Avery (Billionaire Bad Boys & Blue Collar Men #1)

Chapter 1

Avery

Cutting the ignition as soon as I threw my car into park, I let my head fall back to hit the headrest behind me and closed my eyes.

There was a soft ticking sound as my car’s engine settled. The silence filling the cab and causing my ears to ring wasn’t the most unpleasant thing after being crammed inside of a car for hours on end and traveling to get all the way out here.

No, it was the fact that now that I was finally here and back in Ellington Heights, I actually had to deal with what I’d been putting off for the past four months—with no choice but to face it head on.

I’d run out of time to stave off the inevitable and now I was going to be paying the consequences for it.

See, the thing about death was that it wasn’t always about the grief and the coming to terms with that person no longer being involved in your life that was the shitty part.

There were things outside of that emotional process that were just as big, if not more, of a pain in the ass than the actual burying of your relative and wishing them well in the afterlife.

Namely in the form of their estate.

My father was a complicated man and had lived the kind of life that most people tended to envy from the outside. The kind of life that would be slapped on the cover of magazines with salacious headlines and that had reporters lined up outside the gates to our family’s mansion come sunrise.

He’d never let any kids, a wife, a well paying corporate job, or whatever responsibilities that went with any of those titles, stop him from living however he wanted to.

Mainly at the detriment to everyone around him.

Growing up, my relationship with him had been, to put it nicely, quite strained.

Living in his shadow my whole life and then watching him completely destroy everything I’d ever known after the death of my mother, had erased any goodwill I had for the man, which carried over well after I became a legal adult.

So, on the day of his passing, when I’d received a phone call from his lawyer to talk me into coming back to Ellington Heights in order to work through settling his estate, I was met with a sort of crossroads.

Pushing it off had gotten me nowhere to delay the inevitable truth that I knew would be waiting for me once I finally made the drive back to my place of birth. His entire life was mess after mess and even in death, none of that was escapable.

The only difference now was that I had to deal with it.

Opening my eyes again, I stared through the windshield at the mansion that I grew up in and was forced out of the day I turned seventeen.

Fond memories were seldom things to be found within those walls.

And while the staff that had been left behind to take care of me after my father had decided that jet-setting around the globe was a far more lucrative use of his time than continuing to raise his only heir by himself, had been good to me, their care levels were directly associated with their paychecks.

As I’d gotten older, I’d blamed them less and less for it. Their responsibility in keeping me alive and fairly functional was all that any of them had been signing up for upon walking through those large double doors. Any more than that was simply a waste of their time.

They had their own families to worry about, after all.

Sighing to myself, I slipped two fingers under the car door handle and popped it open. The hot afternoon breeze hit me instantly, soaking me in the high humidity that I’d long since forgotten about upon leaving this god-forsaken town.

My dress shoes crunched against the graveled drive leading up to the marbled steps.

The familiar arched doors greeted me with their iron filigree accents curling around the glass panels.

At one time, I used to think that they were beautiful—a symbol of my mother’s delicate touch that guests would see first thing upon entering our home.

Now, all I felt was deep dread.

The doors parted easily when I pushed at them, a small chime coming from deeper inside the foyer was all that awaited me.

Soon, the telltale footsteps of someone rushing to the door, their shoes clapping loudly against the tile, beckoned me into shutting the door behind me and turning to face the hall leading down to the kitchen.

Luanne, our family’s live-in chef, stopped short the second she spotted me.

She had a dirty dishtowel thrown over her shoulder, her black apron hand-printed with flour and other powdered ingredients.

Her wiry gray hair was thrown up in a messy style on the top of her head, pieces of it falling down the back of her neck.

“Well, I’ll be...” she muttered. “As he lives and breathes.”

I held back another sign in favor of plastered a smile on my face. “Good afternoon, Hazel. It’s been a while.”

She was in motion before I could even blink, ripping off the towel from her shoulder and curling it up a few times between her hands before snapping at me with it. It caught me right in the thigh, the pain biting my skin even through the fabric of my slacks.

“Ow!” I howled.

She snapped it at me again and caught me right above the previous spot, just as she would any other unruly child she came across. “Don’t you ‘it’s been a while’ to me, young man! You come waltzing in here like it’s any other normal Tuesday night dinner. Ha!”

“Okay! All right!” I threw my hands up in surrender.

“You never call, you never write!” she kept going on. Her disappointed scowl was the stuff of nightmares—mine, to be exact. Even after I was accepted into college, I still woke up sweating some nights, remembering those long days spent at the dinner table while she lectured me about my homework.

“I’ve been busy!” I said, though even to my own ears, it sounded like a lame excuse. Mostly because it was one.

I’d stayed away from this place for many reasons, only having been dragged back on the rare occasion where I’d felt the need to try and reconnect with my past and soon finding out that the old me, and my past along with it, had died the night my father had put me on a plane to Switzerland.

A lot could be said for being sent away under the guise of your only surviving parent giving you a ‘better education’ far, far away from the place you grew up in and the only home you ever knew.

All the while having to find out through various online media that that same parent that had promised sending you away was for your own good was then found entangled in various affairs all around the world.

But I digress.

Hazel threw her arms up in the air out of exasperation. “For ten years, Avery?”

All right, it couldn’t have been that long since I’d last visited. Right?

Recalling the last decade was fuzzy, but not for the fact that I had a shit memory. I’d tried hard not to think back on what I’d been forced to leave behind, rewriting those deep wounds with something that was far less easier to digest.

Such as forgetting any of it ever happened.

“Sorry,” was all I could manage to come up with.

She sighed at me, shaking her head before pulling me into a tight hug. “I missed you, you know. Not that you care.”

I clapped my hand against her back a few times. “I do care.”

“Don’t make me whap you for lying to me.”

I winced.

When she pulled away again, she had a smile cracking through that tough scowl. “Are you here to stay?”

I wasn’t really sure how to answer that. While in the long run, I’d eventually need to go back to my life in the city, for now, I had enough time to stay and sort through the mess left behind by my father.

Dedicating most of the last eight years to being a workaholic and getting to the top echelon had earned me some perks with my associates—namely in the form of taking an extended leave for the foreseeable future.

Though it could also be wagered that perhaps that wasn’t exactly a perk so much as getting to do whatever I wanted by being in the top one-percent of the economy’s income earners.

“I am for a while. Until I sort through the estate and whatnot,” I said.

She nodded slowly. “You’re staying here?”

I wasn’t planning on it. “Ah...”

She nodded again. “Good. I’ll have Janey make up a bed for you.”

I slowly shut my mouth. There was no use in arguing with a woman like Hazel. Especially, when she had her mind set to something. Even as a grown adult, I felt reverted back to my teenage self, treated as if I were her own unruly child in need of discipline.

In a way, back then I’d needed someone like her around. With my mother buried in the ground and my father off doing whatever it was that had occupied his time after she’d passed, Hazel had been one of the few to step up and expect better of me

She was determined to not let me fall into the ‘rich brat’ mindset and forced me to challenge myself in ways that no one else around me really expected me to.

Now that I was home again, I found myself really missing this kind of structure—as sad as that was coming from a thirty-something adult.

“Thank you, Hazel.”

She waved her hand at me, her expression softening. “Oh, stop. You go grab your bags and bring them inside. Ivan will bring them up to your room. I expect a full report of what you’ve been up to when you come back inside. Come find me in the kitchen.”

“Yes, ma’am,” I murmured.

Satisfied, she spun around on her heel and toddled back down the hallway.

Blowing out a breath, I made my way back outside to where I’d parked my car, fishing the keys out of my pocket to pop the trunk open. Upon rounding the passenger side to grab my smaller bag, my phone began to go off in my pocket.

I dug it out as my father’s lawyer’s number flashed across the screen.

Great. What now?

I punched the green button, sucking in a breath. “This is Avery,” I said, once it was put up to my ear.

“Mr. McAllister,” Ted Evans greeted. “How was your drive up from the city?”

“Long.” Grabbing my bag, I looped the strap over my shoulder and hip checked the door closed. “Just got in. But I assume you’re not calling just to check in on my travels.”

He chuckled. “Straight to the point as always, I see. I wanted to run something by you. Going through your dad’s paperwork, I noticed that there was something else that I’d missed when we were going over the estate.

It seems he also has an off-property garage that has a few classic cars stored in it. ”

That had me blinking in surprise.

Classic cars?

Since when was my father ever into anything old?

That man was notorious for being a habitual upgrader, especially with his women.

What use would a couple of classic cars have in his possession when he was barely ever in the country as it was?

“How many?” I asked.

There was some rustling of paperwork before he said, “Looks like four.”

Four more problems to deal with.

“Where is the garage? I assume that it’s gated and I’ll need a passcode to get into it.”

“Yes. I can send all of that information over to you. I also have a set of keys here to open the garage but the facility also has a spare set that they’ll let you borrow. I called already to let them know about the situation. You just need to show them your ID.”

Checking the time on my Rolex, I noted there was still a little bit of time in the day that I could run over there and see what exactly I was going to be forced to deal with.

The only problem now was that I had no fucking clue about classic cars outside of my slight knowledge from when I was a teenager.

My heart squeezed at the memory, driving me to push it back into its box in the back of my mind and lock the damn padlock before I was forced to unpack that shit that had been long since buried.

Clearing my throat, I said, “You have any recommendations for places around here that can assess cars like that?”

The sound of his fingers moving across his keyboard filled the speaker. “There is a repair shop that’s known for working on classics. It’s called Carmichael’s Body Shop. I’ll send you the info.”

“Thanks. I’ll head over there now and talk to them.”

Pulling the phone away from my ear, I ran a hand across my face, massaging my thumb and pointer against my eyes.

Classic cars...

What the fuck?

As if my life could get any less ironic.