Chapter 5
5
Preston
N atalie’s face falls. Which is understandable, considering my words. But I can’t walk on eggshells here. I have less than a month to do the impossible, and she’s the first obstacle.
“I assume Hanna told you the bad news.”
“Preston, hang on,” Hanna says.
“We’re going to have to let you go.”
“Jesus, Preston! Hang the fuck on!”
My sister is furious.
“You can’t barge in here and start— Natalie, you’re not being let go. Preston, sit the fuck down.” Hanna buries her face in her hands momentarily. “There’s a simple solution to this. Natalie, I’m sorry. My brother is—” She throws up her hands.
Natalie is taking all this surprisingly well. She stands up and holds her hand out to me. “Natalie Archer.”
Her eyes—a cinnamon-brown color—are curious but not panicked. She’s shorter than I am by almost a foot, with curly dark brown hair, and she’s wearing a loose tunic-style top over a pair of leggings. A lot of her is hidden, but the part of my brain that never shuts up registers that her curves are…generous.
She’s extremely attractive.
Which has no bearing whatsoever on the situation, so my brain and I agree to disregard it.
“This is my brother Preston Hott.” Hanna’s voice is aggrieved. “Like all my brothers, he’s an acquired taste. Which can also be unacquired.” She turns back to me and glares.
I glare back. Mergers and acquisitions is a good school for standing your ground.
“Don’t listen to anything he says until he listens to what I have to say. First of all, he doesn’t have the power to let you go because he doesn’t actually own this business .” She glares at me again. “I’m your boss, and he’s…” She sighs. “He’s basically the mother-in-law of the bride in this scenario.”
Natalie bites her lip—holding back a smile, I think.
“So, you know how I was starting to tell you about the will?” Hanna asks Natalie, who nods. “Well, the will says?—”
I break in because if I wait for Hanna to get there, we’ll be here all day. “It says I have till the end of summer to create an activities program for Hott Springs Eternal, that I have to test the program offerings at the summer festival and receive at least a four-point-five rating on all of them, or?—”
“Shut up and let me talk, Preston!” Hanna says. “This is my business, and the consequences are mine if you fuck it up, so let me talk!”
Natalie makes a sound that might be a choked laugh, and I turn my glare on her. Surprisingly, she doesn’t wither under it. She raises her eyebrows at me instead—a challenge.
And God help me, I’ve never been able to resist a challenge.
She has a pretty, round face and full, pink lips. My brain serves up an uninvited image of my thumb pressed against them to part them, and something in my groin tightens in a way that’s completely inappropriate and absolutely distracting.
Fuck that.
I need to be totally focused here.
Hanna has been talking while my mind went on that rampage.
“—or we lose the family land and my business to a mining company. He has to produce the program, but the will absolutely doesn’t say he has to do it without help or guidance, and you’re the one who knows how to do this. So not only are you not let go, but you’re going to help him?—”
I cut my sister off. “No.”
Natalie’s eyes pop back to mine—wide, surprised, and definitely pissed.
I cross my arms. “I don’t actually have till the end of summer. I have a month. And then I have to be back in New York. The program has to be done and tested by then. And in order to do that, I need this to be easy. Uncomplicated. The last thing I need is design by committee. Nothing personal,” I tell Natalie. “You might be brilliant at your job. But I prefer to work alone.”
It’s not personal. She’s just an obstacle to be removed from my path.
A very sexy obstacle, my brain says.
“No,” Hanna says. Unfortunately, stubbornness is genetic, which means that all of us—every last Hott—inherited our grandfather’s immovable-object personality and his irresistible force methods.
Hanna and I glare at each other. Hard.
“No,” she says again. “ I need this to be easy. Uncomplicated. And you are complicating it. Natalie knows what she’s doing. You don’t. And we need those four-point-fives.”
“So I’m not fired?” Natalie asks.
There’s a tease in her voice. Like she thinks this is funny . I turn and glare at her.
“No.” Hanna sounds tired. “You’re not fired. Now, let’s talk about what’s going to happen here. The two of you are going to work together and come up with an absolutely killer program, you’re going to test it at the Rush Creek Summer Festival a month from now”—she looks at me as she says this—“because someone has to be back in New York, and we wouldn’t want to stand in the way of”—she pulls finger quotes—“‘one of the rising young titans of finance.’ And we’re going to start right now by brainstorming a list of ideas.”
To her credit, Natalie takes this all in, nods, and pulls her phone out of a pocket in her tunic. Even though I want her out of here, I have to admire her spine. She’s not backing down.
She swipes something open on her phone. “Okay, so my thought is we play up both the dude-ranch angle and the spa angle. Horseback rides. A mini rodeo on the weekends. Horseshoes, darts, skeet shooting, archery, lasso lessons?—”
I put a hand up. “Do you have any idea of the liability issues surrounding that stuff?”
The corner of her mouth twitches. For the first time, she addresses me directly, her cinnamon eyes brimming with amusement. “That’s what you got out of that? Liability issues?”
“I won’t put my sister’s business at risk.”
Hanna makes a sound. Pretty sure it’s a growl. “Let me be the judge of that,” she commands. “Keep talking,” she tells Natalie.
“Obviously we’ll deal with the liability issues,” Natalie says, addressing this to Hanna. “We could partner with some vendors, and then the legal issues would belong to them. Like pairing up with a riding school to make horseback rides available. Or the Wilder Adventures outfit could bring their rafting and paddleboarding options here. If an outside vendor offers the activity, the liability is theirs.”
Hanna looks interested but not sold.
I shake my head. “We need to scale expectations way back for this one-month rollout. What you’re talking about could work over months or a year, but it’s not realistic for the short term.”
“Makes sense,” Natalie says calmly. “What’s on your list?”
I swipe open my phone and look at the list I brainstormed on the plane. “Scavenger hunt, human knot, trivia, charades—what?” I demand because the twitch at the corner of Natalie’s mouth has morphed into laughter, and I’m awash in irritation.
She darts a quick look at Hanna, who nods. Natalie squares her shoulders and says, “Those are eighties-era team-building activities, not upscale, stylish wedding-resort offerings. We have to think bigger.”
“Those activities are classics because they work . And this is exactly what I didn’t want to get into. Arguing about every little thing instead of getting it done. You see?” I say to Hanna. “This is why I think you should fire her. Because if we go down the path she’s proposing, we’ll never pull together a program by the end of the summer, let alone in a month.” And Hanna will lose the business and we’ll lose the land. And then not only will I be exactly what grandfather said I was, I’ll be what I’ve always most feared: the Hott who let this family down.
But when I look at Hanna, far from nodding along, seeing the logic of my assertion, she’s glaring at me with the force of a thousand fiery suns.
“Preston Barrett Hott. I did not sign up to get dragged into Granddad’s bullshit and be a pawn in this ridiculous game while all of you get to act out your childhood crap all over Rush Creek.” She crosses her arms and takes a deep breath, closing her eyes briefly before she speaks. “I didn’t want to have to tell you or anyone this yet, but I’m pregnant again. So when I say I need this to be easy and uncomplicated?—”
But she doesn’t have to finish the sentence. It lands like a gut punch, and I’m sick to my stomach, remembering Hanna’s last pregnancy and how she ended up with preeclampsia. I remember her clutching her head, her face washed of all color, and the hours pacing in the waiting room in the hospital while they brought her blood pressure under control.
She was fine. Eloise is fine. But I never want her or her unborn babies to go through that again.
“I’m sorry,” I say quietly. “I’m an asshole.”
Hanna scowls. “Agreed.”
I’m half expecting Natalie to cosign, but she only says, “Hanna, I’m sorry I’m making this more difficult. Maybe I should , you know, recuse myself or whatever?—”
“No,” my sister says, more gently. “As he himself noted, Preston’s been an asshole since he walked in here.”
I should probably be glad she didn’t say since he was born .
“You,” she says to Natalie, “were just doing your job and trying to keep him from bombing out. And we need that from you, Preston’s opinion to the contrary. So here’s the deal. You”—she points at me—“are in charge because that’s what the will says. But you”—she points at Natalie—“are the brains of this operation. Which means that you”—she points back at me—“need to basically follow her around like an obedient puppy, saying Yes, ma’am .”
“Puppies don’t say?—”
Her glare shuts me up. “And both of you had better keep whatever feelings you have about all of this to yourselves because I have had it up to here”—she gestures to her hairline—“and I don’t have the time or mental energy to play games.”
She turns to Natalie, and to my great pleasure, she gives her a stern-teacher look. “If you and my brother don’t figure out a way to cooperate, I won’t have a business—which means you won’t have a job, and neither will I. And he can’t do this on his own, obviously.”
I start to protest, but Hanna aims a scowl at me that shuts me down.
“If you stay on and make this work,” she continues to Natalie, “I’ll give you a ten-thousand-dollar-raise and free housing for a year, in one of the new cabins. Regular employee rate after that but guaranteed for as long as you have the job.”
Natalie bites her lip. White teeth, soft plump flesh. My body tightens again. Amazing that there’s still a part of my brain with the energy to be turned on by someone who’s essentially making my life miserable. Definitely a testament to the desert of my sex life.
Hanna stands. And scowls at both of us. “So come up with something that works, and come up with it fast. You can audition your first ten activities at the Wilder-Hott family party at my house a week from this coming Sunday. And you can start by both being here tomorrow morning at nine, in the conference room, to strategize.”
Her scowl deepens. “And don’t let me hear from anyone that you’re making this difficult for each other.”