by R. S. Elliot
“What?” I lifted my gaze upward, into their smiling faces. It turned my stomach instantly.
“We’re contesting it,” Daddy exclaimed, the slanted grin on his face saying more than his words. This gave them greater pleasure than it should.
Why? Because grandma had left the house to me and not them? Did they resent me as much as my cousins? Was this what this whole thing was really about?
“You can’t do that,” I said, heat lapping up my cheeks. My eyes stung. “It’s my inheritance.”
“Oh, we know, silly,” Mama said. “But we’re still able to contest it on the grounds of fraud and undue influence.”
I shook my head. “Undue influence? From who? Me?”
“It doesn’t really matter.” She waved an airy gesture, as if they were remarking on a minor detail from an episode they’d watched the night before. “What’s going to happen is, the case will go to court, then we’ll have to fight for discovery of information that doesn’t really exist.”
“And you know how long some of these court cases can be,” Daddy added. “I’ve got one that’s been three years now, without the client receiving a dime from the company that owes him money.”
Mama tapped Daddy on the arm. “Let’s not even talk about the legal fees associated with that.”
“Exactly.” Daddy laughed, a wicked sound that stole into my insides. “So, you’ll get your money...eventually.”
“And definitely not all of it once we’re done,” Mama added.
“Or…” Daddy paused. “You can get a job and prove to us you’re responsible enough to have this house and your inheritance.”
“You two are insane.” I pressed my hand into my stomach. I felt sick.
They had to leave. Now.
“Ambitious, honey.” My mother patted my hand gently. “Get it right.”
“We just want what’s best for you.”
“And that involves blackmailing me?” I snapped. Because this was a normal conversation families had.
“Think of it more like tough love,” Mama said.
I shook my head, appalled.
How could they do this? How could they sit there, laughing and exchanging smiles as if this were the most natural thing in the world? “It doesn’t matter what you want me to think of it as. It’s despicable.”
“Darling, you’re getting those little lines around your eyes.” Mama gestured to the tiny crow’s feet at the corners of her own eyes. “Don’t squint like that.”
I’d had enough. I stood, unable to withstand sitting at the same table as them for another moment.
“It’s a job or this,” Daddy said, rising to his feet across from me. “Take it or leave it. We’ll even start you off at the place.”
I didn’t have a choice, did I? The house needed repairs. I needed that inheritance to even keep it running. They knew they had me, knew I couldn’t refuse. I would have gotten a job on my own eventually. There was nothing wrong with doing this.
But there was just something so wrong about giving in. To them and their petty games. “Where?”
“Your grandmother’s business,” Mama said.
I curled my nose up at the thought. “The matchmaking company?”
“Don’t say it like that,” Daddy said. “It still does incredibly well. Especially with all the changes your cousins have added.”
Mama waved a teasing hand forward. “Yeah. Just don’t tell them we said that.”
“No. Of course not.” I rolled my eyes. They were worried about me telling my cousins they thought they were doing well? But they weren’t too worried about blackmailing me?
“So? What’s the answer?” Daddy asked.
“I don’t really have much of a choice, do I?”
“Excellent!” Daddy said, and ushered Mama toward the door. “You start first thing Monday morning.”
What the fuck had just happened?
I walked my parents to the door and made a mental note to change the locks immediately. I had two days left to prepare for my first day of work. I could squeeze in some maintenance, pick out a kick-ass outfit, then make my way into the company. My cousins wouldn’t want me around, so I’d probably be gone within a week anyway.
Then it’d be back on track to fixing this money pit and figuring out whatever my real calling was.
“Oh, and one more thing.” Daddy turned around to face me. “You have to keep the job for ninety days. You can’t get fired, can’t quit. No rule breaking. Got it?”
I’m cursed. Did I break a mirror or something?
“Anything else?” I asked.
“Yes.” Mama reached across us and lightly pinched my cheek.
“Have fun, honey.”
Chapter Four
Hunter
“It just isn’t fair, you know?” Vanessa said. “We’ve done all the heavy lifting, and she’s the one who walks away with everything.”
I shifted in my seat, glancing around to see how many people were actively listening to our conversation. Vanessa was loud enough to be heard in Jackson. There was one couple pretending not to listen, though the occasional glance and smile they stole in each other’s direction as my sister’s voice hiked another octave higher told a different story. Another group passed a scowl or two my way throughout the course of the meal, to which I could only answer with one of my most charming smiles. And a pair of old women who were old enough to be my grandparents did little to hide the fact that they were listening at all.
From the looks of it, they found the conversation more amusing than anything else they’d encountered in the past decade.
But I’d sat through almost an hour of Vanessa’s complaints already. It was getting old. How many times did I have to hear about the dreaded Lyndsey Saunders who stole the livelihood right out from underneath my sister and her husband, Kyle’s, noses? I scanned the outdoor seating area for our waitress.
The sooner I got out of there, the better.
“Hunter,” Vanessa snapped. “Are you even listening to me?”
“Yes. Evil blonde,” I said. “Stole all that you deserved. Got it.”
“You should care a little more about this,” Vanessa said, nearly slamming her hands into the table in a fit of rage. She was two seconds away from becoming a full-blown, adult-sized toddler. “I’m your sister. You should be taking my side.”
“Your side of what?” I asked.
“This argument.”
“I only know your side of the argument,” I explained. “I don’t even know this girl to take her side.”
I didn’t know Lyndsey Saunders, and already I felt sorry for her. No wonder the girl never came home. I’d stay away from this train wreck of a family, too, if it wasn’t for my mother.
“Well, you should at least be a little bit more supportive,” Vanessa exclaimed.
Supportive. I might have been supportive of Vanessa at first. Sure, it was painful to watch all your hard work go unrecognized. To see everything you worked toward go to someone else. But there wasn’t anything she could do about it. From what I’d heard, Lyndsey was barely even present enough to steal the business from their grandmother in the first place. And Kyle had done some great things with the matchmaking service, for sure, but he was hardly a saint. Compared to her husband, my sister looked almost angelic.
Despite what Vanessa thought, Grandma Saunders must have had her reasons.
“You didn’t lose anything,” I said, utilizing my calmest voice possible. Something similar to how an unlucky camper might approach a bear. “You and Kyle are still the heads of the company. You still work there. It’s not like all of that goes away.”
Vanessa huffed an exaggerated sigh. “But we don’t get the company and we should have.”
“But it wasn’t yours to begin with. It belonged to Kyle’s grandma,” I explained. “I mean, it’s not like the only reason you took the job there was because she would die and leave it to you one day.”
The silence that followed made me nervous. Vanes
sa stared down at her food for the first time since we started this conversation, carefully jabbing at the remaining bits of her lunch with her fork.
“Was it?” I asked, unable to hide the horror in my voice.
She tossed down the fork in a flourish, throwing her hands up in the air and heaving another forlorn scoff. “Well, I mean, who else was she going to leave it to?”
“What the hell, Vanessa?”
“You have to seize your opportunities, Hunter,” she said, gripping an imaginary object in her hand and holding it out between us. Though it wasn’t enough to distract from the fact that she was actually waiting for someone to die to take ownership of their things. “And this was an opportunity. Kyle had some great changes in mind for the company, but now we have to run everything through that stupid half of the family. Not to mention the house.”
I shook my head in disbelief. “You already have a house.”
“A starter house.”
“It has five bedrooms.”
“Regardless.” She raised a hand up for silence. “Hummingbird Hollow would have still been the upgrade we deserve.”
Hummingbird Hollow. Where have I heard that name before?
“The plan was to stay in this house for a couple of years,” Vanessa continued. “Start a small family with one or two kids, then eventually move them into Hummingbird Hollow, convert a room or two into a spa, and another into a home office. It would have been perfect. Now, all those dreams are gone.”
I rolled my eyes.
Yes. Her ridiculous dreams of having a home so big she could convert two of the rooms into a spa were now crushed. While her pathetic five bedroom house with a mother-in-law suite and pool was something to be sneered at. I would have been happy with the family part of the house: the two kids and loving spouse.
Hell, after Dad died six months ago, it was all I’d been able to think about.
It was time I got serious about my life. I wasn’t getting any younger after all. I was the new head of the household, the one in charge of keeping this family together, and keeping it going. I wasn’t doing that great of a job as it was. Vanessa couldn’t stop raving about the loss of an inheritance she never had. My mother hadn’t even smiled more than a handful of times in the past few months.
A wedding would make my mother happy.
“Maybe, she’ll sell it to you,” I said, trying to focus on the task at hand.
Was I really ready for marriage? Or was I just ready for some stability?
“Oh, you don’t know this woman,” Vanessa explained. “She is vindictive. She would find some humiliating way to make me pay for this house, rather than just hand it over willingly.”
“No one is going to hand over a multi-million dollar home to you,” I corrected. “I said, ‘sell it to you’.”
“She’ll ask for something outrageous.”
“You don’t know that.”
“You don’t know her.”
I tossed my hands up, laying the napkin down on the table beside the plate. Where the hell was that waitress? “Fine. You win. Your life is really hard, and you deserve all of this. Is that what you want to hear?”
“I want you to fix it,” Vanessa snapped.
“How the hell am I supposed to fix this?” I asked. My sister wasn’t just distraught. She was insane. “I can’t do anything to change this. I have my own problems to worry about.”
“Right. Saving the world. So hard,” Vanessa said. “You chose to be a firefighter. It’s not my fault your life has no stability.”
I pinched the bridge of my nose. A flash of red caught my attention, and I quickly recognized our waitress from across the way. I flagged her down like a man dying from dehydration on the side of the road on a desert highway. If I flapped my arms any faster, I probably would have even flown a few inches up into the air.
“Check, ma’am. Please,” I said. When the waitress nodded, I added, “Bless you.”
Vanessa sighed across from me. “Look, I’m just upset is all. I know you’ve been worried about finding someone, but it isn’t necessary to get married just because you’re taking over for Daddy.”
It wasn’t just that.
I made a promise. To my father, to myself.
This family was already in such a state of confusion and chaos lately. And Lord knows me working in one of the most dangerous professions in the country wasn’t helping my mother with finding stability in her own life. If something were to happen to me, Vanessa would be left to pick up the slack. And seeing that she’d just admitted to waiting for someone to die for money, it wasn’t likely my sister would turn into Mother Teresa overnight.
“It’s fine, Vanessa,” I said finally. “I’ll take care of it on my own.”
“I mean, your biggest problem is finding someone because of the hours you work, right?” she asked, to which I only shrugged. “You know what you want; it’s just a matter of finding the right fit. So, why don’t I just place you with one of our matchmakers and have them set you up with someone?”
“Isn’t that for, like, rich people?”
Vanessa waved a dismissive hand out in front of her. “We have a whole range of clients. My point is, you aren’t really picky at this point. You just want to find a moderately attractive woman who is content with your schedule and family-oriented. Which is what the service is all about. We take out the whole drama of passion and romance and just get down to what people really want, someone to build their life with.”
“That doesn’t sound right.” Wasn’t passion and romance supposed to be a part of the equation? How could you spend the rest of your life with someone without it?
“You’re looking for a companion. Like Kyle and I,” Vanessa explained, slipping into her business facade with ease. She regarded me already like a client, rather than her brother. The girl was all business. Always had been. No wonder she imagined love to be a secondary feature to marriage.
“We complete each other. We are there for each other, and we support each other,” she continued. “That’s what marriage is all about. Having someone who understands you and helps you achieve your goals, like a friend.”
“And why can’t passion play into that?”
“Because it doesn’t last,” she said. “It’s an illusion. Happy marriages are based on much more than love and sexual connections.”
Well, this just kept getting worse and worse. “So, I’m not supposed to love the person I’m going to marry?”
“It’s a different kind of love. Kind of like an arranged marriage,” Vanessa explained. “It’s more like you learn to love them, or a friend and family type of love.”
Where the hell was the waitress? “I don’t think this sounds right for me.”
Vanessa held up her hands in surrender. “Fine. I’m just trying to help. You could just try it and see what happens.”
Another flash of red, and I instantly drew my gaze to the source. Please be the waitress. Anything to end this conversation.
Not the waitress. Not even close.
I could do nothing but stare at the woman across from me.
She was beautiful, every last bit as lovely as the night I’d pulled her out of the burning house. Only now, no ash covered her cheeks. Every strand of her flawless blonde hair fell into place like perfection. She was wholly put together, all vulnerability gone, and that blazing, fiery temper apparent in every step she took. And yet, I still could not decide which image I liked better.
The sudden spike in my pulse reminded me how much I wanted this woman. The woman who was now only a few yards away from me. She entered the building beside ours. A pastry shop. I could hop over there, ask her a few questions, then be back to pay the bill.
“So, I’ll set you up for Monday,” Vanessa said, though I had no idea what she was talking about.
“Yea. That’s fine. Here.” I dove into my pocket and withdrew my credit card. “Give the waitress this and sign it for me. I’ll be right back.”
“Wait, what?”
And it had everything to do with making a bad decision with a woman that was all sorts of wrong for me.
Chapter Five
Lyndsey
You are a queen.
You are a goddess.
There is no way this nightmare of events is going to get you down.
I had chanted those words to myself for the past fifteen minutes. They weren’t helping. I still felt like my whole life was spiraling out of control. Nothing I could say or do mattered anymore. I was stuck here in this town because of the house. I was stuck, unable to do anything to save the house because my parents thought their cruel play at tough love was exactly what I needed at this moment.
I could just leave. Put the house up on the market, charred bits and all, and just leave.
With what money? I had just enough to get me through the next week. It was enough for a plane ticket back to Berkeley, some food, and the rest of the month’s utilities. But I would be back in the same situation as before.
No job, no future endeavors, and now, no inheritance to fall back on.
I needed to take this job. I needed to be amazing at it! Who knew what my cousins would do with me there? My parents hadn’t even broken the news to them yet.
“We’ll just show up and surprise them,” Mama had said. “It’ll be easier that way.”
Easier for who? My parents weren’t the ones who were going to be stuck with my cousins for ninety days. Every day ingesting their scowls and jabs at me with a smile and pretending I hadn’t just lost the most important person in my life.
How could everything just go back to normal, business as usual? How could they expect me to pretend like I wasn’t still hurting?
I sighed. There had to be another way out of this.
“Contemplating the many mysteries of life?” a voice asked from behind me.
It sounded vaguely familiar, though I couldn’t quite place it at first. The instant reaction my body had to it, though, was unmistakable. I turned around and stared up into the deep, blue eyes of the firefighter from two nights ago.
