Every Road to You

by Phyllis Bourne

  She raised her head from his chest and stared up at him. The incredulous expression on her pretty face was priceless. “Beg for it?”

  “Not necessary,” Ethan teased. “I’d be happy to accommodate you, if you ask real nice.”

  Tia reached under the covers and pinched his bare ass. “I’ll make you beg, Ethan Wright.”

  He leaned in and kissed her lips, still puffy from his kisses. “Gladly,” he said, throwing back the covers. “Now, let me see what I can do about finding us food.”

  Ten minutes later, Ethan tore the wrapper off a giant cinnamon-infused honey bun smothered in vanilla frosting. He leaned against the headboard of the king-size bed and took a huge bite.

  “But I thought you were bringing treats for both of us,” Tia said, her eyes glued to his mouth, or rather the jumbo pastry near it.

  “I did.” Ethan inclined his head toward the disposable cup of hot tea and snack-size container of applesauce. Room service wasn’t available at this hour, so he’d made do with the snack shop in the hotel’s lobby.

  “Applesauce is not a treat,” she protested. The bedsheet was tucked under her arms, covering her deliciously nude form. “It’s baby food.”

  “And a gentle option for the stomach of someone who spent the better part of last night throwing up,” he said. “Besides, I thought you preferred healthy foods.”

  “Normally, I do, but not when I’m on vaca...” She hesitated, apparently realizing how she’d nearly described the impromptu trip he’d coerced her to accompany him on. “Well, you know what I mean.”

  He did.

  One of Tia’s silly pop quizzes sprung into his head, and he couldn’t help smiling.

  A snort came from the other side of the bed.

  “I guess you would have reason to smile.” She ripped the foil lid off the cup of applesauce. “I can practically taste the icing on your sweet roll.”

  Ethan laughed. “Actually, I was just thinking about what you said. While this wasn’t what I’d planned for my time off, it feels like we’re on a vacation.”

  “The closest I’ll probably get to one anyway.” She dug into the applesauce with a plastic spoon.

  “Tell me about it,” he said. “This was the first time I’ve been able to schedule one since I left my grandfather’s old firm and went out on my own three years ago. What about you?”

  Tia shrugged. “This really is the closest thing I’ve had to a vacation, period,” she said. “I have ten spas to keep an eye on. Along with the financial problems on the cosmetics side of the business, it just never seems to be a good time to take off.”

  “This is probably a case of the pot calling out the kettle, since it took me a while to take vacation time myself, but why not just delegate more?” he asked.

  Tia took a sip of from the plastic cup. “It’s bad enough I have to ask Max to keep my spoiled sister from throwing another tantrum. I also haven’t been able to give much-deserved raises to spa employees this year or last because our record-breaking profits are being funneled into the cosmetics division. It doesn’t seem fair to ask any more of them than I already do.”

  “So what’s your long-term solution? What’s the plan to turn the cosmetics division around?”

  Tia looked down at the now-empty cup. “Two good questions I wish I could answer.” She shook her head. “Unfortunately, all I can do is keep throwing good money after bad for a while. As company CEO, my father keeps Espresso stuck in the past out of some misguided loyalty to my mother’s memory.”

  If Ethan hadn’t felt bad about the way he’d coerced her to come along on this trip before, he truly felt like the villain now. He hadn’t realized how much she carried on her small shoulders.

  “So you’re putting money into a situation you have little or no say in,” Ethan said. “That doesn’t seem right.”

  Nor did it seem like the woman he’d come to know over the past few days. It didn’t make sense she wouldn’t be proactive in ensuring her family’s core business turned a profit.

  “You have a brother and sister—can’t the three of you band together and do some kind of intervention on your father or maybe overrule his decisions? You all have a stake in the company, right?” He bit into his pastry.

  Tia nodded. “In theory, we should be able to do it. My dad controls 49 percent of the company, while Cole, Lola and I make up 51 percent,” she said. “But the reality is more complicated.”

  “How so?” Ethan asked the question more out of concern for her than curiosity.

  She opened her mouth to answer and then closed it. Instead, she nudged him in the side with her elbow.

  “Hey, I didn’t mean to turn this into a dumping session. You’ve got your own problems.” She flashed him a smile that didn’t quite reach her eyes. “Besides, we’re supposed to be engaging in pillow talk. You know, light, meaningless banter couples engage in while they rest up for more sex.”

  Ethan took the empty cup from her hand. Touching a fingertip to her chin, he tilted it upward until their eyes connected. “You can talk to me, you know. I’m not sure exactly what we are to each other now, but I’d like to think, at the very least, we’ve become friends.”

  He moved his hand up to her cheek and lightly caressed it, the small gesture filling him with an emotion he couldn’t put into words.

  “Friends,” she agreed.

  “So tell me, what’s keeping the three of you from working together to put the company back on track?”

  She shook her head. “It’s kind of a long story.”

  Ethan turned sideways on the bed and looked up at her. “I’ve got time.” He crooked his elbow and leaned his head against the palm of his hand. “I’m resting up for more sex, remember?”

  Actually, he was up for it now, but at the moment she seemed to need a friend more than a lover.

  Tia adjusted herself on the bed until she mirrored his position, sideways with her head resting on her palm. She smiled at him. It was a small one, but Ethan was relieved to see it was genuine.

  “My brother, Cole, is my mom’s son from her first marriage. In fact, she started the company as a young widow with the money from his father’s insurance policy,” Tia began. “So Cole truly grew up with the business more so than my sister or I did. By the time we came along years later, Mom was married to my father and could afford a team of nannies for child care.”

  Ethan reached out, taking her free hand in his as he listened.

  “The trouble started after my mother died. Cole and my father had different ideas on how the company should be run. Cole wanted to make changes that at the time seemed drastic, while Dad wanted everything to remain the way my mom left it.”

  “But you said the three of you together have controlling interest,” he said.

  “We do, but when things finally came to a head between the two of them and went up for a vote...” Tia sighed.

  “You voted with your father,” Ethan said.

  Tia nodded. “I was young and didn’t understand the implications. Neither did Lola. We simply did as our father asked,” she said. “We were reared by nannies, not at the Espresso building like Cole, who knew every nuance of the business and the cosmetics market. At the time, we didn’t know any better.”

  Her eyes shifted to their still-joined hands before she faced him again.

  “By the end of that week, Cole had cleared out of both the Espresso offices and Nashville. That was six years ago,” she said. “Now we see him once every year or two, maybe, when he’s even in the country.”

  Ethan ran his thumb over the back of her hand as she continued.

  “For the last two years, I’ve been trying to convince Cole to return to the company and help turn us back into a real contender on the market, but he’s always off on that boat of his and nearly impossible to track down.”


  Realization dawned on Ethan. “You were talking to him that first day I barged into your office, weren’t you?” he asked. “And I hung up the phone on him.”

  Tia nodded.

  “I apologize,” Ethan said. He was genuinely sorry. If he could do it again, he would have waited until after she was done talking.

  She shrugged a bare shoulder. “Thanks, but it doesn’t matter. Cole doesn’t need Espresso Cosmetics. Leaving is probably the best thing that ever happened to him. He went on to make millions on his own.”

  “What does he do?” Ethan asked.

  Tia looked over his shoulder at the night table. “Pass me your phone a sec.”

  He handed her the phone and she swiped the face of it with her finger until a puzzle game he’d managed to get hooked on opened.

  “Hey, how’d you know I played that?” he asked.

  Tia laughed. “Doesn’t everybody?”

  She had a point.

  “Cole invested in the app developer’s fledgling company as a lark shortly after leaving Espresso. Both this game and the last one are bestsellers. Now he doesn’t have to work another day in his life,” she said. “Unless he wants to.”

  She returned his phone.

  “And I’m assuming he doesn’t,” Ethan said.

  “Cole won’t come back unless Dad agrees to let him run Espresso his way, without any interference,” she said. “With the way Dad has run the company, I can’t really blame my brother.”

  “And I take it your dad...”

  “Is being stubborn as hell,” Tia said. “So now you know why I haven’t been able to take off. I’m mired in the middle of a huge mess.”

  Ethan opened his mouth to comment but decided against it. If it were just business, he would have. However, this involved family, and it wasn’t his place.

  “What were you going to say?” Tia asked.

  He shook his head. “Nothing.”

  “As my friend, if you have something to say, say it,” she insisted. “And if you have any advice, I could certainly use some. Nothing I’ve tried so far has done any good.”

  Ethan exhaled. “Okay, as your friend, I think you should simply quit.”

  “Quit?” Tia sat upright on the bed. “I can’t quit my job.”

  “No. I’m not talking about quitting your job, just everything else. As in quit using the spa’s profits to make up the deficits on the cosmetics end. Quit trying to get your father to reconcile with Cole and quit babysitting your younger sister,” he said. “Quit enabling them.”

  “B-but I...” Tia stammered.

  Ethan reached for her hand and kissed the back of it. “I know you love them, but they’re all adults. Maybe if they faced the consequences of their actions, without your always coming to their rescue, they’d make better decisions.”

  Tia’s eyes narrowed, the brow above one of them raised. “What was the analogy you used earlier, something to do with the pot and the kettle?”

  He knew exactly where she was going with her question, but there was no comparison to draw. “My situation with my grandmother is totally different than yours with your family.”

  “I don’t see how,” she said. “In fact, I’ve been telling you for four hundred and fifty miles Carol is an adult who’s competent enough to make her own decisions and accept the consequences.”

  Ethan pressed his lips together. The truth of the matter dug up fears he didn’t want to bring to mind or to the bed he was sharing with her. Still, he’d brought her along on this trip and then offered her the same advice he’d rejected from her.

  Tia deserved an explanation.

  “It’s me. I’m the one unprepared to deal with the potential consequences of this daredevil list of hers,” he said softly. “Six months ago, Grandma suffered a heart attack right in front of me.”

  Tia’s jaw dropped. “Oh, my God,” she gasped.

  “Luckily, I was there when it happened, and she realized what was going on. She had me bring her an aspirin, and then I broke every traffic rule in the books getting her to the emergency room.”

  Shock still registered on Tia’s face. “But I talk to her at least once a month, and she never said a word.”

  “If I hadn’t witnessed it myself, she probably would have tried to get away with not telling me.”

  She stroked a hand down his arm. “It’s a good thing you were there. Still, it must have been terrifying.”

  It was a nightmare, Ethan thought, forcing back distant memories of watching his mother die. “Grandma’s always been so strong. Even at her age, I thought she was indestructible....” His voice trailed off.

  “But she’s okay now, right?”

  Ethan nodded. “The doctor cleared her to resume her normal activities. However, her usual activities are swimming and gardening, not zip-lining, skydiving, roller-coaster riding and racing cross-country on the back of some stranger’s bike.”

  Tia opened her mouth, but he leaned in and headed off her protest with a kiss. She kissed him back, and he thought the subject was closed.

  He should have known better.

  “All I ask is that you take the advice you gave me and think about applying it to your own situation with Carol,” Tia said.

  “I’ll think about it, but make no mistake, I still intend to find her.” He looked at the clock, which now read two o’clock in the morning. “Hopefully, today.”

  Ethan turned back to Tia, who was gnawing at her bottom lip. “So you didn’t go back to the park last night to look for her?”

  He shook his head. “I couldn’t leave you. Not when you were sick,” he said.

  “But you already knew where she’d be, and you stayed here because of me.” She smiled at him.

  “It wasn’t a big deal.”

  “But it was,” Tia insisted. “Now you don’t have any clues as to where they’re headed.”

  “I don’t need clues, because I know exactly where they’re going next,” Ethan assured her.

  “But how?”

  He grabbed his phone again and opened Facebook. “Grandma may have unfriended me and set her page to private, but Glenn Davies’s page is public and extremely informative,” Ethan said. “His last post was last night. Apparently, they survived the roller-coaster ride, and they’re headed to Oklahoma City. Grandma wants to see her sister, my great-aunt Kay, and they’re also planning to ride some seven-hundred-foot zip line across a river.”

  Tia rolled her eyes. “Glenn put all of that on Facebook, huh?” The question was rhetorical. “That’s just great,” she muttered.

  Ethan showed her a photo Glenn had snapped of his grandmother at some oldies concert they were at yesterday. “I don’t know why I didn’t think of checking his profile before,” he said. “The guy’s practically a GPS.”

  Reaching into the plastic sack he’d gotten at the lobby snack shop, Ethan retrieved a candy bar. He tore off the wrapper and took a huge bite.

  “Hey, you’re just going to eat that in front of me, too?”

  He turned away from her and faced the wall instead. “Better?”

  “Very funny,” Tia said. “I thought we were supposed to be friends, and as my friend, it’s your obligation to share your white-chocolate caramel candy bar with me.”

  He rolled over and faced her, kissing her firmly on the mouth.

  “You taste good.” She licked her lips. “Does that mean I can have a bite?”

  “No, but if you can manage to make it until daybreak without any more barfing or bellyaches, we’ll go by a diner the front desk clerk told me about. They have the best milk shakes in town and serve them all day. Now, how does that sound?”

  Tia’s lips twisted into a frown. “It sounds like you’re not going to share your candy.”

  Ethan nearly
relented but the all-too-recent memory of her being ill stopped him.

  Hopping out of bed, Tia snatched the sheet and wrapped it around her naked body. “Never mind, I’ll just go down and get my own candy, maybe some cookies, too.”

  Ethan caught her before she made it to the door leading out of his room. In one swift motion, he lifted her into his arms.

  “Hey, put me down.” Tia giggled and kicked her legs. “I want something sweet.”

  Ethan tossed her back onto the bed, and she bounced on the mattress. The sound of her sexy laughter filled the room.

  He crawled back onto the bed and pulled her into his arms. “Don’t worry, Daddy’s got all the sugar you need.”

  Chapter 10

  It was well past daybreak when Ethan finished making love to her. Now Tia eagerly awaited her other treat.

  “This milk shake had better be good,” she called out from the sitting area adjoining their rooms. “I’ve been waiting on you to get ready forever.” She dragged the syllables of the last word out for emphasis.

  Finally, Ethan emerged from the other room engrossed in whatever he was reading on his phone. He spent a few more minutes reading and then stuck the phone in his pocket.

  “You ready?” he asked, apparently still preoccupied by what he’d read.

  He looked up at her and his eyes widened. “Wow,” he said. “You look amazing.”

  Tia did a slow pivot to give him the full effect of her coral halter sundress. It was one of her most flattering outfits, and the expression on his face made her glad she’d packed it.

  Ethan looked down at her legs, and his eyes did a slow drag back to her face again. “I don’t know what I like best, you in that dress or you in nothing at all.”

  “Glad to hear it, because this is my last clean outfit. I only packed two changes of clothes.”

  “Not a problem. We’re about five hours from Oklahoma City. If we don’t spot Grandma and Glenn on the road, we’ll definitely catch up to them at my aunt’s place. We can either do laundry there or buy some things at a department store.”