The Firefly Café

by Lily Everett

  “This island,” Dylan said, hushed and almost reverent. “It’s not like any place I’ve ever been—and I’ve been all over the world.”

  Penny frowned a little. How did a handyman have money for international travel? But he’d probably backpacked across Europe or ridden that motorcycle of his across Asia or something. “Sanctuary Island is special,” she agreed. “I’ve loved it ever since we moved here. I knew right away that it was the place to make our new start.”

  “The rest of the world isn’t like this.” He sounded almost angry, voice harsh and clipped.

  “What do you mean?” Penny asked.

  “Happy and peaceful all the time.” Dylan’s hand tightened on her hip.

  Forcing herself to relax, Penny breathed deep. “Well, Dylan, I don’t know how to break it to you, but not everyone on Sanctuary Island is blissfully happy, every minute of their lives.”

  He snorted. “Could’ve fooled me.”

  Dylan had been consistently bewildered by the friendliness of the townspeople he’d met, from her best friend Greta Hackley offering discounts at the hardware store when she saw how much he was spending on getting Harrington House fixed up, to random people walking their dogs in the park by the town square. It was endearing, if a little sad that he was so unused to basic human kindness.

  But Penny had a larger point to make. “You talk a lot about how different we are here on Sanctuary, how much has changed for you since you got here—but Dylan, don’t you see? It’s the same for us, for Matthew and me. We were okay before, we were fine. But then you showed up, and you changed everything.”

  She could feel it when his heart picked up speed to slam against his rib cage. The whole bed shuddered with it.

  “Penny…” His hoarse voice and clutching hands made Penny sit up to get a better look at his face.

  All angular jaw and sexy scruff, his sky-blue eyes were piercing even in the fading afternoon sunlight. He looked lost. Chest clenching, Penny cupped his cheek in her hand and met his gaze with every ounce of calm and certainty she possessed.

  “I know you’re only here for a job, and that this is temporary—a moment out of your life. But I want you to understand what you mean to us.” Pressing her lips together briefly, she amended, “To me. You’re the only man in, well, years, who has made me feel brave enough to take a chance on opening up. And last night, you showed me how wonderful it can be to trust another person, with my heart and my body.”

  Penny wasn’t prepared for the shattered look that washed over Dylan’s tense face. “Penny,” he said helplessly, and she rushed to reassure him.

  “No, no—I’m not trying to put pressure on you about staying on the island. I know that’s not the deal, and don’t worry, you never gave me the wrong idea about that. You know that I don’t do this kind of thing all the time, so obviously there’s something special about you … and I don’t want you to leave here without knowing how I truly feel. Because you deserve to know that wherever you’re off to next, wherever life takes you, there are people here on Sanctuary Island who love you.”

  His eyes pinched shut as if she’d slid a steak knife between his ribs, his whole body jerking with the wound, and Penny’s heart shriveled in her chest.

  “You shouldn’t,” he said, the words harsh as gravel in a blender.

  This wasn’t going at all the way she’d imagined.

  Dylan was so stoic—not much of a talker, more of a doer. But Penny saw beneath the cocky grin and the hard-clenched jaw. She saw a man with a past like a wound that kept breaking open, never healing right. She saw a man who understood what it meant to be lonely, and she’d wanted to give him something to take with him and keep him warm the next time he found himself all alone in the wide world.

  Instead, she seemed to have broken him.

  “Listen, Penny,” he began, voice hoarse and eyes shadowed.

  What was he going to say? Fear momentarily cut off the flow of oxygen to her brain—all she could do was sit there and stare at him, naked in her bed, with her grandmother’s quilt pooled around lean hips still imprinted with the shape of her clutching fingers.

  The sound of her cell phone blaring out Diana Ross’s “The Boss” cut him off. Scrambling for the phone buried under the pile of clothes they’d shed earlier, Penny held it up with an undeniable sense of relief, even as she frowned apologetically.

  “Sorry, I have to take this. It’s Harrington family business, I’m always supposed to be on call. I wonder what they need.”

  *

  The tensing of every muscle in Dylan’s body was all the more painful after being so recently melted into a puddle of happy goo.

  Penny loved him. Or, more accurately, she loved Dylan Workman, the Sanctuary Island version of Dylan—who was nothing like the man he’d been back in New York.

  He had to tell her. Now.

  Tuning back in to the one side of Penny’s call that he could hear, Dylan drummed impatient fingers on his raised knee and waited for her to be done.

  “Jessica, hi! No, it’s fine, I can talk.”

  Penny’s gaze lifted to his for a moment, her brow furrowing as she listened to Jessica Bell, his brother Logan’s assistant. “You are? That’s—well, that’s great! I’ll look forward to finally meeting you in person.”

  Horror crawled down Dylan’s spine. Crap. Jessica was coming here. He was about to be outed as part of the wealthy family who paid Penny’s salary.

  “Alrighty then,” Penny said, determinedly cheerful even though Dylan could read the panic in her white-knuckled grip on the phone. “When should we expect you?”

  The words were no sooner out of her mouth than the doorbell chimed its deep, mellow tones through the house.

  Dylan’s lungs seized. No. This couldn’t be happening.

  Beside him on the bed, Penny turned around, panicked eyes on Dylan. “Oh,” she said faintly. “I see.”

  The phone fell away from her ear.

  “The door,” Dylan said through numb lips.

  It wasn’t a question, but Penny nodded, still shell-shocked. The doorbell chimed again, insistently, and Dylan experienced a moment of intense irrational rage at himself for fixing the damn thing five days ago.

  The second bell catapulted Penny into action. She leapt off the bed and into her clothes, hair flying behind her like an unfurling flag. “Get dressed! Where are my socks? Who cares—I don’t need socks. I do need a bra, though, oh thank goodness…”

  Any chance Dylan had to tell Penny the truth was draining away like sands through an hourglass. He stood up and tried to catch her shoulders and make her stand still for a second, but it was like trying to catch a sunbeam. She slipped through his fingers, a constant whirl of frantic motion as she rushed over to the mirror and moaned at the sex-tousled state of her curls.

  “Penny, please,” he said, hating the desperation so naked in his voice, but unable to cover it up.

  She glanced at his reflection in the mirror, jaw working. “Put some clothes on, I’m begging you. Unless you want to meet my boss in your birthday suit.”

  “I will in a second, Penny, but first just let me—”

  The doorbell echoed through the house once more, making Penny squeak and rush for the door. “No time! I promise, we’ll talk later! I have to answer the door.”

  And with that, she was gone, taking with her most of Dylan’s hope for a way out of this mess he’d created.

  Unless …

  Jerking his pants up over his thighs and zipping them, Dylan dug through the pockets for his phone. Maybe, he thought crazily as searched, maybe he could text Jessica, explain the situation, get her to promise not to say anything …

  Except his phone wasn’t there.

  Dylan cursed fluently while tugging his shirt over his head. He snagged his boots and jammed his feet into them to pound down the stairs toward the last place he remembered having his cell phone, in the kitchen. If he could get to it in time, before Penny opened the door and welcomed Jessica Bell in�
��but he was too late.

  He skidded to a stop at the bottom of the staircase just as the heavy front door swung open. Over Penny’s head, Dylan made eye contact with Jessica first—her perfectly manicured auburn brows arched into an infinitesimal lift as she took in his disheveled appearance.

  But that wasn’t the worst of it.

  Behind Jessica stood her boss, Logan Harrington, pale and swaying in a rumpled three-thousand-dollar suit. Before Dylan could do more than plead with his eyes, Logan cocked his head and said roughly, “What the hell is my kid brother doing here?”

  Chapter 10

  Penny kept her welcoming smile firmly in place, sure she must have heard wrong. Or Mr. Harrington was making a mistake—reading between the lines of Jessica’s unusually tense manner when she’d called, and the gray-faced, wild-haired, lanky man on the front porch, Penny was pretty sure this Mr. Logan Harrington was about a heartbeat away from exhausted collapse.

  “Y’all come on in, you must be tired from your trip. Just let me freshen up the master bedroom. Won’t take me but a second,” Penny said soothingly, darting a commiserating glance at the tall, svelte redhead whose voice Penny recognized from the phone as her liaison with the Harrington family.

  Jessica, who’d been frozen on the welcome mat since Mr. Harrington’s crazy question, unthawed and moved forward briskly. “Thank you very much, but that won’t be necessary. I took the liberty of accessing the house plans, and I saw that there’s a garden cottage behind the house. That will do perfectly well for Mr. Harrington.”

  Penny blinked. Accessed the house plans? Who did that? Well, apparently the perfect assistant did. Mind racing with the list of tasks she’d need to accomplish in order to get the cottage ready for occupants—Lord, she going to have to call in sick to the Firefly, there was just no way to be done before her shift—Penny turned to lead the two guests into the foyer. She stopped dead when she all but collided with Dylan.

  Standing at the foot of the stairs in an unbuttoned shirt with his jeans sagging low on his hips and his boots unlaced, Dylan stared at Mr. Harrington with his shoulders squared and his jaw set, as if he were bracing for a punch.

  As she glanced back and forth between the two men, her heart began to race.

  After a couple of weeks of working outside, Dylan’s skin was a healthy, burnished gold, unlike Mr. Harrington’s weary pallor. Dylan’s hair was cropped close to his skull while Mr. Harrington’s was long enough to stick up as if he’d been running his fingers through it. But both men had light brown hair, broad shoulders and muscular arms, although Mr. Harrington was built along slightly leaner lines. They both had sharp, angular cheekbones and jaws.

  But what really sent Penny’s heart leaping into her throat was the realization that hidden under the heavy lids and deep purple shadows wrought by exhaustion, Mr. Logan Harrington’s eyes were the blue of a glorious summer sky.

  The exact same shade she’d become so fond of in the last few weeks.

  Behind her, Mr. Harrington was still confused and getting cranky about it. “Damn it, is this another intervention? Tink, you’re fired. Dylan, go away, I’m fine.”

  Penny shuddered in a gasp that sounded horribly like a sob, and because she couldn’t close her eyes against the train wreck of her own life, she saw the moment when Dylan realized that she knew.

  His shoulders went even more rigid, until his entire body was as stiff and defensive as a suit of armor. “I tried to tell you,” he grated out harshly, almost sounding as if he were angry at Penny for the way things had gone down.

  “You had two weeks to tell me the truth,” Penny hissed. “Fourteen days and nights…”

  “Okay then!” Jessica spun into motion, taking charge of the situation with an effortless ease that Penny could only numbly admire. “First of all, Harrington, you can’t fire me because you don’t pay my salary. Harrington International, aka your older brother, Miles, does. So here’s what’s going to happen now.”

  She herded Dylan and a feebly resisting Penny toward the empty front parlor no one ever sat in. “You two kids clearly need to talk. I’m going to take Mr. Big Mouth out back to the cottage and get him settled in—no, don’t worry about towels or clean sheets, a bare mattress would be a step up for Logan at this point, so long as it’s horizontal.”

  “There’s nothing worse than a woman who thinks she can manage the entire world,” Logan growled, but out of the corner of her eye, Penny noticed that he didn’t put up much of a fight when Jessica led him back out the front door and closed it gently behind them.

  And then Penny was left alone in the parlor with the man to whom she’d given her body and her heart … before she even knew his real name.

  *

  “I’m sorry,” Dylan said. He wasn’t sure what to say to keep from getting swallowed up by the black hole of guilt and regret in his gut, but he definitely owed Penny an apology. Might as well start there.

  As expected, it wasn’t anywhere near enough. Penny shook her head in disbelief. “You’re sorry. You mean, you’re sorry your brother showed up here and exposed your lie.”

  The bitterness in her voice pierced him like broken glass. “No, Penny…”

  But she wasn’t listening. Dropping onto one of the overstuffed chintz love seats, Penny covered her face with trembling hands. “Your brother,” she groaned. “Lord almighty. Dylan Harrington. I feel like such a fool. You must have laughed yourself sick over how easy I was to seduce. Some silly, gullible waitress to play around with because she doesn’t know any better. Are you going to go back to all your rich friends and have a good chuckle over your latest sexual exploits as Dylan Workman?”

  “Of course not.” Dylan stood in the center of the perfect, fussy little room full of touches that reminded him of his grandmother, and knew without a doubt that Bette Harrington would cry if she knew how the boy she raised had turned out. “It wasn’t like that,” he tried to say past the thick lump in his throat. “I never wanted to make a fool of you, Penny, I swear. And nothing about you is easy or gullible.”

  “No?” She raised her face to his, and though he’d braced himself for tears, her eyes were dry, burning with a fierce light. “‘Kid brother,’ Logan said. That makes you the youngest of the Harrington brothers, the one who refused to take any responsibility for the family company. The playboy. Oh, God—the Bad Boy Billionaire.”

  It stung to hear his whole life, decisions he’d agonized and suffered over, reduced to a single biting summation, but he couldn’t deny it.

  When he stayed silent, Penny swallowed and shut her eyes briefly. “Two weeks. That’s all it took to make me fall in love—and into bed—with you. Tell me, Mr. Harrington, is that a record for you?”

  Every word stabbed him like a knife, but Dylan forced himself to stand there and take it. He deserved whatever Penny dished out, and worse. With her tender, generous heart, there was no way she’d dole out a punishment severe enough to fit the crime.

  But still, he had to try to explain. He couldn’t let her compare herself to the models and celebutantes he’d casually slept with and discarded ever since he’d called his wedding off three years ago.

  “Honestly,” he told her, “no. Two weeks is an eternity for me to stay focused on one woman.”

  She winced, laughing thinly. “Great, so I guess I should be flattered. What was it that made me so special? Was I a novelty to you, Dylan? A single, working-class mom, someone so far beneath you it made me exotic?” She shook her head with a sad smile. “There I go flattering myself again. I’m sure you sleep with all the help, don’t you?”

  “Of course not,” he said firmly. “And you’re not ‘the help,’ Penny. You’re the most amazing woman I’ve ever met. You’re strong and warm and kind. You’re an amazing mother. You’re beautiful inside and out, and I don’t think you even realize it. If you believe nothing else I ever tell you—and I wouldn’t blame you for that—at least listen and believe this. What happened between us was real. I didn’t tell you eve
rything about myself, but what I did tell you was true. And I never lied about what I felt for you, or about how much I wanted you.”

  After a long moment of silence, during which Dylan imagined every possible response ranging from Penny falling into his arms to ordering him out of the house, she said quietly, “I think you can see how I’d find it difficult to put my trust in that.”

  At least she was listening. Pressing his advantage, Dylan sat down on the love seat with her, careful of the nearly visible wall of empty space she’d erected around herself. “I get that, and I’m not making any excuses. It was a stupid, childish stunt…” He paused, hearing himself, then shook his head. “Which, if you ask my oldest brother, Miles, is a fair characterization of my entire life.”

  “Miles Harrington. The head of Harrington International,” Penny said, as if she were still trying to get all the players in this awful farce straight in her head.

  “That’s right.”

  “He—and that man out in the summer cottage—those are the brothers who went off to college and left you to deal with your parents’ deaths alone? So Logan is the workaholic loner, and Miles is the controlling robot.”

  Startled that she remembered what he’d said about his brothers that first night, Dylan shook his head. “No. I mean, yeah, they weren’t around much, but I wasn’t completely alone. I had my grandparents, who were great. Although, like I mentioned before—I wasn’t the easiest kid to raise.”

  She changed tack. “And when you said you spent years drifting through life aimlessly until you finally got a job—you meant until you decided on a whim to impersonate a handyman to fix up your own family’s property.”

  Against his will, Dylan stiffened. “Yep. I ditched college and turned down every one of Miles’s offers to come work for the family company, thereby breaking his heart—or whatever piece of well-oiled machinery he uses in place of a heart. You’re now part of a very elite club, Penny Little: the Society of People Who Expected Better from Dylan Harrington and Were Disappointed.”

  “Stop that,” she said sharply, getting to her feet and hugging her arms tightly around her rib cage. “You don’t get to make me feel sorry for you. This is hard enough already.”