by Becca Barnes
“What?” I finally asked.
“Nothing. It’s just--I keep wondering when you’re finally going to…”
“Going to what?” I knew the words that were about to come out of my best friend’s mouth even as she asked the question.
“I wonder when you’re going to accept reality, Ellie. We both know that Kat is never going to suddenly sprout a soul and let you buy S’Paw Box, much less give you a share of it. But people go there for you. Your clients would follow you to a new location and a new business name. Heck, those dogs would follow you to Mordor.”
I sighed.
“I know,” I said. “I know all of that. I’m not delusional. But I’m not here because I think that Kat is going to hand over the business. I’m here because it was my dad’s life’s work. S’Paw Box was his baby. If I left and let her destroy it—which, she totally would within a week—then it would be like...like…”
It would be like losing my father all over again. Like another death. I knew it sounded stupid, but as long as I had my connection to S’Paw Box, it felt like my dad was there, watching over me.
“I know that’s how you feel, honey. But your dad wouldn’t want you to be living like this. Kat treats you like her peasant servant. She pays you practically nothing. You never get any real time off. I worry about you, that’s all.”
Isobel meant well. But she could never fully understand. She had two living parents, not to mention seven older brothers. If anything, she had too many people watching over her.
And Isobel wasn’t entirely right. Kat paid a competitive wage. I didn’t have to live quite the Spartan lifestyle I did. I lived on next to nothing in my one-room shoebox so I could sock away every last cent I made. Just in case Kat ever did decide to sell, I wanted to be ready. I’d managed to save up almost seventy thousand dollars so far. Granted, it had taken me seven years to do it.
Unfortunately, that was a fraction of S’Paw Box’s worth. But maybe it would be enough to qualify for a loan.
Again, all pipe dreams. First, I needed my wicked stepmother to be willing to sell the store. Fat chance of that happening anytime soon, profitable cash cow that it was.
“Tell you what,” I said, “I promise that we’ll have a girl’s night soon. In the meantime, you need to promise you’ll stop worrying about me.”
“It’s not so much that I’m worried about you. I’m more pissed at Kat.”
“Oh, by all means then, stay pissed.”
“Gladly.” Isobel got quiet, and I could tell there was something else she needed to get off her chest.
“Go ahead and say it,” I said.
“I get that there’s an emotional tie to the business. But whatever you decide, your dad would want you to speak up for yourself. He’d want you to speak your truth.”
“You sound like an Oprah guru.”
“Oprah should be so lucky.”
“What does that even mean?”
“I don’t know. I’m a little drunk.” Isobel hiccuped.
“Do you need me to come pick you up?”
“Nah. I biked.”
It was one of the nicest parts of living in Lavender Beach. Everything was within walking or biking distance. I didn’t even own a car. In this small of a town, your friends were never far from you.
“Call me if you need me to come get you, okay?” I said.
“Yesh, ma’am. But you really should come. There’s a bunch of hot guys here with your name written all over them.”
“I don’t want some drunken frat boy, Isobel. No matter how hot.”
“They aren’t all frat boys. There’s a nice guy right here who’s a...what are you?” Isobel paused, presumably waiting to hear Mr. Wonderful’s occupation. “An insurance salesman. From Birmingham. His name is Allen.”
“I’m sure Allen is very nice.” But I didn’t do flings. And I didn’t want very nice. I wanted the full package. I wanted the fairy tale and the happily ever after. I wanted the deep sighs and the electric tingles, the way I’d felt earlier when Mac had touched me, had whispered in my ear.
“Allen who?” slurred Isobel.
“Allen. The insurance guy who you were just...never mind. Isobel, you’re more than a little drunk. Put Ed on the phone.”
“Oh, come on, Ellie,” she whined.
“Do it, or I’m coming down there.”
“Fine.” Isobel huffed but after a few seconds, the bartender, Ed picked up.
“Fuzzy Palm, this is Ed.”
“Hey, Ed. It’s Ellie.” I’d known the gruff old bar owner since I was little when he’d been one of Dad’s poker buddies and would always bring blend up a virgin strawberry daiquiri for me whenever the card game was at our house.
“Hey, sweetheart. I wondered if it was you that Isobel was on the phone with. Don’t worry. I’m cutting her off this round, and I’ll make sure she gets home safe. Safe and all by her lonesome. Buncha smarmy sharks here tonight.”
“Thanks, Ed.”
“No problem, kiddo. G’night.”
Yep. My friends were never far away. I smiled as I filled the mop bucket with water and cleaner then slipped a few drops of lavender and spearmint essential oil into the mixture. Then a single drop of eucalyptus, my father’s favorite scent.
My ghosts were never far away either.
Six
Mac
“Please tell me this isn’t all you have.” James McCarthy senior, a.k.a. Big Jim, a.k.a. My father, pushed himself back from the desk in the high rise office space that MacCarthy Enterprises was renting short-term in Destin. He crossed his arms, frowning at me in disappointment.
Pretty much the only expression he ever made at me.
I shuffled through some of the notes on my tablet.
“Well, I’ve got a good estimate of their annual gross. Overhead can’t be too high. One full-time employee. Two part-timers. A mom who works there while her kids are in school and a high school student in the afternoons. And then the owner, who I haven’t met yet.” I closed my notes with a flick of my thumb.
I really had only managed to gather a few scant tidbits, and I knew this presentation was going over like a lead balloon. I was unprepared. There. I’d admit it. I thought I would have gotten more information out of Ellie the night before, but I dunno. The conversation never seemed to steer the right direction for very long. Not that I’d tried that hard.
But I also knew I was at my best when I thought on my feet. Not when I parroted back a bunch of stale stats and numbers.
“Weaknesses are obviously the fact that it’s a seasonal location,” I said, “and most of their customers are vacationers, not evergreen throughout the busy season. However, this entire area is growing in population, and their off-season is shrinking. There are a lot of Atlanta families that come down every fall break and for the holidays, which used to be the dead season. Their social media presence is phenomenal for such a small operation.”
That had actually been the main, if not sole, selling point for the investors. Half a million built-in, organic fans? Unheard of.
“Let’s see. Further strengths...umm, personnel. They have a great staff.” Wait. I’d already mentioned that, hadn’t I? But they were great. Well, Ellie was great.
Like, really great. As in, I had spent a good chunk of the morning researching casual yet elegant waterfront restaurants to take her to for dinner rather than economic indicators of Lavender Beach’s downtown.
My dad’s frown deepened.
“Why would I care about the workers at this froo-froo shop? I don’t want to buy a pet store. I want to buy a name. And I want to buy it for the lowest amount possible. You know the drill. Find out their weaknesses. Exploit them. Negotiate the price down, and buy it.”
“But—”
“No buts. There are no buts in venture capital. You said you haven’t met the owner yet. Fix that. Today. Get me ‘S’Paw Box’ by next Wednesday or we’ll go another direction.”
“Dad, there is no other direction. I’ve h
ad this deal in the works for a year now. Everything’s in place. We’d be flushing the entire venture if we walked. The S’Paw Box name might prove a little more expensive than we thought, but—”
“No buts.”
I didn’t know it was possible, but my dad’s expression managed to muster one extra ounce of disappointment. I snapped the tablet shut and cursed under my breath as I marched out of the office and down to the parking lot.
I might not have gleaned any insider info from Ellie yet, but I knew the business of specialty subscription boxes, and I knew it well. Those monthly boxes had proven to be highly lucrative. Build them up, turn a profit, sell them off. The entrepreneurial Ferris wheel went round and round. What had been a novelty a few years ago was now a well-oiled machine.
All you had to do was find the one thing people were most passionate about--the one thing that made them completely lose their minds and open their wallets--then exploit the hell out of it. I looked down at the four-hundred dollar dog harness on my passenger seat as proof. Pet owners were the ideal customer. All the trends proved it.
But my investors were in Miami. Their marketing gurus crunched some numbers and determined that if we obtained the name “S’Paw Box” with its army of adoring fans just lathered and waiting for a monthly dose of luxury dog goods, it would triple our profits in the first quarter alone. So here I was in Lavender Beach, Florida, of all places, courting a small specialty pet boutique. If McCarthy Enterprises wasn’t able to acquire it, the investors would walk.
I revved the engine of my Porsche convertible and briefly closed my eyes. I was a successful, competent businessperson. But looming in my mind,I saw the same vision I always saw—my father, glowering at his son in a perpetual state of letdown.
As I pulled into the Lavender Beach city limit, I slowed down and took a deep breath. Maybe it was my imagination and the subliminal messaging of the sign, but this tiny beach town really did smell heavenly. Like brine and the passing aromas of food trucks and the occasional whiff of fresh flowers. I liked it. It was...quaint.
Quaint.
Normally, I avoided that word like the plague. When Felicia and I had been dating, it was the polite descriptor she reserved for things that she found distasteful or outdated. Things with scuffed up edges--a patina and a history.
Whether Lavender Beach fit that criteria, I couldn’t say, but there was no better word to describe the place than “quaint.” All the houses looked like they belonged on a movie set with their bright, cheery clapboard siding and widow walks poking above the treeline.
As I turned onto the beachfront road, I noticed a woman with an exceptionally fine ass walking unevenly along the base of a dune. Or rather, I saw a woman being pulled up the face of the sand dune by a pack of five dogs on increasingly tangled leashes.
And then she turned her face, and I recognized her.
“Ellie?” I slowed to a roll and leaned my head out the car door to call to her.
“Oh, hey!” She tugged on the mass of leashes, but the dogs took it as a cue to move faster up the sandy slope.
Away from me.
I pulled to the side of the road and parked along the shoulder, jumping out to assist the damsel in distress. By the time I reached her, three of the dogs’ leashes had become so twisted that it looked like a single braided knot with a mangle of mutts wiggling at the end. The other two were doing their damnedest to pull her in opposite directions. Thankfully, they all seemed to like each other, and they were licking everything in sight. Ellie’s feet, a trash can, each other.
And now me as I attempted to help her unknot them. A little yappy one stooped down and slurped my seven hundred dollar Italian loafers.
Great.
As I was distracted wiping off the slobber, the mass of dogs swung around and encircled me in the melee. I tried to shift away before I lost my balance but it was too late.
In an intense moment of deja vu, Ellie reached her arm out in an attempt to steady me. It was no use. We both went sprawling into the sand, a literal dogpile. I managed to catch the bulk of my weight on my rump and forearms, and I caught her so that her legs were astride me. I kept a firm grip on the leashes so at least I wouldn’t be chasing down escaped dogs for the rest of the afternoon.
“Well, that was awkward...again.” Ellie shifted away from me as well as she could, which was only a few inches given how tightly our bodies were entwined with the leashes wrapped around us.
From this distance, I noticed details about her that had escaped my notice before—a single ringlet of hair that curled at the edge of her forehead and a body that was somehow both tight and tantalizingly soft at the same time.
And then there was the warmth again. It emanated from her every pore. There was a physical heat, especially where our bodies pressed flesh to bare flesh. Her temperature had to be running north of ninety-eight point six. But it was also a lightness, or rather, a brightness that seemed to shine out of her.
“We’ve got to stop meeting this way,” said Ellie with a laugh.
“At least I’m not covered with anything nasty this time.”
And that was when the little yappy one lifted its leg and peed on me.
Seven
Ellie
“Oh my gosh. I am so sorry.” I had been stammering barely coherent apologies for thirty seconds straight.
I couldn’t cut a break. It wasn’t like I was normally that klutzy. But this made two times that I’d been a walking natural disaster around him. I guess Mac brought out my inner swoon.
Only instead of a nice, graceful maiden-like swoon, it was more like a lumberjack taking an axe to a rotten tree.
Kerplop.
It hadn’t been an uncomfortable fall...for me. I’d landed half on the sand, half on him. Straddling him, to be precise.
“I’m so terribly sorry. Oh, and this looks really expensive.” Without even thinking, I began unclasping the buttons on Mac’s pee-soaked shirt. Dang Beauregard. That annoying little terrier had had a full bladder and perfect aim as he’d sprayed Mac (and only Mac) with a ridiculous amount of urine.
At least it was sterile.
Maybe.
Was dog pee sterile? Or was it only human pee that was sterile? Or…
Focus, Ellie.
I gave my brain a slap at the same time I realized that I’d reached the bottom button of Mac’s shirt without even realizing it. The ends of my fingers danced across his tanned, sculpted torso.
“I, umm…” What was my plan here, exactly? Undress him in the middle of town and then what?
The rational thing would have been to stand up then and there. However at the moment, every body part but my brain seemed to be in charge of doing the thinking.
My fingers froze on the last button, and I stared at his bare chest, unable to form a coherent thought, much less put together an articulate string of words. He was utterly magnificent.
“I’ll pay you for the shirt,” I promised, fully aware that the cost of it would likely be at least a week’s worth of savings, if not more. A week’s savings that would not be going into my S’Paw Box fund.
I might not have been able to afford the designer, posh labels that my clientele’s owners wore into the shop and spa every day, but I recognized pricey clothes when I saw them.
“You most certainly will not,” he said.
“I’ll pay to have it dry cleaned, then.”
“Also, no. It’s not a big deal,” said Mac, removing the soiled garment.
“But, then, at least let me--”
“Ellie.” He held the shirt out in front of him and gripped it from opposite sides. “It’s just a shirt.”
And then he ripped it in two.
I gasped as the final remnants of fabric shredded apart.
“Why did you do that?” It was insane. And kind of sexy. Okay, really sexy. But also really insane.
“It’s only money.” He shrugged.
Spoken like someone who had it. Plenty of it.
And then
laughter erupted from me. It shouldn’t have. It wasn’t funny--Mac ripping his own shirt. It was wasteful and crazy. But also endearing and, well, if he’d meant to distract me from the fact that I now had to rewash five dogs, mission accomplished.
“Here.” I pushed myself up and reached a hand down to help him up. “At least come over and get yourself cleaned up. There’s a cut-through walkway to the spa behind that bike rental shop.”
I pointed to Seven Bros Bikes, named for and owned by my very own best friend’s brothers. As we walked by the entrance to the bike shop, Isobel’s second--no, third oldest brother--Jack, stuck his head out.
“You okay, Ellie?” he asked, not bothering to mask the distrustful sidelong glance at Mac.
“I’m fine,” I said. “No worries. Tell the guys, ‘hi,’ from me.”
He grunted in reply and gave Mac one last threatening look. Jack wasn’t the sharpest tack in the drawer, but he was a sweetheart under his gruff exterior.
“So do you walk dogs as well as groom them?” asked Mac once we were through the hedge that separated the frontage road from the street where S’Paw Box was located.
“Not usually. But they were all getting antsy. It’s easier to deal with multiple dogs when they’ve had exercise. We have a strict no cage policy at the spa, but it can get out of hand when there are more than two. And five, well.” I rolled my eyes. “The dalmatians were actually supposed to be picked up a couple hours ago, but their owner got held up. And Beauregard here has been at the spa for four hours already and needed a tinkle break.
“Obviously,” said Mac with a chuckle, dumping his ripped shirt in a waste bin as we passed.
I was glad he could laugh about it, but I still felt my cheeks burn in embarrassment.
“I’m truly sorry,” I said.
“And I truly couldn’t care less about that shirt. Just glad I caught the leashes.”
“You caught the leashes? Ahem. I seem to remember you being the reason I couldn’t keep hold of the leashes in the first place.”