On the Market (The Ballard Brothers of Darling Bay Book 1)

by Rachael Herron

  The color came back to Natasha’s face, something that happened after she’d made up her mind about something. She leaned forward in a graceful stretch, digging her fingers into the deep white carpet. “I want that house for the show. It’s not up for debate. You’re doing this.”

  Felicia’s breath was tight. “Or—”

  “Or I fire you right now for real and get Melody up there on the next flight.”

  “You can’t—”

  “I can. I’m within my legal rights. I want this to be epically global. With you on the show, it will be.”

  “It’ll be terrible.”

  “Darling. It’s not like you have to marry one of them.”

  Oh, god.

  Felicia was going to be on a reality show.

  CHAPTER FOURTEEN

  Timbo was usually happy to help Liam in the kitchen, but tonight he was even brighter, like he was made of sparks—all flickering joy. He ran from one side of Liam to the other, grabbing things that Liam might need to make the lasagna, happy to put them back when he didn’t.

  “You know dinner won’t be ready for a while, right?”

  “I had a Snickers. What about the show?”

  “We can talk about it later. Why don’t you tell me how your day was? Did you guys beat the Triple Diamonds?”

  Timbo’s face fell, and Liam regretted bringing it up. “They creamed us.”

  “Sorry about that, champ.”

  “Whatever.” Then he brightened. “So, what about that show? Can I really work on it? Like she said?”

  “We’ll see.”

  If Liam had thought Timbo’s face had fallen a moment before, this time it went all the way to the floor. “We’ll see?”

  “I might have pissed off the producer.” What he’d done was kiss the producer and then run away.

  “I thought this was the only way you could afford to open Ballard Youth.”

  Liam set down the jar of tomato sauce, not caring that some of it glopped to the countertop. “You were eavesdropping?”

  “No.” Timbo crossed his arms.

  “Remember we talked about that?”

  “No.”

  “Really? Because I think you do, and I don’t think you want to have that conversation with me again, do you?”

  “No.” His jaw shot sideways like it did when he was frustrated.

  “Okay, then. No more of that.”

  “God.” Timbo pushed himself away from the counter and stumbled backward until he landed in a chair at the table. “Did you see that? I totally almost fell.”

  “But you lived.”

  A pause. “Can you un-piss her off?”

  “I honestly don’t know where we stand with her.” Contracts were signed. Paperwork was bouncing back and forth. Nothing had come up about Timbo interning. It was possible Liam had just blown it all. “We can’t control the universe. Remember, we talked about that?”

  Timbo lowered his head to the tabletop melodramatically. “Man, you gotta come up with some new material, all you do is go over what we already said.”

  “It’ll be fine. Just don’t set your heart on it, okay?” Liam pulled three cloves of garlic off the bulb, and smashed them with the side of his knife.

  “Oh, man, are you going to pull out of the show? You’ll be famous.”

  “I never wanted that.”

  “But the money. Where else are you going to get that?”

  “Paper route?”

  “You know, grades are more important than you think.” Timbo’s eyes were wide, his expression guileless. “Maybe you could go back to school. Get a degree in something important.”

  “You planning on stopping the jackass routine anytime soon?”

  “Nah. This is fun.”

  Liam twisted his lips to keep the smile from taking over his face. This kid. Sometimes Liam wondered how it was that people had overlooked Timbo for so long. Why did he get to be the lucky one that took care of this guy? How had he been ignored, unseen?

  Instead of saying it, though, he just kept chopping garlic.

  Timbo thumped the floor with his shoe. “That girl is pretty.”

  “Who?”

  “You’re bad at playing dumb.”

  That was probably the biggest problem with Timbo—you couldn’t get anything past the kid. He’d probably noticed exactly how Liam had reacted to Felicia. “Yeah, I guess she is.”

  “When are you gonna see her again?” Timbo picked up a paper napkin and started shredding it into tiny pieces.

  “She’ll be back in three weeks to talk to us some more. We’ll see then—”

  “Do you believe in love at first sight?”

  Liam stopped chopping and turned to look at him. “What are you talking about? Where did you even get that idea?”

  “Some stupid movie I saw at Roger’s house. The guy walks into a mall and sees a blonde and the rest of the movie is about him chasing her around. I kind of thought he was acting like a stalker, but eventually the girl liked it. That seems kind of dumb, you know?”

  “Yeah.” Liam went back to chopping and almost took off the end of his middle finger. That was a useful one. He didn’t want to lose it. He slowed his motions.

  “You didn’t answer my question, though. Do you? Believe in it?”

  “Kiddo, I have no idea.”

  Timbo slumped into the chair as if gravity had suddenly become too much to bear. “I knew you would blow it. She’ll never let me intern.”

  “Thanks for the vote of confidence.”

  “This could be the most important thing to ever happen to you.”

  For a second, Liam thought Timbo meant his meeting Felicia. The most important thing to ever happen to Liam. The knife came dangerously close to the tip of his finger again.

  Timbo went on, “You might end up being famous, and then I would be famous, and then I’d probably get a scholarship playing basketball to Notre Dame or something awesome like that. Our whole lives could be different if you don’t blow this.”

  “How does my selling a house to a woman on national television make you into a better basketball player?”

  Timbo shrugged. “So tell me why you’re all freaked out and stuff.”

  Maybe it was okay to be honest with him. Liam remembered a time long ago, when Bill had been honest with him about why Liam and his brothers had to walk to school. It’s because I lost my license. I did something stupid, drove home from work after having a couple of beers with the boys.

  You drove drunk?

  I did. Do you know why that was stupid?

  Because it’s illegal?

  That doesn’t necessarily make it stupid. But I was behind the wheel of that dumb old truck and I shouldn’t have been. If a little kid had run out in front of my car, I might’ve killed him. It was probably one of the stupidest things I’ve ever done, and now I’m not going to have a license for a while. I’ll keep the truck, but just for you all to learn on. That means you all have to walk for a while. For that, I’m sorry.

  Bill had looked heartbroken, and now that Liam was a grown man with a foster kid that he loved of his own, he could hardly imagine being that honest about a mistake that big. He kept Bill’s old rusty truck in front of the house as a reminder of the man—of what honesty and love looked like. Maybe it wasn’t pretty and maybe it was kind of beaten up, but like Bill, it was reliable and sturdy. He wished he could tell Bill how much that confession had meant to him. Liam had never driven drunk, not once, not even when he was twenty-one and stupid as a stick.

  So, maybe in honor of Bill, he’d be honest with Timbo. “I guess it has a lot to do with Brandy.”

  “Brandy? But she’s not even around.”

  “Maybe I’m scared of being hurt again.” This was stupid. A fourteen-year-old boy wouldn’t understand this. He couldn’t be expected to.

  “Yeah, well, she was a bitch.”

  “Excuse me?”

  Timbo sat up straighter in his chair. “You can’t be mad at me. I’m just quo
ting what Uncle Aidan said.”

  Liam put the flats of his palms against the countertop. “Uncle Aidan shouldn’t have said that about her. We do not talk about women like that. You get me?”

  Timbo had the grace to look chastened, and his gaze dropped to his lap. “Sorry. But I don’t think she should have said yes to your proposal if she was just going to run away the night before. The girls at school call her the Runaway Bride. Someone said it was an old movie, but it’s not one I want to see.”

  It wasn’t a movie Liam wanted to see, either. He’d lived it. He didn’t feel like watching a rerun. And that, right there, was why he didn’t want to be around a woman who made him feel the way Felicia did. In two whole years of being with Brandy, kissing her had never felt as electric as that one damn kiss he’d planted on Felicia. Brandy had been a safe choice. A good choice. Another realtor, she understood the business. He’d thought she’d understood him, too. But when she’d called him the night before their small wedding was supposed to occur, she’d told him that he’d never seen her. “You never let me in. You never trusted me to stay.” He hadn’t pointed out the obvious, that she wasn’t. “You and your brothers, they’re all that matter to you. When they need you, you drop everything and go running.” The unfair part was that she’d never asked him to drop a damn thing. She’d just been there. Until she wasn’t.

  Liam went back to chopping the garlic even though it was finer than a mince now, and in a minute it would be a paste. “Remember when Sarah babysat overnight? And I came home with that hangover—which are even worse than they look, by the way, they make you want to die—that was the night I was celebrating a year of singleness. I’ve gotten over Brandy, you know.”

  “How?”

  Hanging with his brothers. Some tears. Some anger, and some resignation. “Sometimes it just takes time.”

  Timbo scratched his head. “How long did it take you to get over your mom leaving?”

  “I don’t know, kiddo. Do you ever get over something like that?” The knife slipped for the third time. This time it nicked his first finger. “Dammit.” Liam sat at the table and twisted a paper towel around the end of his finger.

  “I’ll get the Band-Aids!” Timbo thundered from the room. He was probably excited to get the bandages for a wound that wasn’t his own.

  His mother. Some wounds were just too deep. Maybe that’s what made Liam love Timbo so hard—he understood that pain of having a mom take off, a mom who chose a life that didn’t include the person she was supposed to love above all others.

  Timbo ran back in the room. “We only got the Superman kind, but here’s a big one.”

  “You’re the best.”

  Timbo sat across from him, his face so wide open and hopeful that it hurt Liam’s heart to look at him. “No matter what, I think you should do the show. Because Bill was like your dad and your mom, right? I mean, not your mom, but he was like your family. Like you are to me, now, right?” He ducked his head, looking suddenly bashful. Then he glanced up again. “And if Ballard Youth can help other kids like me, and if you’re doing it for him, then maybe it’s a good idea. It’s okay to hope, right? For good things? Like, Brandy left, but you can still hope for happiness, yeah? Is that what you mean?”

  The kid was smart. Wicked smart. “You really want to work on that show.”

  Timbo thumped backward dramatically in his chair. “So bad.”

  “We’ll see.” Liam stuck the superhero’s cape around his finger. “You might be right.”

  Timbo’s eyebrows flew upward. “Oh, I’m so right.”

  Liam laughed and felt that hope again, right next to his heart. It felt dangerous. And good. He considered his Superman bandage. Felicia would be gone a few weeks. That was probably enough time for her company to come up with five more show ideas and start casting three of them.

  But yeah. If Felicia actually turned out to be the buyer…

  Liam shook his head to clear it. He finished making dinner.

  They ate.

  Timbo went upstairs to play Xbox.

  Liam checked his email. There was one from Felicia.

  We’d like to move ahead with the Maupin property. I’ll be the buyer. If you and your brothers are amenable to the rest of the contract as-is, the network will remove the physical contact clause. Please move ahead with purchase negotiation. We’ll start filming in three weeks.

  That didn’t give him much time. He assumed that they’d film walking through the other houses as if she were thinking about buying them, while she’d actually bought the treehouse. That timeline meant that within a month, provided the Maupin estate accepted their offer, Aidan could start the remodel. And given that the Maupin estate was managed by Mrs. Maupin’s third cousin Dorene Hammer who’d always thought the redwood was unhappy about being hugged by a house with no way to get away (she was a poet), she’d accept.

  Felicia’s email was business-like. Terse and professional.

  And just reading it, he imagined the smell of strawberry he’d caught on her skin while he’d kissed her, the scent of the Cat’s Meow that had clung to her.

  Strawberries had never been more erotic.

  CHAPTER FIFTEEN

  Twenty-two days later, Felicia drove back into Darling Bay in a graffiti-free rental car. She passed the wooden sign planted firmly in a well-tended patch of annuals. Welcome to Darling Bay. Stay a While!

  This was real.

  Imminent.

  Her town.

  She was buying the treehouse—the offer had been accepted and escrow had almost closed even though they’d film it like it hadn’t already happened.

  Soon she’d be part of Darling Bay, even as just a summer resident. Did they accept people like her? People who paid property taxes but only showed up for holidays? How long did it take to be known by the woman at the grocery store? By the bartender at the Golden Spike saloon?

  She braked for an old man crossing the street with a walker. He was adorable, dressed in a black cowboy hat, black shirt and black jeans that looked two sizes too big for him. He glanced at her. Felicia sucked in a breath and waved.

  And he waved back.

  Felicia bit her bottom lip in delight.

  Could this really be home? Someday? Every night in LA, she’d dreamed about walking the wooden floors of the Maupin house, climbing the redwood, sitting with her back pressed against the trunk, gazing out westward. Being inside the house, even for just those thirty minutes, had made her feel more at home than she’d ever thought she could feel. The fact that Liam had been standing next to her in the dreams held no meaning. Of course he was. He was the realtor.

  Okay, and soon he would be her date.

  Felicia needed the house. For that, she needed her job to be there waiting for her at the end of the show. That meant Liam was part of the network property, something to be wrangled and handled, exactly what Felicia was best at.

  She parked in front of Ballard Brothers Building and Realty. She took the steps up to Liam’s office quickly and knocked before she lost her nerve. And as she waited, her heart rattled loosely in her chest, as if she hadn’t put enough packing material around it. He’d been nothing but friendly in their email communications. Felicia and Natasha had had a Skype meeting regarding set load-in with all three brothers a week ago, and Liam had winked at them cheerily when they’d been logging off.

  But the man had kissed her and had then literally hurled himself off a balcony to escape.

  Felicia took a deep breath and knocked again. She touched the tangled wind chime. It chunked clumsily and went silent.

  Timbo opened the door. He wore an oversized blue sweatshirt and his glasses were seated crookedly on his nose. He pulled the door open all the way and yelled over his shoulder, “Liam, she’s here!” Then he brushed past her and bounced on the balls of his feet on the porch. “Just so you know, I’m still totally good with working on the show. Sorry, though, but I gotta go now.”

  “Big game?”

  “Nah,
that’s this afternoon. This morning, me and the guys are going fishing.”

  “Where’s your fishing pole?”

  Timbo flashed her a smile, and she thought she could see the man he would grow into. “And by fishing, I mean wading in the creek that runs into the ocean.” He ran down the steps and jumped on his bike. He was gone in a matter of seconds.

  From behind Felicia, Liam spoke. “And by wading in the creek, he means watching the girls lay out.”

  “Boys’ll be boys.”

  “Would you like some coffee?”

  She held up both cups. “I’m supposed to ask you that. I got you an Americano at the Coffee Caboose.”

  He took it from her. “Was that just a good guess? Or did you ask someone?”

  “I asked the blonde. Nikki? She said no cream, no sugar.”

  “There are no secrets in this town.”

  “There have to be some,” she said lightly. “But they’re probably only good ones. Want to go for a walk? Or can the network take you out to breakfast?”

  “Look.” Liam set the cup on the porch railing and jammed his hands into the pockets of his brown Dockers. “I shouldn’t have kissed you. I was trying to make a point, and it was a stupid one.”

  “About the physical contact clause. I get it.”

  “I regret running away, though.” He squinted at her. “I’ve never gone over a balcony to get away from a girl before.”

  Felicia felt the band around her forehead tighten. She was aimed at a headache if she didn’t take a few deep breaths and get some more caffeine in her system. “Can you tell me what I did to make you do that? Because I have to admit, I sure felt like an idiot.”

  “I’m sorry. I overreacted. I wasn’t used to the idea of the show yet.”

  Felicia chose to take that as a positive sign. “What can I do to make you more comfortable with the idea?”

  “Maybe if you weren’t yourself.”

  She choked on her drink.

  Liam raised his hands. “That came out bad.”

  “Honest. It came out as honest.” And hurtful. But Felicia was strong. Usually.