical with Trey and now he felt territorial. And he would happily piss on whatever he needed to piss on to keep her from turning to Patrick—not that she’d had the slightest intention of doing so. But he hadn’t asked, had he?
“You’d do that,” she said. “You’d snatch Beachcrest away from me, renege on our deal before it’s even done, just because you’re having a dick-measuring match in your head with some guy from my past.”
She should have known better than to give any piece of herself to him. Now he was doing what men—what rich and powerful men—did in these situations. He was using his money and his power to control whatever he could control—and in this case, that was her.
And she was so fucking disappointed in him she couldn’t speak.
But mostly, she was disappointed in herself. For letting him feel like he had any right to make decisions for her—
“No!” he said.
“What?”
“No. You misunderstood me. I’m not talking about reneging. Or snatching anything away from you. The opposite in fact. I’m saying—”
He swallowed, hard.
“Auburn. There’s something I need to tell you.”
A fist squeezed in her belly, a warning that whatever it was, she probably wasn’t going to like it.
“Do you know what ‘overleveraged’ means?”
She shook her head.
“It’s when a company has taken on too much debt.”
“Okay,” she said uncertainly.
“My company. Home Base. It’s overleveraged.”
The words came out slowly, as if they pained him. He closed his eyes, and an expression like grief came over his face. It took her a moment to recognize it for what it was.
Shame.
“Trey.”
He opened his eyes but wouldn’t meet her gaze. “We had more than half a billion on the balance sheet. Operating budget for two decades. Everyone thought it was a good time to grow. So we did. And then something that was too big to fail failed, and we were locked up in it, and overnight we went from being able to meet our obligation
s for five-to-ten years to being able to meet them for less than two months.”
She was starting to see. And her stomach hurt. Not so much for her—although she was getting the sense of how his revelations would affect her—but for him. She didn’t think many people knew what he’d just told her. She didn’t think Trey Xavier would admit what he was admitting to most people in the world.
But he was telling her.
As scared as she was, as bad as this news was, she was warm all over, and she wanted, more than anything, to reach out and hug him. Hold him.
God, how had she gotten here? And—how did she get herself out again?
“I scrambled, trying to find a way out. I found a buyer, which was a miracle in and of itself. It’s a good buyer, a good sale. If I make the sale, I’ll come out a winner instead of a loser. I’d be able to start another company—instead of not knowing if I can keep my house and my car. And chances are good that my people—a hundred and fifty employees, to be exact—could keep their jobs. But to make that deal go through, to make that sale, I have to be able to keep the company running long enough for the deal to get penned and signed.”
He took a deep breath. “I’m just a few weeks short of money. That’s it. Just a few weeks. Nothing in the scheme of things. Except…” He closed his eyes. “Everything is leveraged. Everything.”
Slowly, slowly, the last piece fell into place for Auburn. “Everything except Beachcrest.”
“Even Beachcrest. It’s mortgaged almost to the hilt, thanks to my grandfather. Which means—”
“That the only thing you can do is sell it.”
He closed his eyes again, and she could see the pain etched into his features.
“The last thing I wanted, you have to believe me, is to sell it out from under him. God.” His tone was fervent. “But then he had the heart attack, and he said he was ready to retire, and I thought—here’s a way out. It was like being handed my salvation, Auburn—”
“And then I came along.”
A funny expression came over Trey’s face then. “Yes. And then you came along.”
“And ruined everything.”
“That’s not—that’s not what I was going to say.”
His eyes were warm on her face, and if she hadn’t been so confused, she would have stepped toward him. Let herself be pulled into the tenderness of his gaze.
But she was confused.
“If you don’t get the money—?”
He sighed. “A hundred and fifty people lose their jobs. I lose my business and—well, most of the money in it.”
She thought of what he’d built, and from what. A lemonade stand, a pet-sitting business. Lawnmowing, landscaping, house flipping, real estate development, his own app … bit by bit, one thing building on the next, each increment taking him further from the shithole of his childhood. Leaving behind his father’s world.
She thought about what he’d said about his dad. And he flailed—broke shit, ruined shit. Couldn’t hold a job. Then he’d get into these risky schemes to try to make the money he couldn’t make nine-to-five.
And then she thought about Beachcrest and her mind stalled out.
“If I get Beachcrest … you lose everything.”
He opened his eyes. They were clear and bright. “No. Not necessarily.”
“But I don’t—how—”
And then she got it.
“You could sell it to me.”
“I could sell it to you,” he affirmed. “But—”
She was there, a beat ahead of him. “But only if I have the money.”
He heaved a sigh. “Yes.”
“Which I don’t. Trey?”
“Uh-huh?”
“Why are you telling me this now?”
“Because you won. By the book. You made me fall for Beachcrest. And because—” He hesitated. “Because it didn’t feel right anymore. After what happened between us on the beach. And after what you told me about Patrick and how he’d controlled you. I had to give you a fair shot.”
“But that’s all it is. A fair shot. If I can’t get the money, you’ll sell to …?”
“If you can’t get the money, I have to sell to someone else.” His eyes met hers, and she thought the worry there was as much for her, and what she stood to lose, as for himself. “I’ve called in every favor I have coming to me already. If I thought I could squeeze another ten thousand out of anyone I knew, believe me, I’d do it.”
“I believe you,” she said quietly. “How much time do we have?”
“Monday. I’ve done the math a hundred ways, and—well, Tuesday, if the Dow doesn’t lose more than a hundred points.”
She didn’t let her shock and horror show; he didn’t need her to pile onto the shame and fear he was already feeling. “Okay. Let me think. There’s still one more lender who has to get back to me. And Chiara set up a Bootstrapper page for me. But when I checked this morning, there were only a thousand dollars in pledges. That’s hardly going to save our asses.”
“I have a friend who’s gotten some good startups off the ground with cloud-sourced money. I can have him look at what you’ve got on the page, tweak it a bit, advise you about advertising. That’s a favor I can still call in.”
She nodded.
“And Auburn?”
She found him looking at her intently, an expression she couldn’t quite read on his face. “Mmm?”
“It wasn’t jealousy. The thing with Patrick. I mean—” The corner of his mouth turned up, that rare Trey smile that she’d already learned to crave. “Like any sane man would, I wish I were the only person who’d ever felt you come apart in his arms—”
She made a small involuntary sound, somewhere between a gasp and a whimper, and his smile brightened another notch.
“But I meant what I said. I don’t want you to take his money, because—because I have nothing but respect for the fact that you walked away from him. And the last thing I want is for you to have to turn to him.”
She couldn’t believe—couldn’t believe—that she’d thought him icy or power hungry or like Patrick in any way, and she was about to say so when an eardrum splitting honk—the firetruck going by—made her jump. The parade was passing them now, and she turned to watch for a moment as the firefighters tossed saltwater taffy and other candy toward the curb, and Trey’s nephews and her two young guests dove after it. When she turned back toward him, he was watching the parade, too, and his smile had bloomed into a disbelieving grin. “Is that a lawn chair twirling group?”
“Indeed,” she said.
“If I were not already in love with Beachcrest and Tierney Bay, I would be now.” He turned the grin on her, and she felt a little weak in the knees at the wattage of full-on Trey amusement.
She caught her breath, rallied her sanity, and said, “We’re going to figure this out. We are.”
“We,” he repeated.
“Yes. We.”
His gaze found hers and held, and held. There was so much warmth there that for a moment she lost all sense of time and place—she just wanted to turn herself over to it. Then his face cracked with mischief. “If you can stop fighting with me long enough for us to work together.”
27
As the parade goers drifted back to Beachcrest for the afternoon’s barbecue, Trey and Auburn hid in the lobby and called Trey’s friend James, the cloud-sourcing expert.
“You need better incentives,” James said bluntly, as soon as Auburn was done explaining the situation and the need for speed.
They spent a while brainstorming, and Trey multitasked on his email, calling in what he described as “the last favors left on earth” to get some of his business buddies to donate subscriptions and services.
“Who’s going to support some inn in Oregon because they want a Home Base subscription? Or cloud computing services?” Auburn demanded.
“It’s a long shot,” James admitted. “But it’s better than what you’ve got there. You need people willing to give five hundred doll
ars. Or a thousand. Ideally? More.”
When he put it like that, it made Auburn’s stomach curl in despair.
James frowned on screen. “The real key is how you get the word out. I’d suggest running both Bootstrapper and social media ads. Hundreds of dollars a day of each, if possible.”
“It’s possible,” Auburn said.
“Are you good with creative?” James asked.
“Creative?”
“The design for the ads.”
“Um—yes?” Auburn hazarded, shooting Trey a look.
He nodded. “My assistant can do them.”
Thank you, she mouthed.
James ended the phone call shortly after that, and Auburn hung up and buried her face in her hands.
“Don’t,” Trey said. “Please. Don’t give up. It’s only Thursday.”
“Or, if you look at it from a different perspective, it’s already Thursday,” she said.
“Don’t give up on what?” Chiara said from the doorway.
“Nothing,” Trey and Auburn said at the same time.
Chiara rolled her eyes. “Seriously, people? Do you know me, Auburn? That kind of shit never flies with me.”
Auburn looked at Trey, and he gave a slight nod of assent.
“Trey’s willing to sell me Beachcrest,” Auburn said. “But I still need to raise the money.”
“Why can’t you just finance her?” Chiara demanded.
Trey opened his mouth to answer, but a voice cut in before he could speak.
“Finance her for what?”
It was Mason, who’d wandered in from the barbecue.
“Hey, Mace,” Chiara said.
“Hey. I couldn’t take it out there.”
Auburn and Chiara both knew what he meant. Mason was—well, some people said he was shy. Some said he was quirky. Auburn thought he was the sweetest, most loyal human being on earth, and if the rest of the world couldn’t see it, fuck ’em. But parties were definitely not his scene. In general, conversation with humans other than his siblings was not his scene.
And yet Mason had once let slip that he was a regular and devoted user of Swiperight, which Auburn wondered the heck out of. How did you manage hookup culture without having to talk to strangers? Or maybe that was exactly why he thrived at hookup culture …