by Megan Hart
“That’s enough for tonight. You can go, take a break.”
“You want me to order you some dinner?” Tony tucked away his phone and stood, all six feet five inches of him. He pushed the folder across the desk toward Reese. “I’m going to order in and veg out, catch up on some TV.”
Reese twisted to look up at him. “You’re not going out? It’s Friday.”
“I’m sure Lancaster is a hotbed of excitement if you know where to go,” Tony said, deadpan, “but tell you the truth, I’m beat. If you tell me what you want to eat, though, I’ll be glad to get something for you. There have to be some places that deliver, right?”
“Don’t forget, this is hick city.” Reese laughed.
Tony tilted his head. “It’s not that bad. There’s a certain charm to it. All the fields. The cows and stuff. I saw three buggies on the way here; that was pretty cool. I’m going to check out some like, quilt shops and stuff tomorrow. Buy me some of that…what’s it called? Red pepper jelly. You grew up here, have any recommendations?”
“Not really.” Reese stretched, cracking his neck with a wince. His back and neck were killing him, and he desperately needed a run. Or a massage. Something to help him shed some of this fucking tension.
Tony stood and, without a word, went behind Reese to work his fingers into the knots at the base of Reese’s neck. “No love for the old hometown?”
“No.” Reese groaned, letting the other man work away at the painful spots. “Shit, that’s good.”
Tony worked a minute or so longer, then patted Reese’s shoulders. “Want me to see if the hotel has a spa service or anything?”
“Remember, hick town.” Reese rolled his shoulders as Tony gathered his things.
“I bet things have changed since you were here last. Give it a chance. You might be surprised.” Tony excused himself, leaving Reese alone in the oversized hotel room.
The business suite would never win any awards for its decor, but the design was functional and practical, two qualities Reese appreciated. The king-sized bed seemed comfortable enough. He wasn’t going to sleep much tonight, he was sure of that.
His phone beeped and he snapped it up, sure it would be Corinne calling to apologize. Her boss hadn’t been too pleased about her abandoning the meeting, that had been clear. He’d been apologetic to the point of awkwardness about it.
Reese should’ve told the guy right then the entire offer had been something of a scam. How he’d never intended them to take it, that Reese been caught up in a personal issue with their haughty CFO, and the only business he’d meant to finish was the unfinished business between him and Corinne. Of course he’d said nothing like that, and of course the message was not from Corinne with her hat in her hands. She wasn’t going to apologize to him, and he ought to have known better.
The message was from Tony, double-checking that Reese didn’t want any food. He was ordering pizza and wings. Reese’s stomach grumbled. He shot back a text.
Beer?
They won’t deliver it, Tony replied. But we can nip down to the place around the corner if you really want to.
Around the corner was some divey looking corner bar with neon in the window. An idea struck him, and Reese tapped a query into his phone, then shot back a text to Tony.
I have a better idea. It’s a little longer to walk, but you’ll love it.
Ten minutes later they were sweating in the late September heat and walking away from the hotel. Reese shouldn’t have been surprised the old place was still in business—diners rarely seemed to go under. They might change ownership a couple dozen times, but they usually managed to survive.
He paused on the sidewalk to look up at the long silver building lit with blue lighting. The sign was different. A new logo. Same name though. Triton’s Diner had been around forever.
Tony gave him a curious look. “You don’t want to go in?”
“My dad used to take me here when I was a kid. Saturday mornings. We’d get up early. He’d make sure all my chores were done. Then we’d ‘sneak’ off to town to have eggs over medium and pancakes. Mom always knew, but she pretended she didn’t. They made the best hash browns here I’ve ever had in my life.” Reese laughed ruefully and shook his head. “It looks the same. But not.”
Tony put his hands in his pockets and rocked back and forth on his heels. He didn’t say anything. He waited. It was one of the qualities in him that Reese appreciated most. That ability to know when silence was better than speech.
“Let’s go in,” Reese said.
Inside, the young waitress who seated them sported multiple piercings in her ears and lip and nose. Her artificially black hair was carefully arranged in a fifties pinup style, including a headscarf. A pattern of stars outlined her temple and snaked toward the back of her neck.
“Coffee, hon?” She even had the diner waitress patter down.
“Two coffees. You still serve breakfast now?”
“All day,” she said with a grin.
When she’d taken their orders and filled their mugs, Tony watched her head behind the bar and into the kitchen. He put a hand over his heart. “I’m in love.”
Reese chuckled. “With a girl?”
“I could be in love with a girl who looks like that.” Tony gave Reese a dreamy eyed grin.
The food was up in minutes. Steaming hot, eggs prepared to perfection. Hash browns glistening with grease and still the best Reese had ever tasted. He and Tony ate in companionable silence punctuated only by requests to pass the ketchup or more sugar for the coffee.
It was the most satisfying meal Reese had eaten in a long time. He wiped his mouth with a napkin, then sat back in the booth and rubbed his stomach with a sigh. Tony laughed.
“Better than pizza and beer,” Tony said. “Good idea.”
“Dessert? We’ve got a killer lemon meringue. It will blow your mind.” The waitress made goo-goo eyes at Tony, who returned the look with an equally soppy one of his own.
“Sold,” Reese told her.
Tony sipped some coffee, not making a secret of how he was admiring the view of the waitress walking away. “So what’s it like, coming home?”
“This hasn’t been home for a long time.” Reese hardly ever talked about growing up on a dairy farm here in Lancaster County. He tried to hardly ever think about it.
“Got it. And growing up here has nothing to do with buying this dairy. Right.” Tony gave Reese an assessing look. “Nostalgia?”
Tony didn’t know the half of it.
“I’m trying to buy that dairy because I think I can make some money off it. The same way I’ve done with every other business I bought. It has nothing to do with where or how I grew up. It’s totally a business decision.” Reese scraped up the last crispy bits of yolk-soaked hash browns and licked the fork clean. He caught Tony’s look but very carefully gave nothing away with his own expression. Tony didn’t need to know the truth. “You have another opinion?”
Tony shifted in his seat. “I know that you’ve never dealt with any place that makes food or beverages before. Not even a restaurant. There were plenty of opportunities to get into that sort of thing, but you’ve always steered away, even though restaurants can be some of the fastest things to turn over.”
“Who says I couldn’t own a restaurant, if I wanted to?”
“You looking to buy a place?” The waitress had reappeared with two plates of pie and another round of coffee. “Eddie’s trying to sell, if you’re really interested.”
Tony grinned at her, eyeing the name tag pinned to the front of her blouse. “Hi there…Gretchen. Awesome coffee, by the way.”
“Why’s he selling?” Reese ignored Tony’s batting eyelashes, though they seemed to have caught the waitress’s attention.
“He wants to retire to Florida.” Gretchen shrugged and topped off their mugs, then stood back to give Tony a contemplative look that turned into a small, interested smile after a moment. “Says it’s too cold here in the winter. He’s had this
place for about thirty years.”
“Eddie Malone.” Reese nodded. “My dad knew him.”
The waitress shifted her flirtation from Tony to give Reese a curious look. “Yeah? Who’s your dad?”
“Uh…well, he passed away,” Reese told her, which wasn’t the answer to the question she’d asked but one she accepted with a nod.
“Well, Eddie’s trying to get rid of this place. If you’re really looking.”
“I’m not,” Reese said. “But thanks.”
With another shrug, she left them. Tony gave him a long look as Reese forked a bite of orgasmically tasty lemon meringue into his mouth and pretended he had no idea Tony was trying to dig out more information from him.
“I’ve worked for you for eight years,” Tony said finally. “You can’t tell me there isn’t more to this dairy acquisition than just making a profit. I’ve run the numbers for you. I’ve done the due diligence. Sure, it’s possible that with your magic touch you could make it work, but you made them a shit offer. It’s almost like you didn’t want them to take it in the first place.”
Reese chewed pie. Swallowed. He gave Tony a bland grin.
Tony frowned. “Fine, don’t tell me. Drag my ass out here to the middle of nowhere to pursue some weirdly sudden artisanal cheese fetish. It’s my job, I get it.”
“It’s your job,” Reese agreed mildly.
“I live to serve, master.”
Reese frowned. “Don’t call me that.”
“Fine. My liege?”
Tony was joking and had no idea why it made Reese a little uncomfortable. Like he’d never spoken to Tony about where he’d grown up, Reese had never told him about the sorts of games he used to play. “Cut it out.”
Tony stabbed the air between them with his fork. “You can’t hide it from me forever.”
“I’m not trying to hide anything,” Reese began, and his words cut off at the sight of Corinne coming through the diner’s double front doors.
She wore a pair of faded jeans and a stretched out T-shirt sheer enough to hint at the outline of her bra beneath. Her long, dark hair had been pulled into a messy bun, though a few tendrils had escaped to curl and stick to her neck. She looked tired.
She was beautiful enough to stop his heart.
She saw him in the next second, and the pleased, anticipatory look she’d had when she came through the doors became immediately shuttered. She’d put on her guard.
It fucking broke him that he was the cause of that. In the times before, all she’d ever had to do was look disappointed in him, and he’d gone to his knees for her. Literally. Once, making Corinne happy had been the only goal Reese ever had.
Tony twisted in his seat to look where Reese was staring. “You know her?”
“It’s the CFO of Stein and Sons.”
Tony’s eyebrows lifted. “She’s—”
“She’s the CFO,” Reese repeated harshly, “of Stein and Sons.”
“Ah. Look, how about I head on back to the hotel and turn in. I’ll see you tomorrow morning?”
“Yeah, I’ll go with—”
Too late. Corinne had crossed the tiny dining room to stand in front of their booth, hands on her hips. Mouth a thin, grim line. “What the hell are you doing, Reese? Stalking me?”
“I’m finishing my dinner,” he told her. “Actually, it was breakfast. Just at dinner time. Breakfast all day.”
Tony looked startled at the blather spouting from Reese’s mouth. Corinne noticed Reese wasn’t sitting alone. She shook her head and frowned, probably against the start of a tirade. She nodded at Tony.
“Hi,” Tony said. “You must be Corinne. Tony Randolph.”
Now she looked embarrassed and held out her hand. “Oh. Tony. You work with Reese. Hi, nice to meet you. I thought we were supposed to meet.”
“I changed it, I told you,” Reese said.
“I’m just on my way out. I’ll see you Monday at the meeting…?” Tony stood.
Reese watched Corinne’s gaze go up, up, up. At the small curve of her smile, no different than the looks Tony eternally garnered from men and women alike, Reese winced from the stab of jealousy. He was an idiot. She could look at whomever she wanted to. Hell, she could drag Tony off into a corner and fuck him into next week, if they were both into it, and although before tonight Reese hadn’t thought Tony might even have considered it… Fuck.
He was getting out of control.
Both Tony and Corinne were staring at him. Keeping his expression bland, Reese leaned back against the diner booth as though he didn’t have a goddamned care in the world. He didn’t seem to have fooled his assistant, who was still smart enough not to say anything about it, but he gave Reese a look that said he’d be asking about it later.
When Tony had gone, Corinne turned as though she meant to leave too. Reese snagged the soft fabric of her jeans at the knee, letting go at once when she looked down at his hand, then at his face. He’d seen that look before. He’d overstepped.
“Sit,” he said. Then, more gently, “Please?”
Corinne slid into the booth across the table from him. “What kind of game is this?”
“This is called coincidence. I had no idea you’d be there tonight. How could I?”
“You want me to believe you come back into town after about a million years, trying to buy the company I work for, and you show up at the diner where we first met, and that’s a coincidence?”
He would always remember the first sight of her behind a coffee pot with a plate of eggs and potatoes in her hand. This might have been the place his father brought him on Saturday mornings, but it was also the place with strong memories of her. Reese frowned.
“I wanted something to eat.” He sounded defensive and cursed himself for giving her any hint that she was affecting him.
Her gaze softened, though her mouth did not. “So you came for breakfast.”
“It always was the best I ever had.”
“I bet it still is.” Her eyes met his, held his gaze. Challenging him the way she’d used to, and it wasn’t about the breakfast.
Reese shrugged, giving Corinne the look his last lover had called “the smug bastard expression.” Amber had hated it. He was sure Corinne wouldn’t like it any better.
Corinne, however, smiled. She tilted her head and looked him up and down, and though it had been a long, long time since she’d studied him that way, he’d never quite forgotten how it had felt to be the center of her attention. Object of her affection. Nobody else had ever come close to making him feel for even one second what Corinne had done with such casual cruelty.
“Maybe you should tell me what’s going on,” she said when he didn’t speak.
“I buy and sell businesses that are faltering, and I grow them and sell them for a profit,” he told her. “I saw Stein and Sons listed in a report I get about small businesses that are considered to be in need of acquisition.”
Impulsive. Mom had said he was impulsive, in response to Dad’s somewhat harsher assessment of “flighty.” Reese had grown to think of it as following his gut.
Corinne’s smile twisted on one side. “And you…what? You saw I worked there and decided to buy it? So you could somehow fuck with my life, Reese? What the hell?”
“Is that what you think of me? I guess I shouldn’t be surprised. You never did give me the benefit of the doubt.”
Corinne’s smile disappeared entirely. “I guess that must be what you think about me.”
More words wanted to shoot from his mouth like bullets, finding the best places to hurt her. Over the years he’d often imagined it, some grand speech that would put her in her place and leave her reeling, maybe even begging him to forgive her. Now faced with the chance, all Reese could think about was how he needed to tell her the truth. Things had ended between them because of broken trust that had never been repaired. It had changed and ruined everything between them, and it had changed and sort of ruined him too.
“I wanted to see you again,”
he said finally.
“Coffee, hon?” The waitress caught a glance of Corinne’s face and frowned. She looked at Reese. “Oh. Sorry. I can come back?”
Corinne shook her head. “Coffee’s good, along with a cup of ice, please. And I’ll have some of that Stein and Sons full cream Eddie keeps. Thanks.”
When the waitress left, Corinne looked at him. “You wanted to see me again.”
He nodded.
Then, shit, she was going to cry. Tears glittered. Her lips quivered. How could he have ever thought that was what he wanted, to hurt her?
He wanted to take her in his arms and kiss away the tears, but didn’t move so much as an inch. Too much time had passed. He didn’t know her anymore.
“You could’ve just called me or something,” she said when she won the struggle to get herself under control. “Found me on Connex, for God’s sake.”
Connex had paid for his house in County Galway, Ireland, but he wasn’t going to tell her that. “I don’t have a Connex account.”
The waitress brought the drinks and the cream. Corinne took her coffee the way she always had. He remembered. Three sugars. Enough cream to turn it white, but she would refill her cup several times without adding more. She added the coffee to the cup of ice and stirred.
“It’s a terrible offer, and you know it,” she told him after she’d sipped.
He wasn’t going to admit that. “It’s a fair offer, considering the losses the company has taken over the past few years and the changes in the marketplace.”
“You really want to run a small town specialty dairy? This isn’t some tech company that you can oversee from afar,” Corinne said, then raised an eyebrow at his look. “Yeah, I did my own research on Ebersole Enterprises. You’re a hands-off kind of corporate mogul, aren’t you? You like to buy up businesses, tear them apart, and sell off the pieces.”
“Not always,” he replied.
Her chin lifted. “You do it often enough.”
They stared at each other over the table, but Reese refused to allow himself to get lost in her gaze. Fathomless, blue, he’d more than once dived into those eyes and let himself drown.