His First Choice

by Tara Taylor Quinn

  “She mouthed off when he accused her,” he clarified. She’d specifically said she’d been a bit tactless when the elderly investor had first accused her. Tressa wasn’t one to admit to wrongdoing. So when she did, he knew she was telling him the truth.

  “That’s when she called him an asshole.”

  Obviously the “tactless” reference. Oh, hell. Tressa, will you ever learn to hold your damned tongue inside your mouth?

  She wasn’t anything like her parents; he’d give her that. And couldn’t imagine what it had been like growing up with them constantly berating her, withholding love on a regular basis.

  But how much did she have to lose before she realized that people did not tolerate the verbal lashes that seemed perfectly normal to her?

  Lord knew he’d tried to tell her. She thought he was the one who didn’t get it. Until she was in trouble. Then she came running to him.

  And so he came out to play golf. Or find some other way to chew on her crow.

  “Okay, look, Mick, she made a mistake. She was pretty shaken up, a banker being accused of theft. She said the conversation took place where other customers could have heard him.”

  Tressa thought she had a case for slander. Jem didn’t agree. He just needed her to be able to keep her job. He made good money, but he wasn’t going to support Tressa forever. They were divorced. She had to learn to take care of herself.

  But still, she was the mother of his child, and a woman with a good heart.

  “And other than this one incident, she’s been good for the bank,” he continued. “She tells me your accounts have grown a third in the year and a half she’s been there.”

  “She’s good at helping people see how to get their money to work for them.”

  “Right.” At least she had given that to him straight. “They benefit and so do you. Everyone wins. Which is a hell of a lot better than having a salesperson who can convince people to do anything, but then later have it not be good for them.”

  That kind of thinking backfired eventually, as Mick knew—and knew that Jem knew, too. Tressa had come into a branch that was on the verge of closure due, in part, to the previous manager’s smooth tongue and inability to deliver the low interest rates and other terms he’d promised in order to close loans. After homes and cars had been purchased, sometimes even after a client was driving a new car, he’d call the client back with the bad news. If they wanted to keep the car, or have the house actually close, they’d have to agree to higher terms. Most often they did. But the bank had acquired enough of a clan of unhappy customers to do it measurable harm.

  “Look, I appreciate what you did, Jem, delivering Tressa up to me at a time when I had no ready answer of my own. You hooking me up with her, that was decent. But I can’t...”

  “Let me talk to her,” Jem interrupted before the man said something that would be difficult for him to take back. Mick had hired Tressa on Jem’s word because Jem’s company had built the half-million-dollar addition to the man’s Beverly Hills home. He had to hope that his word would be good enough a second time. “I’ll have her apologize, in writing, to the customer. And I’ll make sure she understands that the customer comes first and she has to treat every one of them with respect. Even when they’re rude.”

  The man looked at him, his eyebrows drawn together against the bright sun. “You sure you aren’t making promises you can’t keep?”

  Tressa might be unhappy at work, but she wasn’t stupid. Her alimony was up in the next month. And deep down, Tressa knew she didn’t have a slander case. She’d have to actually prove that someone else had overheard what the elderly customer had said, and then prove that the statement had somehow damaged her or the bank. She didn’t have a case.

  As Amelia, her soul mate, and also a lawyer, had no doubt already told her.

  “I’m sure. Just let me talk to her. You’ll have something in writing before Monday.”

  Jem shot and made it to the green.

  Not saying a word, Mick made the par three in two, watched while Jem made it in four and led the way to the next tee.

  He never did actually agree to keep Tressa on, but Jem knew he’d won his ex-wife another chance. He just wished Tressa didn’t put him in positions where he had to hang his own reputation on her. Most particularly when it came to people he liked and respected.

  He’d stuck his neck out for her, getting her this bank job after she’d walked out on the investment firm because an account she’d believed should have been hers had been given to someone else. The least she could do was see that his head didn’t get cut off.

  * * *

  LACEY WENT HOME to San Diego for the Memorial Day holiday. She’d had fantasies about getting out of the traditional family barbecue at the beach cottage her parents had purchased when the twins were little. But in the end she’d gone. As she always did.

  As she’d also known would be, Kacey’s latest handsome guy was there, doting on her—as her sister certainly deserved. Kacey was beautiful, inside and out. More inside than out—which, looking at her, was hard to believe.

  The guy this time, Dean Bates, didn’t deserve Kacey, though. They never did. Kacey was so sweet and had such a selection lined up out her door, that she never had a chance to find a real guy. One who’d love her even if she wasn’t Kacey Hamilton. The Kacey Hamilton. Of The Rich and Loyal.

  Not that Kacey resembled her on-air heiress soap-opera character, Doria Endlin, all that much without the short blond wig and stage makeup.

  Scrubbing at dishes they’d all left in the sink when they’d come in from a bonfire on the beach the night before, Lacey worried about her twin. Kacey was getting a little hard around the edges—with some brittleness seeping into her laugh.

  “I was planning to help with that.” Recognizing the voice almost as though it had come from inside her own head, Lacey glanced over her shoulder to see the subject of her thoughts grabbing a dish towel off the oven door handle and coming toward her.

  “I was awake,” Lacey said. “I’ve got to get back up north. I’ve got an appointment this afternoon.” Truth be known, she’d planned to leave the night before, but when her sister had asked her to stay for the bonfire, she’d had a beer and sealed her fate for the night.

  “Can’t you just take one more day?” Kacey asked. If she’d been pouty, or whiny, Lacey wouldn’t have had as hard a time answering.

  She shook her head. She could make a phone call. Her only appointment that day, the Tuesday after Memorial Day, was with a potential new service to clean the rented office used by Santa Raquel social services. They’d been given the governmental all clear to switch services, and Lacey had been elected spokesperson for the department on the project.

  “We’ve hardly had a chance to talk all weekend.”

  She finished with the small sauce dishes she’d washed first because they fit in the bottom of the drain board and she could stack other dishes on top of them. “What about Dean?” He’d been glued to her sister’s side and was mainly the reason they’d had no time to talk.

  “He left last night,” Kacey said. “After everyone went to bed.”

  Lacey didn’t just hear the things her sister wasn’t saying. She felt them. Physically. In her gut.

  Picking up a dish to dry before Lacey could put another on top of it, Kacey rubbed thoroughly.

  Their father, a truck driver who’d had his own fleet of trucks by the time the girls were ten, had never put a dishwasher in at the cottage.

  She might not have liked Dean, but... “I’m sorry.” Because she knew Kacey was.

  “Can’t you stay, Lacey? Just one more day? We can go up to my place and you’d already be partway home.”

  Kacey owned a condo in Beverly Hills, the kind with a doorman and a half-acre all-adult pool with mountain views.

  Lacey washed t
he watermelon bowl and the pot with baked beans caked on. Thank goodness they’d used paper plates.

  “Even half a day,” Kacey said, keeping right up with her drying duties. “We could leave within the hour and be at my place in time for a mimosa on the balcony.”

  Mention of alcohol on a Tuesday morning bothered her a bit. But then, Kacey was still in holiday mode.

  Looking at her sister, who was wearing no makeup and whose long blond hair was falling straight and loose, Lacey could have been looking at herself in the mirror. The experience would have been disconcerting if she hadn’t had it her entire life.

  “I’ll make some calls,” she said against her selfish wishes. She just needed to get home, back to her own space and the life she’d made for herself. The life she was happy with.

  But when she felt Kacey’s smile as well as saw it, when she sensed how much peace her capitulation brought her sister, who’d have done the same for her, she was glad she’d made the choice she’d made.

  * * *

  THEY HAD TEA instead of champagne and orange juice—partially because Kacey didn’t have any champagne—leaving Lacey to wonder if her sister was drinking so much she’d forgotten that she’d finished off what she had, or wasn’t drinking enough to know that at some point she’d opened the bottle she’d thought she’d saved.

  As she put ice in their tea glasses, she didn’t ask. Because she didn’t want to know the answer.

  But as soon as they were settled, bare feet up on the wrought-iron bars around Kacey’s spacious covered sixteenth-floor patio, Lacey said, “I’m worried about you.”

  “I’m fine.”

  She wasn’t.

  “You drank twice as much this weekend as you normally do.”

  “I was thirsty.”

  Didn’t assuage her concerns at all.

  She could tell by the way Kacey watched the hills in the distance that her sister was avoiding her unspoken question and her heart sank. Because she also knew that Kacey wouldn’t have asked her to stay if she didn’t need her help.

  “Is it a problem, Kace? Or are we still just at the warning stage?”

  They’d talked about this before. Once. Right after Kacey’s third broken engagement. Her sister had it all. Got it all. And sometimes all just wasn’t enough. Because it wasn’t what mattered.

  Kacey’s shrug out and out scared her.

  “You drinking every night?”

  “Maybe.”

  “A lot?”

  “Not always.”

  “For how long?”

  Kacey turned to her then, her blue eyes filled with pain. “Not long, Lace, I swear. I just... I love my job, but my character, she’s not real. I know that. I don’t even want her to be. I’d hate to live like she does. But everyone I know, everyone I meet, they all think I’m her and...”

  Lacey had been thrilled when the offer had come in for Kacey to join The Rich and Loyal cast the year before. Until then she’d been making a very healthy living as a print and commercial model. But if she was smart with her money, the move to daytime television could secure her future for the rest of her life.

  But she’d also been worried when the offer had come in. Because at heart, Kacey wasn’t all that different from Lacey.

  Other than that, where Lacey just filled the space her body took up, Kacey exuded all over every room she walked into.

  “How much longer does your break last?” she asked now. The R and L cast was on summer break. She’d known that, but had just figured Kacey would be doing promos during the time off as she’d planned. She hadn’t known until this weekend that her sister had turned down offers so she could spend her summer traveling with Dean, who’d yet to produce even a glimpse of the private jet he’d told her he owned. And, she was guessing, wasn’t going to be around at all after the previous night’s hasty departure.

  “Another month.”

  “You want to come to Santa Raquel?” She didn’t usually ask. Actually, she never did, as was evidenced by Kacey’s open mouth as she turned to look at her.

  “You’re serious.”

  She nodded.

  “But...”

  Lacey had made a big deal about needing her own space. A big deal.

  “You’re the world to me, Kace.” She’d rather live every moment of the rest of her life in Kacey’s shadow if it meant keeping her sister healthy. And alive.

  “I promise not to look at or talk to anyone,” Kacey said.

  She was serious, and Lacey felt sick. Physically, like she had a ball of warm, mushy clay in her stomach.

  “I made a mistake, Kace.” She prayed her sister was emotionally open enough to read her. “Those things I said, I was blowing off steam...”

  “You were right.”

  “But it’s not your fault. You don’t do anything to attract people. They just gravitate to you.”

  “I’d give anything to send them your way. Well, not the Deans. But the good ones...”

  For some bizarre reason a vision of Jem Bridges popped into her mind. “It’s really okay,” she said. “I’ve been on my own for more than a year.” Since she’d moved out of the condo she was sitting in and transferred to the Santa Raquel branch of California state social services. “And I’m over all that.” At least in any way that mattered.

  “You aren’t just saying this? You really want me to come up?”

  How could her sister have been hurting this much over the talk they’d had when Lacey had told her she was moving out, and Lacey hadn’t known?

  “Look me in the eye,” Lacey said now. And when Kacey’s gaze was glued to hers, she leaned in closer. “Feel me, Kace.”

  Kacey nodded.

  “Now you tell me. Do I want you to come up and stay with me?”

  The tears that filled Kacey’s eyes hurt Lacey’s heart. And she was ashamed of herself for having caused her sister so much pain.

  CHAPTER TEN

  JEM HATED HOW much Lacey Hamilton’s brief intrusion into their lives had affected them. If the vulnerable look on Tressa’s face when he’d picked Levi up from Amelia’s little beach house on Monday afternoon hadn’t been enough, the fist clenching his own gut as he dropped Levi off at day care on Tuesday would have done it.

  But he’d already been disturbed by Lacey’s effect on him.

  Fantasies of the woman had followed him all over his boat as he’d spent the weekend alone in his garage, building his dream, with a couple of jaunts out to celebrate the holiday.

  Dillon, his most trusted foreman and college buddy who’d dropped out to marry his pregnant girlfriend, had had him over on Saturday night for a barbecue with him and his family. On Monday he’d met a group of the guys at a local bar for a couple of brews.

  Still, if it hadn’t been for the social worker hanging around in the back of his mind all the time, he wouldn’t have worried at all when he had to leave his son in safekeeping so he could get to work on time Tuesday.

  Levi had been a little weepier than usual.

  Weepy. A girlie term. Which didn’t describe his son at all. But the little guy hadn’t been whiny, and he really hadn’t cried all that much, either.

  He’d just almost cried over things that normally didn’t bother him. Like being told that he had to go to day care when he’d wanted to spend the day with Jem.

  And finding out that they were out of peanut butter and he’d have to have his toast with just jelly that morning.

  The woman had said their file was still open, but with no active investigation. But what if she heard that Levi showed up at school out of sorts?

  He knew why Levi was upset. And he kind of blamed Lacey Hamilton for that, too. When he was feeling particularly sour. Mostly he knew the woman had just been doing her job. That she’d invaded their lives out of
true concern for Levi. And that she’d done exactly as he’d have wanted her to do, as he’d have done, if Levi were really in any kind of danger.

  But didn’t she see that her descending on them as she had had affected all of them?

  Levi had had a nightmare Sunday night. According to Tressa, he’d been screaming for Jem. Because he’d dreamed that someone had come and taken him away from his father.

  Which didn’t totally make sense. He’d never given Levi even a hint about why Ms. Hamilton had been so briefly in their lives.

  Unless... Had she?

  “Tell me again about your dream...car,” he said as they pulled into the day care. He’d promised himself he wouldn’t bring up the nightmare unless Levi did. He didn’t want to make it more than it was. The four-year-old had slept just fine the previous night at home in his own bed.

  Jem knew because he hadn’t slept much. And when he had, it had been with the nursery monitor on the pillow beside him.

  “It’s that one with spoilers on it that I already told you about.” Levi sounded more sad than cantankerous.

  Jem preferred cantankerous. That he knew how to deal with.

  “You going to be okay at school today?” he asked.

  “I wanna go to work with you.”

  “I know, but you can’t. I’m on-site all day today, a smaller job without a trailer for you to stay in.” Electric had been laid at a million-dollar house he’d been commissioned to build and the inspectors were coming out. “So you going to be okay in here?” He’d yet to shut off the car.

  Looking from Jem to the school, Levi unfastened the belt on his car seat. “Can we be at the beach tonight?”

  “Yep.” And have chocolate for dinner, too, if it will bring the smile back to your face.

  “Okay.” It was a disgruntled sound, but Jem took it. He hoped that they were on their way past this most recent crisis.