Homecoming: The Billionaire Brothers

by Lily Everett

  “You stood up for me. You told Trent to shut his mouth before you shut it for him. And you helped me clean up the glass.”

  “I helped you.” Everything inside Dylan thrilled toward her, and what she offered him—the chance to be a better man, because Penny believed in him.

  She nodded, tugging him closer, and Dylan followed her down to the mattress eagerly. “You could help me more, if you wanted,” she murmured, the words soft and hot against his cheek.

  “Anything,” he promised roughly, entranced by the delicate shape of her shoulder blades beneath his palms as he cradled her.

  “Help me forget the past,” Penny said, arching up to him in a fluid curve that nearly blew the top of Dylan’s head off. “Help me live in this moment, right here, right now.”

  She was like a flame, in constant searing motion, and Dylan fell into her without hesitation. Taking her lips in a deep, hungry kiss, he filled his head with her scent, her sounds, the feel of her kicking the thin sheets to the foot of the bed and bringing their lower bodies into heartbreakingly perfect alignment.

  Two kisses weren’t enough to get Dylan used to the idea that he was allowed to touch Penny, to press himself against the lush, welcoming softness of her curvy little body and sink into her.

  The fact that she was trembling too made him feel better—he wasn’t in this alone, overwhelmed and overloaded. Penny was right there with him, pushing hard into his arms and snuggling her face into the bend of his neck, where she fit perfectly.

  There was an astonishing innocence to Penny, despite what she’d been through. She made Dylan remember what it was like to be young and eager, too inexperienced to realize that every woman who hopped into bed with him had visions of dollar signs and diamonds dancing in her head.

  “You make me feel like I’m not any older than Matt,” Dylan growled, nipping sharp little kisses along the line of her jaw. “Desperate for it, and having a tough time believing I’m about to get it … oh no. Matt.”

  “Don’t worry about him. He’s a teenager—he could sleep through a volcanic eruption.” Penny tilted her chin back, baring her throat in a clear request for more biting, sucking kisses. Dylan was happy to oblige.

  “I’ll show you a volcanic eruption,” Dylan muttered, just to make her laugh. The sight of her, head thrown back and smiling mouth open on a sigh, fed some hunger deep inside just as surely as the greedy clutch of her thighs around his hips fed his physical desire.

  But even in the midst of the most passionate, intimate lovemaking Dylan had ever known, even as both of them clung to the present moment and immersed themselves in it and in each other, Dylan felt the future barreling down on him.

  Penny had opened herself to him completely. He couldn’t keep lying to her.

  She’d made him believe he could be a better man. The kind of man who would tell her the truth … and once he did, Dylan knew he would lose her.

  No second chances.

  Chapter Nine

  Penny blinked her eyes open with a start of disoriented wonder. Watery morning light filtered through the lace curtains, and she should be shivering under the thin cotton sheet, but instead it was approximately four million degrees in her bed.

  A slow, luxurious stretch revealed the culprit behind the humid heat, and the twinge in certain seldom-used muscles.

  Dylan Workman. The tall, muscled handyman who had—wow, really lived up to the hype about being good with his hands.

  One of those broad-palmed, blunt-fingered hands was still cupped around her hip, as if he hadn’t wanted to let go even in sleep, and Penny closed her eyes to enjoy the way her heart fluttered.

  With a sharp intake of breath, Dylan stirred awake beside her. “Time’s it?”

  Penny glanced at the antique silver alarm clock next to the bed. “Nine fifteen. We should get up, Matt will be awake soon. And I need to get ready for the lunch shift at the Firefly.”

  Dylan shifted, but only to sling a leg over Penny’s bare calves and trap her more thoroughly on the mattress. “Not yet. Plenty of time.”

  Humming with pleasure, Penny relished the sticky slide of their naked skin, the crispness of Dylan’s chest hair and the combined scents of their clean sweat and satisfying lovemaking. “We don’t have plenty of time. But I’m not ready to get up yet, either.”

  A sweet, comfortable silence descended over the room, broken only by the dip and sway of the trees in the light breeze and the bright chirping of birds. Here in the heart of downtown Sanctuary, they were at least half a mile from the beach, but if Penny closed her eyes she pretended she could almost make out the sound of the waves lapping at the shore.

  “This island,” Dylan said, hushed and almost reverent. “It’s not like any place I’ve ever been—and I’ve been all over the world.”

  Penny frowned a little. How did a handyman have money for international travel? But he’d probably backpacked across Europe or ridden that motorcycle of his across Asia or something. “Sanctuary Island is special,” she agreed. “I’ve loved it ever since we moved here. I knew right away that it was the place to make our new start.”

  “The rest of the world isn’t like this.” He sounded almost angry, voice harsh and clipped.

  “What do you mean?” Penny asked.

  “Happy and peaceful all the time.” Dylan’s hand tightened on her hip.

  Forcing herself to relax, Penny breathed deep. “Well, Dylan, I don’t know how to break it to you, but not everyone on Sanctuary Island is blissfully happy, every minute of their lives.”

  He snorted. “Could’ve fooled me.”

  Dylan had been consistently bewildered by the friendliness of the townspeople he’d met, from her best friend Greta Hackley offering discounts at the hardware store when she saw how much he was spending on getting Harrington House fixed up, to random people walking their dogs in the park by the town square. It was endearing, if a little sad that he was so unused to basic human kindness.

  But Penny had a larger point to make. “You talk a lot about how different we are here on Sanctuary, how much has changed for you since you got here—but Dylan, don’t you see? It’s the same for us, for Matthew and me. We were okay before, we were fine. But then you showed up, and you changed everything.”

  She could feel it when his heart picked up speed to slam against his rib cage. The whole bed shuddered with it.

  “Penny…” His hoarse voice and clutching hands made Penny sit up to get a better look at his face.

  All angular jaw and sexy scruff, his sky-blue eyes were piercing even in the soft morning sunlight. He looked lost. Chest clenching, Penny cupped his cheek in her hand and met his gaze with every ounce of calm and certainty she possessed.

  “I know you’re only here for a job, and that this is temporary—a moment out of your life. But I want you to understand what you mean to us.” Pressing her lips together briefly, she amended, “To me. You’re the only man in, well, years, who has made me feel brave enough to take a chance on opening up. And last night, you showed me how wonderful it can be to trust another person, with my heart and my body.”

  Penny wasn’t prepared for the shattered look that washed over Dylan’s tense face. “Penny,” he said helplessly, and she rushed to reassure him.

  “No, no—I’m not trying to put pressure on you about staying on the island. I know that’s not the deal, and don’t worry, you never gave me the wrong idea about that. You know that I don’t do this kind of thing all the time, so obviously there’s something special about you … and I don’t want you to leave here without knowing how I truly feel. Because you deserve to know that wherever you’re off to next, wherever life takes you, there are people here on Sanctuary Island who love you.”

  His eyes pinched shut as if she’d slid a steak knife between his ribs, his whole body jerking with the wound, and Penny’s heart shriveled in her chest.

  “You shouldn’t,” he said, the words harsh as gravel in a blender.

  This wasn’t going at all the way
she’d imagined.

  Dylan was so stoic—not much of a talker, more of a doer. But Penny saw beneath the cocky grin and the hard-clenched jaw. She saw a man with a past like a wound that kept breaking open, never healing right. She saw a man who understood what it meant to be lonely, and she’d wanted to give him something to take with him and keep him warm the next time he found himself all alone in the wide world.

  Instead, she seemed to have broken him.

  “Listen, Penny,” he began, voice hoarse and eyes shadowed.

  What was he going to say? Fear momentarily cut off the flow of oxygen to her brain—all she could do was sit there and stare at him, naked in her bed, with her grandmother’s quilt pooled around lean hips still imprinted with the shape of her clutching fingers.

  The sound of her cell phone blaring out Diana Ross’s “The Boss” cut him off. Scrambling for the phone buried under the clothes they’d shed earlier, Penny held it up with an undeniable sense of relief, even as she frowned apologetically.

  “Sorry, I have to take this. It’s Harrington family business, I’m always supposed to be on call. I wonder what they need.”

  *

  The tensing of every muscle in Dylan’s body was all the more painful after being so recently melted into a puddle of happy goo.

  Penny loved him. Or, more accurately, she loved Dylan Workman, the Sanctuary Island version of Dylan—who was nothing like the man he’d been back in New York.

  He had to tell her. Now.

  Tuning back in to the one side of Penny’s call that he could hear, Dylan drummed impatient fingers on his raised knee and waited for her to be done.

  “Jessica, hi! No, it’s fine, I can talk.”

  Penny’s gaze lifted to his for a moment, her brow furrowing as she listened to Jessica Bell, his brother Logan’s assistant. “You are? That’s—well, that’s great! I’ll look forward to finally meeting you in person.”

  Horror crawled down Dylan’s spine. Crap. Jessica was coming here. He was about to be outed as part of the wealthy family who paid Penny’s salary.

  “Alrighty then,” Penny said, determinedly cheerful even though Dylan could read the panic in her white-knuckled grip on the phone. “When should we expect you?”

  The words were no sooner out of her mouth than the doorbell chimed its deep, mellow tones through the house.

  Dylan’s lungs seized. No. This couldn’t be happening.

  Beside him on the bed, Penny turned around, panicked eyes on Dylan. “Oh,” she said faintly. “I see.”

  The phone fell away from her ear.

  “The door,” Dylan said through numb lips.

  It wasn’t a question, but Penny nodded, still shell-shocked. The doorbell chimed again, insistently, and Dylan experienced a moment of intense irrational rage at himself for fixing the damn thing five days ago.

  The second bell catapulted Penny into action. She leapt off the bed and into her clothes, hair flying behind her like an unfurling flag. “Get dressed! Where are my socks? Who cares—I don’t need socks. I do need a bra, though, oh thank goodness…”

  Any chance Dylan had to tell Penny the truth was draining away like sands through an hourglass. He stood up and tried to catch her shoulders and make her stand still for a second, but it was like trying to catch a sunbeam. She slipped through his fingers, a constant whirl of frantic motion as she rushed over to the mirror and moaned at the sex-tousled state of her curls.

  “Penny, please,” he said, hating the desperation so naked in his voice, but unable to cover it up.

  She glanced at his reflection in the mirror, jaw working. “Put some clothes on, I’m begging you. Unless you want to meet my boss in your birthday suit.”

  “I will in a second, Penny, but first just let me—”

  The doorbell echoed through the house once more, making Penny squeak and rush for the door. “No time! I promise, we’ll talk later! I have to answer the door.”

  And with that, she was gone, taking with her most of Dylan’s hope for a way out of this mess he’d created.

  Unless …

  Jerking his pants up over his thighs and zipping them, Dylan dug through the pockets for his phone. Maybe, he thought crazily as searched, maybe he could text Jessica, explain the situation, get her to promise not to say anything …

  Except his phone wasn’t there.

  Dylan cursed fluently while tugging his shirt over his head. He snagged his boots and jammed his feet into them to pound down the stairs toward the last place he remembered having his cell phone, in the kitchen. If he could get to it in time, before Penny opened the door and welcomed Jessica Bell in—but he was too late.

  He skidded to a stop at the bottom of the staircase just as the heavy front door swung open. Over Penny’s head, Dylan made eye contact with Jessica first—her perfectly manicured auburn brows arched into an infinitesimal lift as she took in his disheveled appearance.

  But that wasn’t the worst of it.

  Behind Jessica stood her boss, Logan Harrington, pale and swaying in a rumpled three-thousand-dollar suit. Before Dylan could do more than plead with his eyes, Logan cocked his head and said roughly, “What the hell is my kid brother doing here?”

  Chapter Ten

  Penny kept her welcoming smile firmly in place, sure she must have heard wrong. Or Mr. Harrington was making a mistake—reading between the lines of Jessica’s unusually tense manner when she’d called, and the gray-faced, wild-haired, lanky man on the front porch, Penny was pretty sure this Mr. Logan Harrington was about a heartbeat away from exhausted collapse.

  “Y’all come on in, you must be tired from your trip. Just let me freshen up the master bedroom. Won’t take me but a second,” Penny said soothingly, darting a commiserating glance at the tall, svelte redhead whose voice Penny recognized from the phone as her liaison with the Harrington family.

  Jessica, who’d been frozen on the welcome mat since Mr. Harrington’s crazy question, unthawed and moved forward briskly. “Thank you very much, but that won’t be necessary. I took the liberty of accessing the house plans, and I saw that there’s a garden cottage behind the house. That will do perfectly well for Mr. Harrington.”

  Penny blinked. Accessed the house plans? Who did that? Well, apparently the perfect assistant did. Mind racing with the list of tasks she’d need to accomplish in order to get the cottage ready for occupants—Lord, she going to have to call in sick to the Firefly, there was just no way to be done before her shift—Penny turned to lead the two guests into the foyer. She stopped dead when she all but collided with Dylan.

  Standing at the foot of the stairs in an unbuttoned shirt with his jeans sagging low on his hips and his boots unlaced, Dylan stared at Mr. Harrington with his shoulders squared and his jaw set, as if he were bracing for a punch.

  As she glanced back and forth between the two men, her heart began to race.

  After a couple of weeks of working outside, Dylan’s skin was a healthy, burnished gold, unlike Mr. Harrington’s weary pallor. Dylan’s hair was cropped close to his skull while Mr. Harrington’s was long enough to stick up as if he’d been running his fingers through it. But both men had light brown hair, broad shoulders and muscular arms, although Mr. Harrington was built along slightly leaner lines. They both had sharp, angular cheekbones and jaws.

  But what really sent Penny’s heart leaping into her throat was the realization that hidden under the heavy lids and deep purple shadows wrought by exhaustion, Mr. Logan Harrington’s eyes were the blue of a glorious summer sky.

  The exact same shade she’d become so fond of in the last few weeks.

  Behind her, Mr. Harrington was still confused and getting cranky about it. “Damn it, is this another intervention? Tink, you’re fired. Dylan, go away, I’m fine.”

  Penny shuddered in a gasp that sounded horribly like a sob, and because she couldn’t close her eyes against the train wreck of her own life, she saw the moment when Dylan realized that she knew.

  His shoulders went ev
en more rigid, until his entire body was as stiff and defensive as a suit of armor. “I tried to tell you,” he grated out harshly, almost sounding as if he were angry at Penny for the way things had gone down.

  “You had two weeks to tell me the truth,” Penny hissed. “Fourteen days and nights…”

  “Okay then!” Jessica spun into motion, taking charge of the situation with an effortless ease that Penny could only numbly admire. “First of all, Harrington, you can’t fire me because you don’t pay my salary. Harrington International, aka your older brother, Miles, does. So here’s what’s going to happen now.”

  She herded Dylan and a feebly resisting Penny toward the empty front parlor no one ever sat in. “You two kids clearly need to talk. I’m going to take Mr. Big Mouth out back to the cottage and get him settled in—no, don’t worry about towels or clean sheets, a bare mattress would be a step up for Logan at this point, so long as it’s horizontal.”

  “There’s nothing worse than a woman who thinks she can manage the entire world,” Logan growled, but out of the corner of her eye, Penny noticed that he didn’t put up much of a fight when Jessica led him back out the front door and closed it gently behind them.

  And then Penny was left alone in the parlor with the man to whom she’d given her body and her heart … before she even knew his real name.

  *

  “I’m sorry,” Dylan said. He wasn’t sure what to say to keep from getting swallowed up by the black hole of guilt and regret in his gut, but he definitely owed Penny an apology. Might as well start there.

  As expected, it wasn’t anywhere near enough. Penny shook her head in disbelief. “You’re sorry. You mean, you’re sorry your brother showed up here and exposed your lie.”

  The bitterness in her voice pierced him like broken glass. “No, Penny…”

  But she wasn’t listening. Dropping onto one of the overstuffed chintz love seats, Penny covered her face with trembling hands. “Your brother,” she groaned. “Lord almighty. Dylan Harrington. I feel like such a fool. You must have laughed yourself sick over how easy I was to seduce. Some silly, gullible waitress to play around with because she doesn’t know any better. Are you going to go back to all your rich friends and have a good chuckle over your latest sexual exploits as Dylan Workman?”