Give and Take

by Lee Kilraine

  Wyatt slid two slices on each of our plates, leaned over to me, and planted a long, firm kiss on my lips. “Eat up, Rhia, you’re eating for four now.”

  “What?” Steph said, her head swiveling in our direction.

  “Oh my God,” my mother said, her hands hanging in midair, caught in the middle of spooning up peas. “You’ve got to be kidding!”

  “No, ma’am. Triplets. The doctor thought it was twins at first, but then she caught the last little peanut hiding behind Wyatt Jr.’s equipment. Male Thornes come well-equipped, if you know what I mean. Survival of the fittest, and all that. If you believe in Darwin, that is.” Wyatt kept dishing food onto our plates while everyone else at the table sat frozen and transfixed. “Rhia may give birth to the three dumbest grandchildren you’ll ever have, but I guarantee you they’ll come out good-looking and carrying a full package.”

  “Yes, sir, just like their daddy.” I sighed and made googly eyes at Wyatt. “You’ll be the best daddy, Wade.”

  He pulled my face toward his in both his hands and kissed me. “It’s Wyatt, babe.”

  “It sure is.”

  “Dinner looks delicious, Dr. Hollis.” Wyatt turned his attention to his meal.

  Everyone had just begun eating, the table unusually quiet when Wyatt added, “Do you want the triplets to call you Maw Maw or Dr. Granny?”

  Mother choked on her meatloaf, and it took a few slaps on her back from Dad until she could breathe again.

  Steph leaned forward from her spot three people down and hissed, “Wesley, do you have any single brothers? I’ve got to get my hands on a sample of the Thorne super-sperm.”

  “Stephanie Hollis, I’m shocked!” This from my brother.

  “For scientific purposes of course,” Steph said. “Get your mind out of the gutter, Cole.”

  “Which one of you is Aunt Tia?” Wyatt asked, looking up and down the table until sweet little Aunt Tia raised her hand. “I hear you adopted our office cat. How’s she doing? Did you know she likes tuna fish? And she likes to be scratched below her left ear.”

  Mom stood, stacking plates, which was my cue to help. Genetically, I come from a family of stackers. We stack plates at home, restaurants, weddings. Pretty much anywhere and everywhere. If it’s a plate, we’re stacking it. I figure we’re helping the waitress out, but the fact is we can’t not stack. All trash goes onto one plate, the rest get stacked, saucers on top of plates, and then silverware on top of that.

  I stacked everything within reach and followed my mother into the kitchen.

  “Rhia, I need your help.” She stood with her back to the sink, looking at me with a frown.

  “Sure, Mom, what’s up?” If she tried to set me up with someone’s son visiting from out of town while my pretend boyfriend, Wyatt, sat out in the dining room playing another round of twenty questions with my father, uncles, and siblings, then I’d be very upset. So upset I might even leave Sunday dinner before dessert.

  The fact that I was contemplating talking Wyatt into coming back to my apartment for another round of hot sex might have had me already thinking about leaving before dessert. That part of our friendship was working out very nicely.

  “I need you to take care of the department’s employee appreciation luncheon.”

  “Excuse me? Are you saying you want to hire me?” It would be a fantastic opportunity, but wow, I was shocked that my mother was offering this to me. She didn’t take my business seriously and thought I didn’t take it seriously, either. “Mom, I’m touched that you believe in me enough to ask me.”

  “Hmm, well, the original planner I hired left town, with half of the funds for it.”

  “Crap, that’s not good. So, I wasn’t your first choice for an event planner.” It really shouldn’t hurt, since I knew how much my family thought this was a whim and not a business—but it did. “Was I even your second choice?”

  “Sweetheart, your father and I have always told you the truth, but I think it would be best if you simply accept the job and we move forward.”

  “I think I need to know how many event planners you called before you asked me.”

  She glanced over and then away quickly. “Seventeen.”

  Seventeen. I let that sink in. Seventeen. As in ten plus seven. Almost twenty. Seventeen other planners who she trusted to do a good job before she trusted me. Wow.

  “Okay, I’ll be honest, Mom, that hurts. I also find it hard to believe that seventeen event planners would turn down such a big job.” What the heck? This was one of those large events that any planner would love to count on as a definite job on their calendar every year.

  “Well, they didn’t all turn me down, as such. In fact, most were simply booked.”

  “When exactly is your event?” If she said two months away, I’d probably walk outside to scream. Planning for events this size needed to start beyond a year out. No wonder everyone else turned her down.

  “Three…” Holy, heck. Three months was ridiculously close, but I could swing it.

  “Weeks.”

  “Weeks?” The casserole dish I was drying almost slipped from my hands. “This is a joke, right?”

  “Have you ever known me to tell a joke, Rhianna? No, this is an absolute nightmare is what it is. And if you want us to believe what you’ve been telling us—that you’re a serious business woman—then now is your chance to prove it.” My mother’s eyes didn’t hold much confidence in me. Just wild desperation.

  Something in the pit of my stomach clenched into a fiery ball. This felt wrong. And unfair. Yet, darn it, I did want to prove to my family that I was equally as competent as the rest of the Hollis family. I wanted my parents to be proud of me. But three weeks? I rarely cussed, but, man, did I want to right now.

  “Three weeks is impossible, Mother. That’s why everyone else turned it down.”

  “Are you saying you can’t do it? That you won’t help me? Because to be perfectly frank, this will reflect very poorly on me if we have to cancel the employee appreciation gala the first year I’m head of the department.”

  I wanted to help my mother avoid denting her immaculate reputation at the hospital and the university. But with only three weeks, I didn’t know if it was even remotely possible.

  “Do you have anything from the planner? Did they send you any updates before they took off?” A good planner kept the client in the loop, but I could also see my mother not wanting to be bothered with the details.

  “He did send me some emails, but between my surgery schedule and teaching, I didn’t have time to read them. Who has time to follow up like that? What good is an event planner if you can’t trust them to plan the damn event instead of running off with half the money? This is a complete fiasco.”

  Trust. She put her trust into a planner she’d never met before, but she couldn’t trust me. That was like a cold slice of a knife to my heart. And still I wanted to both help her out of the jam and make her proud of me. Which was surely a sign I needed therapy.

  “Forward me all his emails right now, and I’ll do my best to fix this,” I said.

  “Wonderful, Rhia. I’ll get the emails right to you. You’re going to make this fabulous for me, right?”

  Huh. She hadn’t trusted me enough to hire me a year ago, but now she expected fabulous with three weeks to go all while I was cleaning up someone else’s mess and with only half (if I was lucky) the budget.

  “Mom, I’ve got three weeks and half the budget, if even that. Don’t count on fabulous.” My mother had not a clue. And maybe I was fighting a losing battle thinking my parents would one day look at me with the same pride they looked at my siblings. If it was going to happen, then this was my chance. I was going to work triple time on this. Come hell or high water, this event would be memorable. I just hoped it would be for being wildly successful and not a complete and utter fail.

  I grabb
ed my phone from my purse and began making a list:

  Check with the venue. If he hadn’t booked it, I was toast.

  Most important would be checking on the caterer. Hope to heck the guy had booked and paid the caterer before he’d taken off. Check staffing!

  Check on registration list and responses for attending. Double-check numbers.

  See if the planner had already booked entertainment.

  Check with keynote speaker.

  Have programs been ordered? Presenters and scripts finalized?

  Payments: Who was already paid and who can I renegotiate with?

  “I’m going to head out and get started. Forward me those emails as soon as possible. I’ll need to start making calls first thing in the morning.”

  See? Hadn’t Wyatt and I just been talking about this very thing? Sure, maybe planning parties wasn’t my passion, but it was an important job. The frantic expression on my mother’s face while she discussed her situation was exactly why event planners existed on this earth. There were lots of people who didn’t know how to throw a party or a dinner. I did. I could help those people. Dinners weren’t just for fun. Look at my mother, for instance. This party was going to reflect on her position as the head of the department. People were going to be watching what she did. Critiquing and forming opinions about her professionalism and competency. It was important. Too important to have trusted some dweeb like she did, but I digress. I had a lot of work to do if I was going to swoop in and save the day for her.

  This was crazy. If the planner had taken the money and run, I’d have to make this whole thing up on the fly. Scale everything down to bare bones and call in favors with some of my regular vendors and maybe even talk my friends into helping. Oh, wow.

  But if I could pull this together, this could get Seize the Day an important boost and maybe the praise I’d been wanting—needing—from my family.

  Chapter 20

  Wyatt

  “Don’t anyone move, or the P.I. gets it.”

  I looked up from where I stood near the copier machine behind the receptionist’s desk to see Jack Sinclair, the P.I. Beck had hired to track down Ryker, and a woman. In fact, the newcomers had the attention of everyone in the front lobby area, which happened to be four Thorne brothers, Rhia, our newest receptionist, and a client waiting for an appointment. And pretty sure Sinclair was paying attention, seeing as how the woman apparently had a gun shoved into his rib cage.

  “What’s going on, Sinclair?” Beck took one step forward while Ash stood next to him, looking tall and intimidating. Hopefully, the woman would think twice about messing with someone as big as Ash.

  My gaze landed on Sinclair, and I noticed he looked angry instead of concerned or worried, which was darn impressive considering the woman’s threat.

  The last we’d heard from Sinclair, he was about to contact the sister we didn’t even know existed until a few months ago, so the odds were high that this was her. Scratch that. Now that I looked at the woman closer, the odds were one hundred percent this was her. She was the spitting image of Eli.

  I thought I’d prepared myself for almost anything when it came to meeting our new sister. Except this. This scenario where my sweet little sister held a man at gunpoint. I hadn’t imagined this one.

  “I believe I’ll ask the questions, thanks. Who the heck are you guys? You have five seconds to tell me who you are and what’s going on.” She poked Sinclair harder, drawing a growl. “Or you hired gun here gets it.”

  “Just keep that up, woman, and I’ll forget everything my mama taught me about how to treat a lady,” Sinclair said.

  “I quit.” The new receptionist stood from behind her desk, grabbed her purse from the file cabinet behind her, and backed toward the front door. “I thought I’d love this job on account of how good looking you Thornes are, but y’all are crazy. I can get my fix of good-looking men on TV. Crazy women holding men at gunpoint, fighting in one office, people making out in another, iguana lizards streaking down the hallway. Y’all don’t need a receptionist, you need Nurse Ratched. I’m out.”

  The woman backed out of the front door and hustled away like she was running from a zombie attack.

  Iguana? My eyes met Rhia’s who shrugged but looked a little guilty.

  “This big jerk says you bunch of losers may be my long-lost brothers. But I don’t have any long-lost brothers, so I figure it’s a scam of some sort.”

  “I found her for you. Good luck. That’s all I’m saying.” The frown on Sinclair’s face was so deep I’d swear he was regretting finding her. “And that’s a finger in her pocket, not a gun.”

  “You are such an asshole.” She narrowed her eyes at him, withdrew her hand from her pocket, and shot him with her finger gun anyway.

  “I’m an asshole?” He bent down from his six-foot-two stature until they were right in each other’s faces.

  “Would it have hurt you to be a bit more effusive with information? You’re like a poker-faced secret service agent, only without the charm. Like the speak-no-evil monkey. Why not just wear a big ole piece of duct tape over your mouth?” She got right in Sinclair’s face, not intimidated by his size or fierce look.

  “Lady, if I had any duct tape on me, I know exactly what I’d do with it. You just—never mind.” He swung his gaze over to us. “I’ll be in touch when I find Ryker.”

  “Ryker? Who’s Ryker?”

  “Our brother,” I said.

  “Your brother,” Ash added.

  “Oh, right. If I believed you, which I don’t. I’ve never heard of you Thornes, and Lord knows I look nothing like you.”

  “Well, that’s because Eli’s not here,” Gray said, and he was exactly right about that. We’d always thought Eli had a different father. Seeing Hope sort of gave that theory extra credence.

  “How many of you are there?”

  “Six.”

  Hope’s eyes ran down the line of us, freezing on me.

  “Which one are you?”

  “Wyatt. The youngest. Was the youngest. I guess you are now.”

  “Uh huh.” She kept staring at me, even moving closer and walking around to look at both sides of my face.

  Sinclair shook his head. “I’m out. I’ll call as soon as I’ve got a line on Ryker.”

  “Oh, I believe I’ve got a line on Ryker,” Hope said, as if she didn’t have all our attention already.

  “Bullshit,” Sinclair said from where he’d stopped in his steps on his way out the door and whipped around to glower at her.

  Beck stepped forward. “I’ve been searching for him for over ten years. How in the hell would you have a line on a man you didn’t even know existed until five minutes ago?”

  “Yeah, you want to explain?” Ash crossed his arms over his wide chest.

  It was only looking at Ash that I realized I’d taken the same pose. We all had. Defensive and on edge. We’d been searching for Ryker since before Beck was old enough to gain guardianship of us all. Because the way we’d made it through our ugly childhood of abuse, neglect, and abandonment was by sticking together. Until the foster system had broken us up one last time, and that was when we’d lost Ryker. There was a huge gaping hole where Ryker belonged, and none of us would feel whole until we knew where he was. Knew he was safe and happy somewhere.

  “What’s with all the hostility? Dudes, chill. Fine, maybe it wasn’t your missing brother. I’m sure it’s a complete coincidence that I met a man who looks almost exactly like Wyatt here.”

  “When and where did this happen?” Sinclair had moved back until he stood in front of her.

  She narrowed her eyes at Sinclair, then ignored him and turned to look at the rest of us. “Back home in Apache Junction. When? Maybe a month or two before my parents died.”

  “Mom’s dead?” I asked. Had I missed this information? I looked around at my brothers,
and their faces showed the same shock I felt, so no, this was new.

  “I thought you knew.” Her head whipped around to Sinclair. “What the hell, Sinclair? What kind of P.I. are you?”

  “The kind who was trying to figure a way to tell them rather than just blurt it out with no care to their feelings.” His brows were pulled low over his pissed off gaze. “Up until now, you’ve been unwilling to share a single piece of information with me, so forgive me if I didn’t consider the scenario where you’d just blurt it out like that.”

  It was Rhia who moved in to separate the two of them. She linked her arm through Sinclair’s and pulled him off to the side, so we could get back to what had us tense and on edge.

  “What happened to your mother? To your parents?” Beck asked, his face like carved marble. Yes, I noticed Beck’s use of “your mother.” Not his. We all noticed. Beck had never forgiven her for abandoning us, and knowing what he’d had to face as the oldest, I didn’t fault him one bit.

  “Car accident. Near as the highway patrol can figure out is Dad got…uh…distracted, then a road runner darted in front of the car, he swerved, then overcorrected, went off the road, and slammed right into a Saguaro.”

  “Shit. That’s awful.”

  “It is. But they died instantly and happy. So…”

  “How do you know they died happy?”

  “Because, apparently, Mom was giving him head.”

  “That would explain the distraction.”

  “Hope, I’m sorry to hear about your parents.” I nodded at her and she nodded back. “But could you tell us a little more about when Ryker visited?”

  “Look, I don’t even know that you guys are who you say you are—let alone if the guy I met was your—”

  “Where is she? I got here as fast as I could.” Eli rushed in, swinging the door so hard it clanged up against the wall a couple times before slamming itself shut behind him. “Damn log truck turned over on the highway. Where’s our sister?”