Homecoming: The Billionaire Brothers

by Lily Everett

  Logan broke off, his hoarse voice grinding to a halt as he turned his back and braced his hands on the kitchen table. Jessica had to curl her fingers under the edge of the counter to stop herself from going to him.

  She wanted nothing more in the world than to wrap Logan up in her arms and shield him from this pain—but the pain was inside him already, and he had to get it out. Terrified that if she moved, she’d shatter this rare confessional moment, Jessica held her breath.

  “Instead,” Logan said, low and hoarse, “I tested out of my senior year of high school and escaped to college a year early. I abandoned my grief-stricken eight-year-old brother to life in a new city with grandparents he hardly knew, buried myself in school and work and research, and I never looked back. Of course Dylan hates me.”

  Jessica’s throat ached with tears she wouldn’t shed. Logan hated tears, mostly because he was bewildered by them and didn’t know how to react, she’d learned. So she wouldn’t cry for this proud, lonely, regret-ridden man, no matter how badly she wanted to.

  Instead, she finally pushed away from the counter and took the few steps that would allow her to slide her arms around his lean waist and press her hot face to his back. Logan’s muscles were granite under her touch, but she didn’t let go.

  “It sounds to me,” she murmured urgently, “like Dylan isn’t the one who hates you for leaving him. It sounds like you hate yourself. But Logan—your parents had just died, tragically and suddenly, and your world was spinning off its axis. You handled it the only way you knew how. Please, please don’t hate yourself for that.”

  “Dylan was only a kid. He needed me, and I could’ve stayed. I chose to leave, I chose college over taking care of my baby brother.”

  “You were a kid, too.” Jessica snuggled up as close to Logan as she could, until she couldn’t tell her own heartbeat from his. “So young. What were you, sixteen?”

  Logan cleared his throat. “Fourteen. I’d already skipped a couple grades.”

  Squeezing her eyes shut against the burn of tears, Jessica mouthed a quick, fervent kiss against the body-warm cotton of his T-shirt. “Only a baby yourself. Logan—”

  “I should have stayed. But what could I have done? I don’t know the first thing about comforting someone else, or making them feel better. All I knew was that I was in raw, screaming pain, and I had to escape it any way I could—which was by throwing myself completely into my work.”

  “That’s not true.” She tightened her arms around him. “That you’re bad at comforting people. No matter what we talk about, or how emotional I get, you always make me feel like it’s okay. You listen. That’s all anyone can do.”

  He slumped another inch over the table, hanging his shaggy head between his stiff arms. “So I should have stayed and listened to Dylan have nightmares and cry for Mom and Dad.”

  “That’s not what I’m saying. You did what you needed to at the time, to cope with your own grief.” Although she was starting to suspect that he hadn’t coped with that grief at all; instead, he’d grabbed onto the challenges of college at fourteen years old to avoid facing it. How had he put it? That he escaped completely into his work.

  But no one could outrun a loss like that forever. Jessica was very much afraid that Logan could never truly be healthy and well-adjusted until he dealt with the pain of the past.

  “I should have listened to him,” Logan repeated, like a looped recording, and Jessica let out a shaky breath.

  “It’s too late to help your eight-year-old brother,” she said, as firmly and gently as she could. “You can’t go back in time. You have to let it go … and realize that you’ve been blessed with a second chance.”

  “What do you mean?” His wrecked voice came from deep inside his chest.

  “You can listen to Dylan now.” She kissed him once between his shoulder blades, then again because she couldn’t help herself, before glancing at the digital clock on the stove. “Come on. Let’s go wild and skip dinner, head straight for dessert. Last one up the garden path to the big house has to wash the dishes.”

  Logan straightened slowly, as if his bones ached, but when she finally got a look at his face, there was a small smile curving his mouth. “Dessert for dinner? Doesn’t sound very healthy to me.”

  “It’s okay to let yourself enjoy life sometimes,” Jessica said, brushing a tentative hand over his jaw.

  He turned his head to plant a kiss that left her palm tingling. Meeting her gaze directly, he admitted, “That’s not the easiest thing for me. But I’ll try. I want to do better.”

  Joy lifted Jessica’s heart into her throat. She’d never felt closer to anyone than she did to Logan in that moment. “That’s good. Because you’re a Harrington—and what you boys want, you usually get.”

  But as they left the summer cottage and walked up the winding path through the twilight garden, Jessica’s happiness was tempered by the fact that if Logan was truly improving so quickly, then their time on Sanctuary Island was drawing to a close.

  And once they left this magical little hideaway and returned to the real world … she and Logan would never be this close again.

  Chapter Eight

  Logan sort of wanted to hold hands with Jessica on the way to the house—it was a garden, there were flowers all around and the setting sun was flaming the sky with pinks and purples overhead. A textbook definition of a romantic setting probably called for something sappy like hand-holding.

  To his surprise, he found he didn’t mind the idea all that much, although it was something he usually avoided like malware and spam. Everything was different with Jessica. Take cuddling in bed, for example. He hated cuddling—the clinginess of a woman he barely knew expecting him to keep in contact long after the sex was over? Made no sense, was sweaty and awkward, and he just … didn’t enjoy it. So he didn’t do it.

  But with Jessica and her crazy rules about not having sex in bed, there was nothing to do except lie close together, their heads on one pillow, and breathe each other’s breath. Sometimes they talked, sometimes he watched her sleep until the steady rhythm of her soft breathing closed his lids and pulled him under.

  He didn’t mind it. Same with the hand-holding, as long as it was with Jessica—except at the moment, his palms were too clammy and itchy with nerves to inflict on anyone else.

  Don’t be stupid, he told himself. This isn’t going to be some huge emotional revelation. You’ve already met your quota for those today.

  Dylan just wanted his brother to meet the woman he was seeing for more than a thirty-second introduction in which Logan had inadvertently outed Dylan as a member of the Harrington family. Which Penny hadn’t been aware of previously.

  Jessica led them confidently up the back steps and rapped smartly on the window-paned door, giving Logan flashbacks of arriving at the house a week ago.

  Only then, they’d waited on the front porch, and he’d felt like a reanimated corpse after weeks of nonstop work. Now that his brain no longer resembled a cracked-out hamster trapped in an exercise ball, Logan could appreciate the storybook feel of his family’s old vacation home.

  Most of the Victorian gingerbreading was festooned over the façade in front, but even from the back, the house was appealing. Three stories, gables, wooden shutters, the whole nine yards. There was even a bay window overlooking the garden; probably a nice spot to settle in and read a book.

  Still, as footsteps sounded from inside and Logan braced himself for whatever was about to happen, he acknowledged silently that he was glad Jessica had maneuvered them out of the main house and down to stay in the cozy summer cottage across the garden.

  In the cottage, they had privacy and peace, and no … teenagers.

  A lanky kid opened the back door and grinned at them from under a shock of dirty-blond hair.

  “Ha! Dylan, you owe me five bucks,” he shouted over his shoulder before pushing the door wide and ushering them in. The kid studied them with open curiosity, his wide hazel eyes lingering on Jessi
ca in a way that made Logan suddenly, intensely aware of how extraordinarily beautiful she looked. Dressed more casually than he was used to in a linen button-down shirt over a pair of jeans, Jessica took his breath away.

  “You’re very lovely tonight,” Logan told her immediately. He should have said it before. He should be saying it constantly. “Well, objectively, you’re lovely all the time, but tonight you look especially beautiful.”

  The blush that suffused her cheeks in no way detracted from her beauty, he noticed with interest.

  “Thank you. That’s very sweet—and awkward—of you.” Reaching past Logan, she put out her hand to shake the kid’s. “Hi, I’m Jessica Bell. This is Logan Harrington.”

  “Dylan’s brother.” The kid nodded in that know-it-all-way common to teenagers. “I told him you’d show. I’m Matt Little. Come on in, my mom already sliced the pie but she said we had to wait for you.”

  At the word pie, Logan shot Jessica a glance and saw her biting her lip against a smile. They followed Matt through the open, airy kitchen, past a round table that showed the obvious marks of frequent use and into a formal dining room.

  Dylan sat at the head of a large oval table, his elbows resting comfortably on the polished mahogany surface, one hand extended across the table to clasp the hand of a smallish brunette with a beaming smile. Penny Little, Logan remembered through the haze of exhaustion and confusion that had dimmed his vision when he met her.

  The moment before they became aware of the presence of guests, Logan caught a glimpse of something he dimly recognized, an invisible spark that flew between them and tied Dylan and Penny together as they smiled into each other’s eyes. Dylan lifted their entwined fingers to his mouth and kissed Penny’s knuckles so tenderly, Logan felt his own cheeks heat uncomfortably. Feeling as if he was intruding on an unbearably intimate moment, he froze in the dining room doorway, unable to make his feet move forward.

  Clearly unburdened by any feelings of being an intruder, Matt breezed past him. “I told you they’d come,” he said confidently, grabbing a dessert plate and a fork before retreating in a rush of big feet and lanky limbs. “No one can resist Mom’s famous buttermilk pie. I’m taking this up to my room so y’all can have boring grown-up time.”

  Dylan jerked, clearly startled, and as he started to get up to greet them, Logan’s gaze caught on something sparkly in his brother’s grasp.

  It was a ring. A diamond ring, on Penny Little’s left hand, and its facets winked in the light when Dylan pulled her to her feet beside him.

  “Logan. You’re looking much better than the last time I saw you. I was worried you’d starved to death down in the cottage.”

  “Jessica would never let that happen,” Logan retorted automatically.

  “No, sure,” Dylan said, darting a quick glance at Penny. “Of course not.”

  Logan swallowed. He’d been right, this was awful. Stilted and weird, too formal and polite. Nothing like the conversation they’d had a week ago, when Logan had told his brother to believe in himself, that he was more than the Bad Boy Billionaire the tabloids made him out to be, that he deserved to find love.

  He stared at the ring on Penny Little’s left hand. Looked like Dylan had taken that advice and run with it.

  “So you’re engaged,” Logan said abruptly, aware that his tone was brusque, almost cold, but not sure how to fix it.

  “Logan!” Jessica hissed, poking him in the side, but he twitched away irritably and kept his gaze on his brother’s face.

  Instead of looking sheepish or caught out, the way he had when he was six years old and dragged every pot and pan out of the lower cabinets and piled them up to try and climb the counter to get to the cookie jar, Dylan seemed perfectly at ease. When he smiled and rolled his eyes, contentment radiated from every pore.

  “I should have known you’d notice it the minute you walked in.” Lifting Penny’s hand for another one of those fairy-tale kisses, Dylan said, “I asked Penny to marry me. And she said yes!”

  “Congratulations,” Jessica said into the brief silence that followed Dylan’s jubilant announcement. “What a wonderful surprise!”

  Some of the light in Penny’s pretty face had dimmed, and Logan noted the way her eyes flicked worriedly from him to her fiancé. But she smiled and held out her hand when Jessica asked to see the ring.

  “My boss and coworkers at the Firefly Café want to throw us an engagement breakfast at the restaurant tomorrow morning,” Penny said. “I hope you can both be there.”

  “Of course! We wouldn’t miss it,” Jessica assured her, stepping sideways to tread on Logan’s toes in an obvious effort to make him contribute to the conversation.

  But Logan was at a loss. This wasn’t Dylan’s first engagement. His previous fiancée had been working an angle, looking for a soft landing with a rich husband—or a heavy payoff for leaving him alone, which was the route their eldest brother had taken to get rid of her.

  Logan knew he was the last person on the planet that Dylan would—or should—take romantic advice from, but he couldn’t help being concerned.

  “You’ve known each other for three weeks,” he pointed out abruptly, killing the conversation around him.

  Dylan’s face went hard, his eyes glittering with emotion. “Don’t start. I already heard it from Miles. Yes, it’s fast—but when it’s right, you know it.”

  “So Miles is aware. Good.” Logan seized on the pertinent information and ignored the rest, including the small pang at the knowledge that he was the last to hear about the engagement. So much for Jessica’s theory that Dylan was reaching out to him.

  “Yeah, I called him this afternoon.” The downward curve of Dylan’s mouth revealed that it had not been a happy conversation. Logan could only imagine Miles’s reaction to the news that his reckless, directionless youngest brother was marrying a single mom who worked two jobs and lived on a tiny, backwater island off the coast of Virginia. “I’m starting to regret telling either of you. Damn it, Logan…”

  Penny moved to Dylan’s side and slid an arm around his waist, presenting them as a united front. She faced him with head held high, her eyes clear and body language open when she said, “I understand your concerns. I truly do. The world you live in—you have to be constantly on guard against people taking advantage, or wanting more from you than you’re willing to give. But that’s not my world. I love your brother, and he loves me. We want to make a life together, here on Sanctuary Island. We think we can make each other happy. That’s my ulterior motive here. My happiness, Dylan’s happiness and my son’s happiness.”

  A small flame of respect kindled in Logan’s chest at the proud, direct way Penny spoke. Her matter-of-fact words about love and happiness tugged at his heart in a way he didn’t like. Unsure how to react, Logan looked to Jessica.

  She gave him an encouraging smile, tilting her head as if to say, Go ahead.

  Uncomfortable, Logan shrugged and shoved his hands in the pockets of his trousers. “Do what you’re going to do. You hardly need my approval or my blessing.”

  “We don’t need it,” Dylan agreed, curling his arm around Penny’s slender shoulders. “We’re getting married, building a life and being happy, just as Penny said, whether you and Miles like it or not. But I guess I hoped you’d see that, for once, I know what I’m doing.”

  “Are you sure?” With Dylan’s track record, Logan had to ask.

  A slow smile spread across Dylan’s face as he stared down into the upturned eyes of his fiancée. “I’ve never been more sure of anything in my life. Marriage is a big step, a real commitment … but I spent years wandering around, not even knowing I was searching for something until I found it. Until I found her, and Matt, and Sanctuary Island. This might seem too fast to you—but for me? I’ve waited long enough. I’m ready for my life to finally begin.”

  Chapter Nine

  Jessica was a pace behind Logan all the way back to the cottage, his long legs and quick, restless strides eating up the pat
h.

  The rest of the evening with Dylan and Penny had been … well, “disaster” was probably too strong a word, but not by much. Logan had shut down completely after Dylan’s heartfelt speech. He sat there at the table with an untouched piece of pie in front of him, mouth a thin, hard line and his eyes dark and shuttered.

  Jessica did her best to keep conversation flowing by offering to help Penny set up for the engagement party and asking if they’d set a date yet, while the two brothers glared at each other across the table in silence.

  Sighing as Logan slammed into the screened-in porch and flopped down on the glider, Jessica leaned against the doorway. The drone of cicadas rose and fell around the cottage, accompanied by the song of crickets and the rustle of a breeze through the magnolias. It was a beautiful night.

  Too bad her plan to strengthen Logan and Dylan’s relationship was a total bust.

  “That could have gone better,” she observed to the top of Logan’s head as he leaned over his knees and fisted his hands in his hair.

  “Where is my phone?” he asked abruptly, glaring up at her.

  That startled her into straightening away from the doorjamb. “It’s in a safe place, don’t worry.”

  “Give it to me,” he demanded.

  Jessica crossed her arms over her chest as dismay trickled into her belly. “No. The rules haven’t changed.”

  “Everything is changing.” Standing in a controlled rush, Logan prowled the length of the porch. “Too fast.”

  Empathy tightened like a fist around Jessica’s throat. Always an introvert, Logan had locked all his tumultuous emotions away in a box when his parents died, and then carefully constructed his life so he never had to deal with them in any way.