Cherish Hard (Hard Play #1)

by Nalini Singh

  He’d have his redhead in his arms again tonight.

  He was planning the next step in his plan to convince her to be his when his phone rang. His gut clenched at seeing his loan manager’s name on the screen. Having just finished up the school project so he could focus fully on Fast Organic, he was still in his truck in the school parking lot.

  “Jenni,” he said, one hand braced on the steering wheel and his eyes looking through the windshield at the sun-golden school grounds. “I wasn’t expecting a call until after the new year.”

  “I’m working between the public holidays, taking my break later, and I wanted to get back to you as fast as possible.”

  “Good news or bad?” He and the loan officer had a friendly relationship—Sailor had already taken out and paid back a couple of smaller loans.

  This one, however, would be a much bigger risk for the bank.

  “Good and bad,” Jenni replied in a tone as no-nonsense as her steel-gray bob. “The good is that the bank will give you the loan.”

  Sailor didn’t start celebrating. “I’m waiting for the bad.”

  “You’re going to need someone to cosign. You just don’t have the assets to borrow against. Not at this amount.”

  Sailor’s hand clenched on the steering wheel. “Thanks for trying anyway.” He knew Jenni had gone to bat for him with the higher-ups.

  “What?” Jenni’s tone rose. “Sailor, this isn’t a big deal. Your folks cosigned that first loan when you were eighteen.”

  Even then, it had been difficult for Sailor to accept any help. He’d done so only because he’d seen how much his parents wanted to be a part of his journey. But he wasn’t eighteen anymore, and the need inside him to achieve this through his own hard work, it had become a second heartbeat that pounded day and night.

  “Some things,” he said to Jenni, “a man has to do on his own.”

  Jenni was made of stern stuff, didn’t give up. “What about your brother?”

  “Gabe would do it in a heartbeat,” Sailor told her because it was true—and because he didn’t want anyone thinking badly of his brother. “This is my call.”

  Gabriel had forged his own path, broken the chains of the past.

  His brother’s determination was legendary—Sailor had spent endless weekends running drills with Gabe, even more evenings going for runs with his brother, had watched game after game while Gabe analyzed plays.

  Sailor felt the same way about his business. And Gabe had done for him what he’d done for Gabe. Over the years, his brother had dug countless gardens, helped unload trucks of seedlings, hauled bags of soil and fertilizer around, kept Sailor company on the drive out to the nursery he rented some distance away.

  But money was a different matter.

  Sailor wasn’t going to ask his brother to subsidize his dream in any form or shape. That would destroy the dream. Sailor needed to do this without expecting the people he loved to pay for what he wanted. That was the whole fucking point. To not be a taker. A user.

  To give back to the people who loved him.

  “You sure, Sailor?” Jenni asked.

  “Yeah. How big a loan can I get on my own?”

  It proved to be a far smaller amount, but it was better than nothing.

  After setting up a meeting with Jenni to go over the paperwork, he just sat in his truck for long minutes, staring out at the late-afternoon sunshine. The brightness seemed to mock the shadows threatening to swallow his dream.

  Without the money, he couldn’t implement the next step of his plan. And if he didn’t implement it within the next year, then it was inevitable that someone else would step in and fill the gap in the market. This would only work if Sailor stayed ahead of the competition.

  For that, he needed cold, hard cash.

  “No,” he said with a scowl. “It’s just a hurdle. You’ve jumped hurdles before.”

  Ten minutes of doing the mental math and he realized he could make enough money to launch exactly when he’d always planned to launch. But he’d have to work from dawn to dusk, seven days a week. Holidays included.

  Sailor tapped his finger on the wheel. Working hard wasn’t an issue. Neither was finding enough work to fill those hours. Yes, big corporate jobs made it easier, but multiple residential jobs would do as well—and he had enough experience at this to know where to advertise to find clients.

  As for his family, his brothers didn’t mind hanging out with him on the job, so he’d see them often. He could shoehorn in time to watch a few of Jake’s and Danny’s games, while Gabe would understand Sailor’s obsession with his dream. And he still had to eat, so he could drop by for dinner now and then to keep his folks happy.

  What was at issue was his redhead.

  Ísa deserved to be cherished and treated like a priority in his life. By working as many hours as he needed to work, Sailor would inevitably be shoving her to the sidelines when he hadn’t yet earned the right to ask for her patience, when he hadn’t yet shown her that she could trust him to only do this for a year. Not only that, he’d be expecting her to fit her life around his.

  His jaw clenched. If he did that, he was no fucking better than her parents.

  And he risked losing her.

  But if he didn’t do what he needed to do, he risked losing his self-respect, risked becoming the kind of man he’d always despised. A man who gave up when the going got hard. A man who just fucking quit.

  32

  The Family Christmas Fiasco & a Love Muffin

  ÍSA WORKED TILL EIGHT THAT night without a break, not just handling the usual duties of a VP but also going over the information she’d collected about the people who’d been in and out of Jacqueline’s office. She had to admit she had a favorite suspect, but she knew it was based on nothing but her personal bias against slimy swamp creatures. Just because she disliked Trevor didn’t mean her stepbrother—yeah, no, that description was never going to fly with her—was a louse who’d leak information to the media. Not when he wanted to be in Jacqueline’s good books.

  On the flip side, Ísa couldn’t ignore that he’d been in and out of the company—and Jacqueline’s office—far more often than explicable for a man who had absolutely nothing to do with the business. Unless you factored in his campaign to convince Jacqueline to give him an executive position at Crafty Corners.

  Which could put Trevor the Creeper in the clear.

  “Argh!” Ísa threw down her pen and gave up—for tonight at least—and decided she needed to get some food into her. Normally she’d have hit Nayna up for a dinner date, but today she found herself thinking first of Sailor.

  Her thighs pressed together, butterflies flittering in her stomach as a goofy smile lit up her face at the thought of seeing him again. She’d missed him over the past few days, had kept on wanting to whisper asides to him during the Christmas Eve dinner in her apartment.

  Like when her father, having flown in for a couple of days, had put his arm around Elizabeth Anne Victoria and quite seriously declared they were soul mates.

  At which point, Jacqueline had shaken her head and said—in Icelandic—“Stefán, you’re a handsome man, but if you’re not careful, you’re going to turn into a caricature of a lecherous old man. Your ‘soul mate’ is an infant.”

  While the sweet but sadly vacuous Elizabeth Anne Victoria giggled and said how “amazing” it was that her “love muffin” spoke so many languages, Ísa’s father had replied to Jacqueline, also in Icelandic. “She doesn’t try to take over my corporations. I consider that a wonderful trait in a wife.”

  “That’s because she doesn’t know a balance sheet from a bedsheet.”

  Ísa had cut off that line of talk before it degenerated any further, but dinner had been interesting to say the least. Even being friends was a complicated matter for Jacqueline and Stefán. Poor Elizabeth Anne Victoria and poor Oliver, both of them with their own personal barracuda they had not a hope in hell of controlling.

  Without Ísa, it would’ve been
a bloodbath—after which Jacqueline and Stefán would’ve shared a toast and wondered what the fuss was about. As it was, Ísa had made sure no blood was spilled and even her combative parents had appeared to relax under the influence of good wine and food.

  Catie and Harlow had had a grand old time talking with their eyes and fighting not to crack up while mouthing “love muffin” when Stefán wasn’t looking, while Oliver had appeared sweetly befuddled until Jacqueline pressed a kiss to his cheek. Then he’d glowed—and Jacqueline had tugged him up into a slow dance in time to “Silent Night.”

  As for Trevor, he’d thankfully been nowhere in evidence, this being the year he spent the holidays with his mother’s side of the family. Which Ísa had known when she’d made the dinner plans. She hadn’t been born yesterday. And she did not intend to have Trevor creeping about in her apartment. Ever.

  She couldn’t wait to tell Sailor everything, laugh with him over her insane family, and hear about his Christmas in turn, her goofy smile getting wider by the second.

  Telling herself to act like an adult, she texted Nayna to ask about the Raj situation. It turned out his family had been invited to the same big fat wedding as Nayna’s family—and he’d had the nerve to come sit right next to Nayna, causing every eyebrow in the place to rise into the owner’s hairline.

  Single, unattached men did not sit next to single, unattached women unless there was “something going on.”

  And even though Nayna had kicked him under the table and hissed under her breath for him to go away, he’d kept on bringing her chai from the buffet, putting extra sweets onto her plate, and all around acting like a besotted suitor.

  “Then he leaves an hour before everyone else and drops me in it.” Nayna had fumed down the phone line yesterday afternoon. “My parents were beaming, the aunties were agog with questions, and I wanted to brain him. It was his revenge for my ‘just want you for your body’ moment, I’m sure of it.”

  Ísa had fought not to laugh—the more she heard about Raj, the more she liked him. Nayna needed a man who’d play with her, tease her, cause her shields to fall. As Sailor did with Ísa. Yes, it was dangerous and would hurt a hell of a lot when it ended, but that was a future Ísa was studiously ignoring.

  Has he got back in touch? she messaged Nayna.

  The evil fiend keeps sending me pictures of his abs and arms and all-around spectacular body. I’m weak. I save the photos.

  Laughing, Ísa picked up the phone and called her friend. The resulting chat was hysterical and illuminating: Nayna, it seemed, was falling for Raj despite herself. Maybe as hard as Ísa had fallen for Sailor.

  Even hungrier by the time she and Nayna finished their call, Ísa went and grabbed some Chinese takeout, then headed to the first Fast Organic site. Sailor had messaged her to say he’d be working there till full dark, and the summer light was only just beginning to fade by the time she arrived.

  His truck was the only one in the lot. Or, she should say, his truck was the only one outside of what had once been the lot. It had been completely dug up, the concrete hauled away.

  Ísa was astonished at the speed of it all.

  Making her way gingerly through the work site, she noticed the warnings about health and safety and did her best to stay uninjured. The last thing she needed was for the company to be hit with a safety violation because she’d fallen on her face.

  “Sailor,” she called out, “where are you?”

  “Ísa?” Sailor’s face appeared from around the corner of the building.

  Scowling when he saw her trying to make her way through the churned-up dirt where the parking lot had once been, he took off his gloves, then walked over in his heavy work boots. He’d lifted her up and was carrying her and the takeout beyond the danger zone before she’d realized what he intended to do.

  Then he leaned in and kissed her in voracious welcome, one rough-skinned hand cupping her cheek. She felt deliciously devoured. It was as if he’d been waiting to kiss her all day, as if she was a drug and he was an addict.

  Ísa decided she was quite happy to be Sailor’s personal drug habit.

  Only breaking the kiss when they were both breathless, he said, “You’re a sight for sore eyes, spitfire.” A long inhale. “And is that Chinese I smell?”

  Toes still curled and cheeks flushed, Ísa pushed the take-out bag at his chest. “Men only want me for the food I bring.”

  “Oh, I have other priorities.” He ran his hand down her back and to her rear, squeezing with open appreciation.

  “Stop that,” Devil Ísa ordered. “That’s dessert.”

  He groaned. “You drive me fucking crazy, Ísalind. And I missed you bad.”

  “I missed you too,” Ísa said, not about to play games with him.

  He responded with one of those silly, sweet nose kisses that made her stomach drop, before he took her hand and walked her around the side of the building.

  Her eyes widened. “Wow, how did you manage all this on your own?” The kitchen garden was marked out by a temporary border, the soil all in place.

  “I could pretend to be Superman,” he said, “or I could admit that I asked my brothers and Raj to pitch in. All four of them turned up today. My dad would have too, except that he and my mom drove back to Waikato to see my dad’s parents—my grandfather twisted his ankle last night.”

  Maybe that explained the tension Ísa had glimpsed in his gaze when he’d first come around the corner. “Is it a bad injury?”

  “No. I think my folks just used it as an excuse to go spend some more time with them.” An affectionate smile. “They’re hoping to talk my grandparents into moving to Auckland, but I don’t know if it’ll happen—those two love the Waikato area.”

  Sitting her down on an upturned wooden box that looked to have once held some kind of gardening supplies, Sailor took a seat on a neighboring box. Hooking a third box with his foot and dragging it over, he laid the bag of takeout between them.

  Wondering if it was just the stress of work that she’d read on his face, Ísa began to set out the food. “How was your Christmas?”

  “Usual mayhem,” he said with a grin. “Danny managed to get hold of a bottle of red wine while no one was looking and decided to see what the fuss was about.” He laughed. “Let’s just say he won’t be going near alcohol again for a while. How was yours?”

  When Ísa told him, he laughed so hard that he almost fell off his seat. “Am I your love muffin?” he asked with a grin.

  Heart skipping a beat, Ísa replied in the same light vein. “I prefer snookums.” She began to open up the takeout to the sound of his renewed laughter, her own lips tugging up. Being with him just made her so painfully happy. “Are you close to your grandparents?”

  “Yep. When I was a kid, I used to spend weeks at a time running wild on their farm back before they downsized.” Accepting the box of fried rice she held out, he said, “You? Close to any grandparents?”

  Grief stabbed Ísa’s heart. “My paternal grandmother,” she said softly. “I lived with her for five years in Iceland, starting at age eight. I loved her more than I’d ever before loved anyone.” The best thing was that her grandmother had loved her back just as much. “She was warm and soft, and she rocked me if I had a nightmare.”

  Running the back of his hand over her cheek, his gaze dark, Sailor said, “She’s gone?”

  “A month after I turned thirteen.” A month after a birthday picnic her grandmother had helped Ísa put together for her friends. “That’s when my father brought me back to New Zealand and told Jacqueline it was her turn to take responsibility for me.”

  “That’s a hard age to adapt to a country you last saw as a child.”

  Ísa made a face. “Especially when you have a ‘funny’ accent and weigh more than average.” Shrugging off the old memories, she said, “I’m trying to give Catie and Harlow the kind of love Amma Kaja gave me.”

  “You’re succeeding,” Sailor said without even a heartbeat of hesitation.
<
br />   Something warm and fuzzy burst to life in inside Ísa’s heart.

  “Try this.” Sailor held out a spring roll.

  Leaning in, Ísa took a bite. He popped the other half into his own mouth. The small intimacy of the moment caught her breath. What would it be like to have this with him every night? These simple, sweet moments of connection as they grew together into the future?

  33

  The Gauzy Tragedy Gown

  IT WAS DIFFICULT NOT TO clutch at the dream. Because despite how hard she intended to fight to make it work, the risk that it would all fall apart remained perilously high. It was a bad risk all around—no woman with a killer instinct and business-black blood would ever pour more resources into the campaign.

  Unfortunately for her future self, Ísa was a romantic who was probably destined to produce her own personal Shakespearean tragedy, complete with a bloodied and broken heart and shattered dreams. Though she drew the line at wearing a flower crown and running through the streets in a diaphanous gown while rambling madly.

  “A woman has to have certain standards,” she murmured.

  Sailor paused in the act of eating another spring roll. “I think they’re pretty good,” he defended. “Crunchy on the outside, delicious on the inside.”

  “What? Oh.” Ísa’s shoulders trembled, her smile cutting into her cheeks. “No, I just had an idea for a poem.” She raised her hand to her mouth after the words escaped. “Forget you heard that.”

  Demon-blue eyes gleamed. “Not a chance, spitfire.” Spring roll demolished, he tugged her fingers away from her mouth. “You write poetry?”

  Blowing out a breath, Ísa nodded. “Finding just the right combination of words to get across a thought or an idea within the tiny, perfect form of poetry, it makes me happy.” It was that simple. “I’m not hoping to be the next poet laureate or anything. It’s a… passionate hobby.”