Harlequin Special Edition October 2015, Box Set 1 of 2

by Christine Rimmer

  “What is up with you and Dad anyway?” Luke asked. “It seemed like you were trying your damnedest to avoid him.”

  “More than you usually do,” Jack added. “Dad’s mellowed over the years, Mac. You could try cutting him some slack—”

  “I’m not having this conversation. I told you. I have a meeting—”

  “No, you have a serious itch to avoid your family today. Which is what I bet you plan on doing all week. We had some very fun family activities planned for the week, too.” Jack grinned. “You know, group trips to the zoo, maybe grabbing some funnel cakes at the fair, a little brotherly bonding in the backyard...”

  Mac snorted. Despite his frustration with his brothers, he found a smile curving across his face. “Funnel cakes? The zoo?”

  “That’s the plan,” Luke said, pushing off from the car, a gleam in his eyes. “All with the customary big-brother torture, followed by a cold ocean dunking and topped off with a day of us arm wrestling you into admitting we’re stronger than you.”

  “Smarter, too,” Jack added.

  “Definitely smarter.” Luke nodded, then wagged a finger at Jack. “And better looking.”

  “Damned shame. You could have been so much more,” Jack said, reaching forward and clapping Mac on the shoulder. “If only you’d been born second or third.”

  Mac shook his head. “It’s too bad you two are so delusional. You do know what Mama says, don’t you? That she should have stopped having kids after she had the perfect one.” Mac put out his arms. “Voilà. Perfection.”

  The three brothers laughed at the familiar joke. Their mother loved them all equally, but when pressed, would tell each boy that he was her favorite. Mac had missed this camaraderie, the gentle ribbing by people who knew him best. For a second, he considered turning down Savannah’s offer and spending the week with his brothers instead. Then he remembered what he had learned from Uncle Tank, and knew if he did that, he’d inevitably feel compelled to confess to Jack and Luke. The truth would come out over some beers or basketball, because if there was one thing Mac had never been able to do, it was keep a secret from his brothers.

  The only one Mac should talk to was his father. Then let Bobby handle it from there. It was, after all, his mess, not Mac’s. Maybe there was a way to encourage Bobby to come clean, to tell the family the truth before it exploded, which it surely would at some point. A secret that big was impossible to keep quiet forever.

  Bobby Barlow, the pride of Stone Gap, had another son. A product of an affair that had been kept hidden for two and a half decades.

  Another Barlow brother, who had contacted Uncle Tank, the one who had been the go-between for the child and the mother, probably to keep Bobby out of the mix. Uncle Tank, who had stopped speaking to Bobby years ago, had called Mac, and said only two words, “Fix this.” As if Mac could even begin to figure out what to do. An illegitimate son, an affair—all that was a hell of a lot harder to repair than a broken tailpipe or a company with too much overtime. Eventually, Mac knew someone was going to figure it out. If the truth didn’t come blasting into town on its own first.

  Because Colton Barlow, Bobby Barlow’s secret son, had made it clear he wanted to get to know his other family—and do it soon.

  Fix this.

  That was something Mac would tackle another day, after he had all this business with Savannah squared away. He needed time to think, time to figure out the best way to talk to his father.

  Just...time.

  “Listen, as much as I’d love to go have funnel cakes,” Mac said to his brothers. “I have plans for tonight. Why don’t I stop by the garage tomorrow?”

  “As long as you promise us something,” Luke said.

  “I’ll be at Jack’s wedding. I already promised that.”

  “This isn’t about the wedding. That’s a nonnegotiable anyway, because your tux is already rented.” Jack grinned. “We need to talk to you about planning the family reunion next month. It’s also Mama and Dad’s thirty-fifth anniversary, and we wanted to make it special. Which means you have to be here for it. Nonnegotiable number two.”

  “There’s a family reunion next month?” And his parents’ anniversary? God. This just kept getting worse and worse every second he stayed here.

  “Jeez, Mac, don’t you read your email?” Jack threw up his hands. “Yeah, I sent you an invite like three weeks ago. The entire Barlow clan, descending on Stone Gap.”

  “Lord, help us.” Luke grinned.

  A family reunion next month meant the other Barlow, the one no one knew about, would want to come if he got wind of the event. Now Mac really needed to find a way to talk to his father.

  “I’ll, uh, think about that. I’ll have to check my schedule,” Mac said.

  “Check your schedule?” Jack scoffed. “Family is the only thing you need on that schedule, you workaholic.”

  The word rankled. Twice in one day they’d called him that. “This workaholic is trying to go someplace. If I can ever get out of here.” Mac fended off the rest of his brothers’ questions and slipped onto the seat of his bike.

  Jack sighed and threw up his hands. “I give up. You know, one of these days you’re going to realize you actually need your family.”

  “I never said I didn’t need my family.” Mac settled the helmet on his head and buckled the strap. Just maybe not parts of his family, such as a father who hadn’t been as true as he claimed to be.

  “You didn’t have to say it,” Luke said, disappointment clear in his expression. “It’s written all over your face.” Then his brothers climbed back into the car and headed out of the lot.

  Mac revved the bike, felt the power of the engine rumble beneath him. He loved his brothers. He really did. But sometimes he wondered if they lived in a fantasy world. They seemed to think a few family dinners would be enough to settle everything. If that was the case, he and his father would have mended fences years ago. But now, with the information about Colton, that broken fence had become a yawning, impassable canyon.

  As soon as he could, Mac was leaving Stone Gap. And it would be a long time before he came back.

  He thought of Savannah Hillstrand and all her talk about the business being family. How her father had treated every employee like a relative. Maybe some people were honestly like that, but Mac doubted it. Or maybe she was just some Pollyanna who thought the world was filled with rainbows and people singing “Kumbaya.”

  He wound his way to the outer edge of Stone Gap, past the beachfront mansions that outdid each other with more windows, more balconies, more square footage, then down around the edge of the bay before finally coming to a stop in a dirt parking lot. The ocean breeze rolled in from the Atlantic, sweet and crisp. He inhaled and wondered how long it had been since he’d been on the water. Too long, for sure.

  His gaze shifted away from the deep blue ocean and over to a small wooden shack. No bigger than a trailer, the place looked ready to crumple with the slightest breeze. The Sea Shanty was, indeed, a shanty.

  This was where Savannah Hillstrand wanted to have steaks? This...dive?

  When she’d proposed the dinner, with no talk of business until after dessert, he’d balked. That wasn’t how Mac ran his life. He worked as much as possible, as often as possible. But as he’d wound his way down the roads toward the address she’d given him, and caught the scent of the ocean dancing in the air, he’d begun to feel a...longing. For what, he wasn’t sure, but he knew it had come wrapped in her words. What was it about this woman, who believed in family and vacations and lazy days, that had so intrigued him?

  All purely professional interest, of course, even if she did have green eyes that lingered in a man’s mind. He just wondered how anyone running a business, particularly a struggling one, could be so...positive and upbeat.

  He heard laughter and turned. Savannah Hills
trand stood to the right of the Sea Shanty, talking to an elderly man and laughing at something he had said. A little fissure of jealousy ran through Mac. Insane. He had no claims on Savannah, nor did he want any. This was business. Nothing more.

  Then why did his gaze travel over her lithe frame, now out of the severe pantsuit and looking summery and beautiful in a dark green sundress? She had a little white sweater draped over one arm, and her hair was down and curling along her shoulders. She’d changed, done her hair, and a part of him wondered if—well, hoped—that was because she knew she might be seeing him.

  He closed the distance between them just as the elderly man went inside the building. At the sound of his riding boots on the dirt, Savannah turned.

  A smile curved across her face. “You made it.”

  “You sound surprised.”

  “A little, yes.”

  “Don’t be. When I say I’m going to do something, I do it. I’m not one for spontaneity.” Though he was having a lot of spontaneous thoughts about her right now. It had to be the surprise of the sundress, the expression on her face, the scent of the ocean in the air, because he was having trouble thinking about anything other than her. “And for me, this—” he waved at the glorified pile of wood that was passing as a restaurant “—is a semitruck full of spontaneity.”

  “Hey, who knows, Mr. Barlow, in the process of you helping me with the company, I might end up being a bad influence on you.”

  He laughed. “That I doubt.”

  “Come on. Let’s get a table out back before the sun sets.” She waved at him to follow her down a shell-lined path that circled around to the back of the Sea Shanty. The path led to a small deck topped with white plastic tables and chairs and framed by lattice panels on either side. Clearly, it wasn’t the ambience that drew people to this place.

  It was definitely the view.

  “Isn’t this amazing?” Savannah said as they slipped into two chairs. She waved toward the ocean lapping at the rocky shore below. “Every time I look at this view, it... Well, as silly as it sounds, it reorients my soul.”

  Reorients my soul. Mac considered those words as he took in the panorama before them.

  A vast blueness stretched before him, further and broader than his eyes could see. It rippled with tiny peaks of whitecaps, like a dusting of stars in the water. In the distance a sailboat cut through the water quickly and easily. Above his head a trio of seagulls called to each other before one dropped down and scooped a fish out of the shallows. Mac’s heart slowed and his chest expanded as he drew in one deep breath after another like a man who had gone too long in stale air. The salty, tangy breeze was refreshing. Restoring.

  The same ocean was right outside his offices in Boston, of course. But he rarely saw it heading into work early and leaving late. The air there was filled with the smog from commuters and the stink of diesel from the busy harbor.

  Across the bay he saw one lone house, a two-story white Georgian style with a long wooden dock jutting out into the water, topped with chairs to catch the view. It was a peaceful image, like a painting spread across nature’s canvas.

  A sense of something Mac didn’t recognize settled in his chest. Then it hit him—he felt calm, relaxed. When was the last time he’d felt like that? With no worry over an impending deadline or stress about a deal falling through?

  The sound of the water lapping over the rocky shore seemed to whisper relax, relax, and every cell in Mac’s being ached to do that very thing. For a moment, he imagined himself at that house across the way, sinking into one of the two Adirondack chairs facing the ocean and just...being.

  “Beautiful, isn’t it?” Savannah said. “My dad loved this place. He and my mom would come here as often as they could. It was just a short boat ride for them, so they’d pop over for dinner all the time.”

  “Short boat ride?”

  “Yup. That’s my dad’s house over there.” She pointed to the Georgian he had noticed a moment ago.

  “That’s where your dad lived? How did he afford a waterfront home?” The moment of relaxation flitted away. Mac made a mental note to take a second look at the company’s finances. If the CEO had been financing a big mortgage, that kind of practice would have to stop. “Because I thought Willie Jay had a house a few miles from Stone Gap, too. In Juniper Ridge.”

  “We do. The house in Juniper Ridge is small, the same house I grew up in and that my parents bought when they first got married. My mom and dad never really wanted or needed a big house. The one on the beach has been in our family for a long time. My dad was frugal in other parts of his life, so he could afford to keep this house.” She brushed her bangs off her face and wistfulness filled her features. “It means a lot to our family. Almost everything important in our lives happened over there. And someday I’m going to find a way to get all that back.”

  Her eyes clouded and grief settled over her like a cloud. Then she worked a smile to her face and turned away from the view. “Anyway, I’m starving. Do you want to order an appetizer?”

  “No,” he said, before he got too distracted by that look in Savannah’s eyes, and how much it made him want to leap in and fix whatever was bothering her. He was trying to buy her business, not build a relationship. No smart decisions could come from connecting with Savannah on a personal level. “I think we should get to work as quickly as possible.”

  Because if he didn’t, Mac had the distinct feeling he’d get off track by the curiosity to know what Savannah had meant when she’d said she wanted to find a way to get all that back.

  And why it mattered so much to him to see that she did just that.

  Chapter Four

  By the time the steaks arrived, Savannah had lost her appetite. Everything Mac had told her about running a business in the short space of time since they had sat at the table sent one clear message—she was in over her head. He’d given her his CEO 101 talk, and she’d realized pretty fast that he was right—a degree in history and some experience remodeling homes didn’t qualify her to sit in Willie Jay’s chair. Not that she hadn’t known that from the first day, but talking to Mac cemented the truth in her heart.

  She understood the basics of what Mac said, about receivables and payables, about the impact of sales on their bottom line, but as he started delving into the minutia of the monthly general ledger—deviating from their no-business talk the instant dinner was set on the table—her eyes began to glaze over and the hope she’d had that she was up to turning Hillstrand Solar around began to dim.

  He ran a finger down the screen of his laptop, skipping over the figures he’d downloaded earlier. “If you shift to a just-in-time inventory system and reduce the production workforce by two, you should be able to implement additional lean manufacturing—”

  “Wait,” she said, putting up a hand. “Did you just say I should fire two people?”

  “I said reduce the production workforce.” Mac pointed at a number on his screen, flanked by a percentage on the right. “You have too much overhead.”

  “Reducing the workforce is just a fancy way of saying fire people. I’m not doing that.”

  “Part of doing business is separating the wheat from the chaff, so to speak, and getting the most return on your investment. By eliminating two of these positions—” he pointed to a line item for the shipping and receiving department “—you can increase your monthly cash flow by several thousand dollars, which will help tide you over until sales increase.”

  “These are people, Mr. Barlow, not stalks of wheat. And not just numbers.”

  “These people are one of the things keeping you from being profitable. Sometimes, you have to sacrifice one thing in order to gain everything.”

  Gain everything. Like a successful company again. Like a thriving legacy to her father. Savannah’s gaze went to the Georgian house across the water. From here
it still looked elegant, almost regal, but she knew up close that the family home was in a serious state of disrepair. Inch by inch it had decayed in the years since her father had started his company, when he’d poured himself into building that solar business one panel at a time. He’d go to the house on the weekends, but he’d relaxed instead of worked on the house, procrastinating on the damage wrought by the relentless ocean breezes. Someday, he’d said. Someday he would restore the place to its former glory.

  Just before her father died, she’d secretly started working on it for little bits of time here and there, thinking she could renovate the house and get it ready as a surprise for her father. It would have been the crowning achievement of her remodeling career so far, and a way to show Willie Jay that Savannah could indeed make a living from rehabbing historic properties. Then her father had died and left her the company, along with a heavy, solemn promise to keep it running.

  She stood at the proverbial fork in the road. She could sell the company to Mac Barlow right now, walk away and have the money she needed to fund her home-renovation-company dreams. Or she could do what it took to keep her father’s dream alive.

  Either option sucked.

  But in the end there really was only one choice to make. She’d made a promise, the only one her father had ever asked of her, and she couldn’t break that, no matter what happened.

  Savannah tore her gaze away from the house and refocused on the computer screen. Her steak had grown cold. The wine Mac had ordered was untouched by either of them.

  She knew Mac was right about the overhead, even though she wanted to argue. What choice did she have, really? Let the entire company die just to save two jobs? Maybe, when business picked up, she could hire everyone back, but even thinking that made Savannah nauseous. How could she possibly do this? How could she possibly send two loyal employees packing? “Which two...uh, which two would you suggest?”