Home to Stay (Southern Boys Book 2)

by Harper Cassidy

  2

  Though he’d known who he was meeting when his father asked him to take the appointment, the second Nick laid eyes on Chet Barnaby again, it was like all the years since high school fell away. He did his best to keep his professional demeanor and not let on that he recognized Chet, but it was difficult. Years had trimmed the excess softness from Chet's face and his sculpted jaw and plump bottom lip were now offset by a neatly trimmed mustache and goatee, but the sandy brown hair and icy green eyes framed by long lashes were the same.

  Nick was single and more than ready to find someone to settle down with. He desperately wanted to ask Chet on a real date and not just a lunch. But he knew that wasn't an option now, any more than it had been in high school. He hated knowing that Chet was still as unreachable as ever, but he understood it was his own fault.

  What he didn't tell Chet when he was sharing his name change was how cathartic it had been to cast off the horrible asshole he'd let Sam Mayhew become. To have a second chance at being a better person when he took on the mantle of Nick Gallagher. The reasons he'd become the bullying bastard who'd tormented Chet were not valid, though he’d believed them to be at the time, and he didn't view them as excuses for his behavior.

  He'd been a kid, of course, and he had therefore tried to cut himself some slack once he'd become Nick Gallagher, as the counselor had suggested. But he'd never really forgiven himself for driving away the one person in high school he'd thought might have been worth knowing.

  He wasn't surprised to learn that the same attraction was still there, only stronger. In high school, he'd been terrified by it. Certain that his parents and peers would condemn him for his predilections toward guys instead of girls. As an adult, he'd learned his parents loved him, regardless, and he didn't much give a damn what his peers thought, one way or the other.

  “I can’t even imagine the hell I put you through,” Nick had said at the restaurant.

  Chet had coldly replied, “No. You can’t.”

  Conversation had been stilted after that, mostly centering on topics related to the farm and the will. They’d both hurried through their meals and Nick got them back to the office as quickly as possible. He wished he had a do-over for his apology, but there were no mulligans in real life. He’d have to try again later, if Chet would even allow it.

  Nick forced his thoughts away from personal matters and back onto the business at hand.

  "So, these are the keys to the farm. They should all be labeled, so don't let the size of the ring overwhelm you."

  Chet took them carefully, looking a little lost. "Okay. That's a relief, at least."

  "Now, until you've made your decision, you have free use of the house and grounds. If you decide to stay, you will have immediate access to the bank account. However, should you decide at any point that you can't continue for the full year, you will be responsible for repaying any funds used." Nick frowned. "Your father was quite thorough in boxing you in, I'm sorry to say."

  "It's fine. God, this is all so much to take in." Chet massaged his temples. "Will I have access to the books for the farm before I make my decision? I'd like to know whether it's in the red before I take it on, you know?" Chet's eyes went wide. "God, what am I even saying? Why would I take this on? This is ludicrous."

  Nick wanted to comfort him, but he didn't quite know what to do. He reached out to put a hand on Chet's shoulder, but then withdrew it, knowing it probably wouldn't be welcome.

  "Look, this is a lot. My advice is: Take the night off. Leave here, go back to the hotel, and don't worry about any of this crap until you've slept on it at the very least." Nick reached back to his desk and pulled up a file folder. "This is a few printed reports and a flash drive containing all the financial data for the farm. I believe Dad downloaded the latest files yesterday, so it should be fully up to date and give you the whole picture."

  Chet accepted the folder. "Thank you. And for lunch. I—" Chet stopped and shook his head. "Thanks. I should go. No need to get up. I'll see myself out."

  3

  When Chet got to the hotel that night, his mind was reeling and he went straight to his suitcase for the bottle of bourbon he'd brought with him. If things continued the way today had gone, he was likely to need to make a run to the liquor store before he left town—even if he left tomorrow. He'd been given several staggering pieces of news in the last week, and they seemed to just keep on coming.

  First, of course, was the death of his father. Chet had hated the man and still did—but when a person so monumental in your life died, could you really escape feeling a sort of hollow space where they used to be? If for no other reason, Chet thought, than because the hate no longer had a target. It was just going into an empty space inside him now. It felt strange.

  Then the summons back to Rubyville, where he'd never planned to set foot again in his life, had come in the mail. He'd had to rearrange his whole schedule, plan a road trip without knowing how long he'd have to be away, and drive the seven and a half hours from Nashville to Rubyville... only to be told when he arrived that his father had left him everything.

  When he added in the "have to stay in Rubyville for one year" caveat to the bequest, plus finding out his high school bully was his lawyer—a lawyer who had grown up unfairly attractive and a lot kinder—it was all a bit damn much to handle.

  He removed the foil from the top of the bourbon and then uncorked it—before realizing he needed to find a glass because he hadn't packed his tumbler. At least he had thought to fill up the ice bucket first thing after checking in, he supposed. Finally, after wasting precious time finding and unwrapping a plastic cup from the bathroom, he had his bourbon on the rocks in his hand and he lifted it gratefully to his lips.

  The smooth warmth of the high end bourbon was so comforting. Chet didn’t pamper himself in many ways outside of work, where keeping up appearances was required, but he did always make sure he had the best liquor. He could smell caramel and oak as he sipped and he concentrated on that and the warmth blossoming in his chest as the liquor worked its magic and soothed the tension out of his upper back. It was always amazing to Chet how much stress he held right there between his shoulders. He was thankful there were potions to ease that tautness and allow him to relax, even when the world was still spinning way too fast for his anxiety to bear.

  He wasn't making any decisions tonight and that alone cranked his stress down a few notches. Gallagher had given him the keys to the farmhouse, but Chet wasn't going to deal with it today. He was going to drink his drink. Possibly even drink his drink's identical twin. Or triplet. Curl up in the hotel bed and sleep it all off until morning.

  Tomorrow would be plenty of time to check out the place he'd grown up, look over the books for the business and decide what the hell he was going to do with this potential inheritance business. Tomorrow would also be a much better time to contemplate the bombshell revelation that the guy who had called him so many horrible names for most of his senior year now actually seemed to be a decent human being, one who had apologized for his past actions. So for tonight, Chet was going to drink.

  Somehow, despite his best efforts, he was awake longer than intended, as he just kept thinking about those damned blue eyes.

  4

  Nick tossed and turned for an hour before giving up and getting out of bed. After he'd given Chet the keys for the farm and the house, Chet had headed off to his hotel and Nick had gone on to his next client meeting. He'd had a busy and long day at the office, which thankfully had left little time to worry about Chet. Or the unwanted return of the crush he'd harbored for Chet in high school. Obviously, he didn't still have a crush on Chet—he didn't even know Chet anymore and hadn't seen him in fifteen years—but the attraction was still very much there and Nick still found him very likable. So it was hard not to feel the old crush reforming.

  He wished that was all that was keeping him awake. Unfortunately, the guilt he'd thought he'd laid to rest back in college was still very much alive and we
ll inside him, regret its constant companion.

  Nick had acted horribly back then. He hadn't meant to. His first interactions with Chet had been one hundred percent genuine.

  Chet had always been there, obviously, but Nick had only started to notice him with real interest during senior year. Chet had been friendly and fun when they were younger, but after his mom died, Chet mostly kept to himself, despite coming from money. He didn’t excel too much or get in any trouble. He sort of faded into the background for the first few years of high school.

  Then during the first week of senior year, Nick had looked up from his locker and found Chet looking back at him, those ice green eyes suddenly closer than they’d ever been before, and Nick was lost. He’d been so thrown by the feelings that had rushed up, he’d closed his locker and walked off without saying anything—or grabbing his books for the next class. He’d suspected for a while, based on some lackluster male-out sessions with girls and some much more exciting experiences with shirtless men in movies, that he wasn’t straight, but he’d never been attracted to anyone he knew before.

  Nick didn’t really think he had a chance in hell of Chet liking him back, but he was at least going to try to get Chet to be his friend.

  Unfortunately, two of his other so-called friends had walked up at the wrong moment after his second or third attempt to make friends with Chet and they'd turned everything he said into something mocking. It hadn't been Nick's intention at all to insult Chet. And he'd done his best that first time to nip it in the bud before it got out of hand. He had tried desperately not to participate.

  But when he'd tried to defend Chet to them privately, they'd made it clear that they could turn on Nick as easily as they'd directed their mockery at Chet. Nick was not strong. He was already struggling with the feelings he was developing for, not just Chet, but men in general. He couldn't afford to let anyone suspect, even if it was just rumors and hearsay. What would his father say?

  So the next time Nick had seen Chet, he'd given him a horrible, homophobic nickname. Nick squeezed his eyes shut against both tears and nausea as it echoed in his head. It hurt to hear those words from anyone, but it hurt more to know he'd been the one to say them. That he'd been so self-hating that he'd attacked someone who—if his research into Chet was accurate—was probably going through the same struggles in high school as Nick himself had been.

  Only Chet had had a bastard of a father on top of it. And no mother to act as a buffer.

  Nick had made Chet's life a living hell for a year, for no other reason than his own cowardice. He wanted to apologize again. To tell Chet some of his real reasons and to make amends. But what could he do? What apology would ever wipe that hurt away sufficiently for Chet to forgive him? Did he even deserve to be forgiven?

  Nick wasn't sure he wanted the answer to that question.

  He went to the kitchen and grabbed some tequila from the cupboard, pouring a liberal interpretation of two fingers over some ice in a tumbler. He knew that a self-respecting lawyer should really have a liquor cabinet, but hadn't he come home to Rubyville because he didn't want the trappings of a big city lawyer? Still, a separate space for his liquors would free up room on his shelves for other things. Just what, he wasn't sure, but it was worth thinking about.

  For the hell of it—and needing a distraction—Nick started searching online for liquor cabinets while he sipped his tequila. There were a lot more kinds to choose from than he'd expected and soon he was down the rabbit hole of decanters and ice buckets. By the time he'd chosen a few items to look more closely at during daylight hours, the tequila had started to work its magic and he was feeling tired enough to sleep.

  He crawled back into bed, feeling pleasantly buzzed. To help him drift off, he imagined a world where he and Chet could at least become friends. He liked imagining it. Chet was a good guy. Handsome. Kind. Smart. Funny, even. Nick needed more people like that in his life. After high school he'd become much more particular about who he kept as friends.

  He forced his brain away from the negative thoughts and back to Chet and being his friend. Nick smiled, closing his eyes. He decided that was his new mission: Make friends with Chet Barnaby. Step one? Apologize again, more truthfully. Before he could come up with step two, he fell asleep.

  5

  The sun had only been up about an hour when Chet parked his car next to the still-too-familiar farm house. He took and released a fortifying breath and got out of the car, walking up the pathway to the steps and onto the porch.

  People always called the country quiet, but it really wasn't. Chet stood on the porch for a moment, listening to the wind carry the sound of birds, insects, farm equipment and shivering leaves. Somewhere in the distance a cow mooed, and if he wasn't mistaken, someone within a few miles had some sheep now. Those "bleets" and "bahs" hadn't been part of the chorus back in his day, but he rather liked the addition. Off beyond the barn, he heard someone yelling, but it didn’t seem to be a sound of distress, so he ignored it. There’d be time enough to meet the employees of the farm, if he stayed. If he wasn’t staying, there wasn’t much point, he thought.

  He let himself in and was struck immediately by the stillness. When his mother had been alive, there'd always been music playing. After she died, the house had been filled with the sound of the housekeeping staff, volunteers for whatever charity Walker had been working with, or just Walker's shouting voice, directed either into the phone or at Chet himself.

  Gallagher had said the staff had dwindled down to a daily cook and a maid who came three times a week. He also told Chet they were continuing to receive their pay, but had been asked to stay home until Chet made his decision.

  The idea of having someone else prepare his food all the time seemed extravagant—and had when his father had first hired a cook after his mother's death—but the idea of not having to cook for himself was appealing. He had a weekly cleaning service in Nashville, so a maid wasn't such a stretch. Still, either of those options assumed he was planning to stay, and why would he do that? Why was he even considering the idea instead of running home?

  He broke out of his reverie and decided to explore the downstairs starting with the kitchen. So he walked through the foyer past the stairs and turned left into the hallway that led to the guest bathroom and the kitchen, his footfalls echoing heavily on the hardwood floors. He stepped through the entryway to the kitchen, surprised by how easily he could still spot the differences from his childhood, even though he'd been gone a decade and a half.

  Not that some of the changes were insignificant.

  At some point before he was born, his father had renovated the entire house and modernized it. Since Chet had left at eighteen, it looked like his father had redecorated again, at the very least, if not renovated again. The appliances in the kitchen were all state of the art now, though the counters were the same cold white marble they'd always been.

  While Chet didn't find the stainless steel objectionable, there were two changes that he absolutely abhorred. The first was that his favorite feature of the kitchen from his childhood had been the windows above the sink. His father had boarded up the window and put in cabinets above the sink. It made the room feel much smaller and stuffier not only because of the lack of light but the lack of space.

  The second change was much more understandable, if no less incongruent with an old gingerbread farmhouse. The table and chairs of his childhood had been replaced with thick "rustic chic" yellow pine monstrosities that clashed with everything in the room as well as the house itself. They were too big for the space, far too beefy to suit the aesthetic of a farmhouse, and didn't look half as handcrafted as the manufacturers no doubt wanted them to.

  His next stop was the living room. Chet had very few memories in this room, good or bad. It had been rarely used except for company, and children were generally encouraged to make themselves scarce when company was over. At least children whose parents were Walker Barnaby. Still, it was shocking how austere the room was now. It ha
d always been sparse, but now it was downright Spartan in its minimalist approach to "decor."

  He felt a little depressed, seeing how everything had gotten worse after he'd left. Then again, if he so chose, he could stick around and put it all to rights. He could redecorate the whole place, open up those kitchen windows, donate that kitchen set, turn the living room into a room people actually wanted to spend time in. He didn't know if he could though. He had a life (sort of), a business, and friends back home in Nashville. His family was dead. What could he hope to accomplish here?

  The instant he opened the door to the room that had once been his mother's sewing room, he nearly burst into tears. One of his few comforts as a half-orphaned teen with a hateful father had been escaping to her sewing room. He had spent many an hour at her feet when he was little, listening to her sew as he played with whatever toy had his interest that day. In high school, he would regularly go into the room and sit in her chair and weep—or sometimes just imagine what she might say to him, if she were there at that moment instead of lost to time.

  His father had taken every last scrap of her from the room and turned it into a cold, clinical office space.

  Chet found he couldn't breathe. Panic threatened to take hold of him, so he slammed the door behind him and ran for the front exit. He flung it open and nearly ran headlong into Nick Gallagher. He was so shocked by Nick's appearance that he was reasonably certain his heart stopped.