by Avery Flynn
But lucky her, she only had an hour and a half left of the three-hour drive with a guy who—she glanced over from the corner of her vision—was starting to turn green and had a white-knuckle grip on the can of ginger ale he’d grabbed from her mom’s fridge. Good. He was her nemesis and he could stand to be as miserable as he’d made her after the incident.
So Hadley kept her mouth shut, just as it had been since they got into the car and she turned on her playlist. Still… Guilt started to pluck at her resolve. Still… Yes, he was an asshole; everyone who met him would probably agree to that. Still… She started to scan the highway signs for just how many miles were left until The Stop Inn so Will could get out of the car for a few minutes and his stomach could settle.
Why? Because she was still salty about what had happened after the incident—and she had every right to be.
Seriously, she had former coworkers who were no doubt repeating what Will had said about what a loser she was to potential clients, which meant when she started her own consulting firm—and damn it, she was going to do that—there was no way she’d ever land their accounts.
If being single in the city didn’t already have her mom worried, being unemployed and single in the city would send the woman into a flurry of criticizing-out-of-love activity. That was exactly why she gave her mom and everyone else in her family a very curated idea of what was going on in her life. Everything was fine. Always. No complaints. No whining. Absolutely no failure.
“Hadley,” Will said, sounding less like a multimillionaire from birth and more like someone on the verge of losing his breakfast. “Can you stop for a minute?”
“Are you going to puke?”
“No.” The denial would have come across more believable if he hadn’t said it while wincing in misery.
“You look like you’re going to puke.” Did she have to poke him at this moment? Probably not, but she needed to distract him until she got to the next exit.
He flexed his jaw and stared up at the car’s ceiling with an intensity that bordered on desperation. “I do not do a damn thing I don’t want to.”
Bypassing her blinker—there wasn’t a car around for miles—she turned right onto the main street of the blink-and-you-miss-it town of Myrtle. “Spoken with the determination someone would expect from the likes of Will Percival Holt, the youngest CEO of Holt Enterprises in five generations and the wonder of the stock market.”
“How do you know my middle name?” he asked, sitting up straighter and pivoting in his seat to look at her.
“I told Web he had the dorkiest middle name ever, and he corrected me.”
“That really hurts, Trigger.” A half smile curled one side of his mouth upward. “I’m not going to puke.”
He sounded more confident that time—maybe because she’d pulled into the parking lot of a gas station / grocery / diner called The Stop Inn.
“Whatever you say, Percival. Let’s get you some fresh air and after I pick up my sister’s wedding gift, we can get you another ginger ale.” She cut the engine and took a better look at him. The man was definitely close to the color of day-old guacamole. “And maybe some Dramamine.”
He looked around and then stared back at her, total confusion making his forehead wrinkle. “You’re buying a wedding present at a gas station?”
“This isn’t just any gas station. It’s The Stop Inn.” Not that she expected him to understand what that meant, but for her entire high school life, this place had been about as close to magic as it got.
When a person grew up in the sticks, there were limited entertainment options. They could cruise up and down Main Street. They could have beers and a bonfire in someone’s back pasture. They could come to The Stop Inn for coffee that was more non-dairy creamer than java and make detailed plans of exactly how they were going to escape their small town. She didn’t have to glance over at Will to know he didn’t get it. How could he? He grew up rich in the big city where his every want was granted.
“And The Stop Inn means?” he asked, following her inside.
The smile that broke out on her face started in her heart. “Stacey and Kristine.”
…
Maybe Will should have been more worried when he heard the chain saw, but he was so damn glad to be out of the car that not even the fact that he was walking through an aisle of cinnamon-scented car air fresheners located right next to porcelain figurines of semis being driven by reindeer while Santa’s sleigh was on the roof made him think twice. Plus, there was the fact that he couldn’t stop sneaking looks at Hadley’s perfect round ass as he followed her through the gift shop part of the building that also contained a small diner complete with bright-yellow Formica tables. It wasn’t until they were past the novelty T-shirts that said things like Country Built and Farm Tough that the unmistakable revving he’d only heard in horror movies sounded. And when Hadley walked through a glass door hidden behind the sign labeled Trucker Shower Only, the noise hit him in the face loud enough to make his teeth rattle.
A rangy woman with a military-grade short haircut was wielding the chain saw, going at a large log that looked like a half-carved bear. She wore a band T-shirt with the sleeves cut off and the kind of safety goggles he hadn’t seen since he’d done chemistry experiments in boarding school. As soon as they cleared the doorway into what seemed to be a courtyard with a huge steel building on one end, he and Hadley walked around so she was in the other woman’s line of sight.
A slow smile curled the woman’s mouth upward and she turned off the chain saw, laid it down, and raised her safety goggles onto her forehead. “Trigger?”
“Stacey!” Hadley crossed over and gave the other woman a hug. “It’s been forever.”
“Too long for sure. Hey, Kristine,” the woman yelled in the general direction of the big outbuilding. “Come look what the cat dragged in.”
A second woman, hair pulled into a tight ponytail, came out of the building and took one look at Hadley before breaking into a quick jog and joining in on the hug. After that, it was the kind of rush of talking only old friends had, a sort of coded language like he had with Web—except with these three, it was punctuated by giggles, hugs, and something about getting caught breaking curfew. Hadley showed off a few pictures on her phone of Harbor City while the other women held hands and oohed and ahhed at the appropriate intervals.
Once the three of them finally took a breath, Kristine turned around and gave him an assessing look. “So are you going to introduce us?”
Hadley stepped closer to him, pulling him into the trio’s gravitational pull. “This is my friend Will Holt. He came with me for Adalyn’s wedding. Will, these are two of my oldest friends, Stacey and Kristine Van Camp.”
He shook the other women’s hands, and then they all went over to a porch outside the huge building, where there was a pitcher of tea and a cooler filled with ice and sodas.
“You reliving old high school memories coming all the way out here?” Stacey asked after they’d all caught up.
“Actually, we were on our way to get PawPaw, and I was hoping to buy the perfect wedding present for Adalyn. She’s been searching for just the right hope chest for a while, and I figured you two might have something in stock.”
Kristine nodded. “We picked up a few in an estate auction out in Central Kansas. They’d be over in the furniture section. Go on and look your fill. You know we’ll give you the family discount.”
Will followed Hadley past the huge dragons, wolves, and deer carved out of wood and into a building roughly the size of the big barn on her parents’ ranch. It took him a second for his eyes to adjust after coming in from the bright sunshine. Once he did, though, his jaw fell open. The place was huge and filled with what had to be half a million dollars’ worth of oddities and antiques, all in various states of refinishing.
“What is this place?” he asked. “Is that an iron lung?”
Of all the things he’d expected to see in flyover country, he never pictured a collection like this. There were wagons, Victorian-era furniture, what looked like an actual buckskin suit, and family photographs that had to date back from the pioneer days.
“Who are these people?”
Hadley started off toward the far corner of the building to the area that had furniture. “Stacey and Kristine ended up at an estate auction by accident on their honeymoon and they got hooked on finding unique pieces. They got so much good stuff that they opened up an online shop and ship their finds out to places around the world. It’s the perfect place to get something unique for Adalyn. Help me look through the hope chests and see if you can find one that doesn’t top a hundred dollars.”
Less than a hundred dollars? Ouch. Everyone knew the more expensive the gift, the more love there was behind it. That’s why every holiday from boarding school, he and Web came home to extravagant gifts from their grandmother, even if she had to spend the holiday elsewhere. She said what she needed to say with cash, not hugs. “I thought you liked your sister.”
Hadley shot him a no-duh look. “I love her.”
“So shouldn’t you be spending more on her wedding gift than a piece of old random stuff from a high school friend’s garage?” How else was she going to know?
“Number one, who in the world bases how much people love you on how much they spend on gifts?” She must have seen the truth on his face because she wrinkled her nose in disbelief and then shook her head with a pitying sigh. “And that works for you? Does expensive stuff make you feel loved?”
What the hell? Why was she making him feel so weird about how the world worked? “It’s just the way things are.”
She scoffed. “Not everyone judges things by the price tag.”
“You’re saying you’d work for free?” Not likely. Who in the hell would take that kind of sucker’s bet?
“If I could, yes. I love what I do. I get to help great causes that really do make a difference for people. If I hit the lottery, I’d start my own foundation so I could fund those things. Well, that and I’d make sure my family was taken care of. Ranching has been good to them, but you never know when an early ice storm or a hundred-year flood is going to change everything.”
Yeah, that was a likely story. If it were true, she was the one in a million who’d actually go through with it. He’d spent too much time in his life rubbing elbows at fundraisers to believe that for the vast majority of people, their donations were anything but a tax write-off. It all came down to the bottom line. Everything had a price tag. Even the dark-brown wooden hope chest she was trying to pick up.
“Can I help?” He waited for her to agree and then lifted the dark wood box the size of an office moving box. That’s when he saw it. It had horns, was plugged into the wall, and stood surrounded by old gym mats. “What is that?”
Hadley followed his gaze and then let out an evil chuckle that would have done the Grinch proud. “The perfect way for you to earn some of the cowboy cred you bet me you’d earn by the end of this trip.”
By riding one of those bucking bronco machines? “You’re not serious.”
She smiled up at him, more of a dare than any form of encouragement. It was like pouring gas on a fire. He just about went up in flames.
Hadley winked at him. “Time to cowboy up.”
“And what does that mean?”
“Doing the thing that may be a little uncomfortable, but it’s the right thing to do, and you’ll be glad as hell afterward that you did.”
He didn’t believe that definition for a second—more than likely it was all about making a fool of him, but he let himself be suckered in anyway. “Fine.” He strolled over, as if there was nothing weird about riding what was basically a metal tube covered in fake cowhide that was hooked up to a motor. “Let’s do this.”
Really, how was this even hard?
“You sure you know what to do?” She had that look on her face, the one that said he was going to land on his ass.
There was no way in hell he was backing down now. “I hold on to the sticky-up part of the saddle with one hand and don’t fall off. Is there more to it than that?”
She let out a sudden cough that sounded a lot like a strangled laugh. “Nope. That’s pretty much it.”
Shoving the unease down with an extra dose of forced confidence, he strutted over to the bull. He put one foot in the stirrup and pulled himself up, then threw one leg over to the other side. Fucking A, he’d lost the plot. He was supposed to be destroying Hadley’s plan to fleece his brother, not riding a motorized cow. Before he could change his mind, though, Hadley started counting down.
“Three.”
His heart rate jumped to oh-my-God-what-are-you-doing-Holt levels of speed.
“Two.”
He grasped the standup part of the saddle with a suddenly clammy hand.
“One.”
He had about two seconds of rocking back and forth like a teacup ride run by a drunk carny before it sped up and the laws of physics jerked him out of the saddle and dropped him in the pile of blankets surrounding the mechanical bull.
“Ready to give in?” she asked from her spot by the on-and-off switch, a grin transforming her face to one of unadulterated joy.
Never. The surety of privilege and a lifetime of always getting his way because he never gave up revved inside him like the purr of a race car’s motor. He didn’t give in. He didn’t admit failure, let alone that he’d made a bad call.
He stood up and started back to the bull, determination in every step. “I’ll get it this time.”
Fifteen minutes and not a single solitary successful eight-second ride later, and Hadley was flipping through the pictures on her phone and giggling. He couldn’t help but chuckle along with her, despite his now-sore ass.
She held up her phone so he could see the screen. “I could sell that picture for a million dollars.”
It was a joke, he knew that, but it was the perfect reminder of why he was here in the first place.
“Now, let’s get that Dramamine and ginger ale.”
“Look at you being all devoted, just like a real girlfriend,” Will said, trying to sound nonchalant when he wasn’t feeling it at all.
“More like watching out for you so Web doesn’t kill me for breaking the big family CEO.”
“Web wouldn’t hold a grudge, and our grandmother is the only other relative. She’d probably strong-arm the board of directors into selling the company off. It’s not like we’re close.”
Try as he might, he couldn’t keep the undercurrent of something prickly out of his tone. He strode a little too fast to the gas station / grocery / diner’s door and yanked it open, standing to the side so she could go in first. Hadley brushed her hands on the sides of her jeans and walked inside, giving him a smile of thanks as she passed by. If she was any other woman, he’d think twice about that look on her face, but he couldn’t. The best thing he could do right now was put an end to this little truce of theirs before he forgot his mission completely.
They made their way to the sodas chilling in the back. He grabbed two ginger ales and offered her one.
“You make it seem as if you and Web rarely see your grandma,” she said after they paid for their drinks. “That’s hard to even wrap my brain around. I mean, mine live half a country away, but it still feels like they are constantly involved in my life. Plus, you guys were just at the family compound.”
“Web and I were, but our grandma was not.” And there it was, the fishing for information. She was subtler about it than Mia, but there was no doubt in his mind that she was on a mission just as much as he was. He stalked over to the cash register. “Her yearly visit isn’t until she stops in for fashion week in the fall.”
/> He walked out of the gas station / grocery / diner so fast, she had to practically jog to keep up.
“I don’t understand,” she said, pointing the key fob at the rental and clicking the unlock button.
“Maybe you’re not supposed to.” For the first time since the conversation had taken such a weird turn, he looked over at her, letting his expression be as hard and unforgiving as he wished he felt inside. “It’s not like it’s your family. It’s not like you’ll be a part of it, which begs the question: why are you so interested in who is involved in Holt Enterprises and how our family works? Why the interrogation, Hadley?”
Her eyes rounded. “I’m just making conversation.”
“Or gathering intel.” He jerked the door open and got into the car.
For a moment, all Hadley did was stand there with her mouth hanging open, staring at the spot where Will had been. Then she marched over to the car, the gravel in the parking lot crunching under her shoes, and yanked open the car door before sliding in behind the wheel, keys held tightly in her grip.
“What in the hell was that supposed to mean?” she asked.
He snorted and didn’t even bother to look her way. “It’s always better to know everything about a target before you strike.”
“The gold-digger thing? Again?” She let out a frustrated groan. “You have got to put that to rest, because you couldn’t be more wrong. You ever think that Web and I are friends because he’s not you?”
Exactly. He wasn’t Web. He was more cynical, more experienced with deceptions and people going after him for money. Everyone did. The photographers wanting exclusive pictures. Their grandmother valuing the family money above all else. Mia and her brazen cash grab.
“We have another hour and a half to go.” Hadley shoved the key in the ignition and turned it with more force than necessary. “How about we just get it out of the way, get PawPaw, and get back to the ranch so you can go try to learn to be a cowboy and I won’t have to see you.”