Chapter 4
CHAPTER FOUR
RYDER
I hated being behind a desk with the same passion I reserved for broccoli and flip-flops, but someone had to catch up on the paperwork, even if it’d already been a long-ass day.
Caged and restless, I nearly growled when my personal admin, Grif, came to my office with one of his famed smoothies he liked to make me drink, along with that damn iPad of his that was undoubtedly filled with more shit for me to do.
He held out the smoothie.
I grimaced.
He grinned. “You’re such a big baby.”
Not many talked to me with the irreverence that my brothers did.
Grif had been a street kid when I’d first met him a decade ago, having been kicked out of his house for the audacity of being gay.
I’d given him a job and a place to stay.
He no longer lived with me, but he’d kept the job, for which I was grateful.
Suspiciously, I eyed the smoothie he insisted on making me at least weekly. “Why do they have to be green?”
“Come on now, what did green ever do to you?” He held out the glass. “Remember it tastes good, yeah?” He wiggled it a little, knowing I hated drinking anything green, but not knowing that it reminded me of military Hank forcing us kids to drink disgusting vegetable juice in the mornings.
“Hell.” I sipped cautiously at first as always, but as promised, it tasted delicious.
Grif laughed at me, then nodded to the iPad. “Quarterlies are due tomorrow and there’s a list of stuff the accountant needs from you by end of week. Also due tomorrow…employee reviews.” And then he was gone.
I latched on to the most important word he’d said—tomorrow.
Tomorrow was not today. So I stood, needing out of the building more than I needed air.
We currently had more projects than we could handle, and I’d spent too many hours this week staring at a screen.
The only bright spot had been the twenty minutes yesterday morning when Penny had been here, stocking us up on food and setting up a birthday party for Bill in the conference room.
I was leaning against the huge table when she’d walked into the conference room, my excuses lined up for why I’d been there—an early meeting, I needed caffeine… But truthfully, I needed to see her simply because, more often than not lately, she was the best ten minutes of my day.
She’d walked in and met my gaze, her brows raising sassily.
I’d laughed. My first laugh for the day.
Her hair was, as always, slipping out of its ponytail and flying around her pretty face.
I knew it drove her crazy, but I loved it.
I wanted to sink my hands in that hair. I also loved that small crease that formed between her eyebrows when she frowned in concentration. Or at me. Especially at me.
Clearly, I was a very sick man.
She’d wanted a second table for the food. We dragged one in from the storage room, the two of us getting stuck in the doorway, and for a beat, we’d been pressed together from shoulders to knees.
Best half second of my entire week.
Knowing nothing was going to top that, I headed out of my office. I hadn’t even gotten to my truck before Caleb called.
“Hey,” he said when I answered. “You want in on the office bet?”
“What is it?”
“Whether or not anyone will get the Legend of Star Falls on camera this week.”
“You mean the Legend that doesn’t exist? No.” I paused. “You?”
“Hell, yeah. I’m betting no one will record proof. It’s easy money, man. You sure you don’t want in?”
“Very sure.”
“Your loss. Where you off to?”
“To relieve Nell of Captain Asshole.”
“Oh. Right.”
I could almost hear the smile fall off Caleb’s face as he hesitated. “Need any help with him this weekend?”
Yes . “No. It’ll be your turn soon enough.”
“Yeah, can’t fucking wait.”
My gut churned with regret and concern. Being the oldest had meant being the protector. And that hadn’t gone away just because we were no longer kids. I would shield my siblings as much as I could, but Caleb had taken nearly as much of Hank’s temper as I had.
“You don’t have to?—”
“I do.”
“You don’t,” I insisted, trying to sound like I meant it.
But I was exhausted. I’d never intended to end up running a company with a hundred employees, spending all day managing people, reading contracts, and schmoozing clients.
All I’d ever wanted was to work with my own hands.
I wanted to take on old, decrepit buildings that no one else saw the value in and bring them back to life.
But somehow, life had gotten complicated, and it no longer mattered what I wanted.
“How’s he been?” Caleb asked quietly.
I exhaled slowly. After Hank’s first stroke two years ago, the guy had leaned on his Captain Asshole personality hard, getting himself kicked out of every single assisted living place within two hundred miles of Star Falls.
Quite the feat. “Not himself.”
Caleb gave a soft, mirthless laugh. “Yeah. That second stroke changed everything.”
After that second stroke, he’d required a craniotomy.
And that time, to our collective shock, Hank had woken up a completely different person—no longer verbal, not really, but neither was he Captain Asshole.
This man who looked and walked like Hank Colburn now smiled, hugged, even laughed, always just happy to be.
It was a complete mindfuck.
Even so, after rehab, none of the assisted living facilities would take him back.
So Caleb, Tucker, and I had looked at the calendar and divided the year into three.
Three, not four, because we’d left Kiera out of all of it for many reasons, the biggest being that she was still grieving the loss of Auggie, her husband.
That Auggie had also been my best friend and business partner didn’t play into this. I was Kiera’s older brother, and it was my job to make sure she was okay. Auggie would want me to do whatever was necessary in order to ensure that.
I was taking the first shift with Hank, and then I’d pass him onto Caleb, and then Tucker, and we’d do our best, various childhood traumas and triggers and all.
I’d taken the first rotation, and he’d been with me for a month now. It’d felt like ten years.
“This probably isn’t a good time to tell you,” Caleb said reluctantly. “But…”
I stopped in the middle of the parking lot and pinched the bridge of my nose. “I really hate sentences from you that start that way.”
“Hey,” he said, “I hardly ever start sentences that way.”
“You often start sentences that way. Alarmingly often.”
“Name one.”
“Okay,” I said. “How about that time you put blue Gatorade in a Windex bottle at school and walked around drinking it until a teacher caught you and called 911? You called me in a panic from the ambulance racing you to the ER to get your stomach pumped.”
“Okay, well, that was my bad,” he admitted.
“And then there’s the time that your asshat college friends dared you, the biggest college hockey star in the country at the time, to walk into a fast-food joint and say, ‘Dude, the M&Ms are coming and they have guns.’”
“Well, how was I supposed to know he’d call the cops? And then TMZ.”
I tipped my head back and stared up at the pink and purple sky, heavy with dusk as it chased the sun over the hills. “Why are we having this conversation?”
“Tucker discovered trouble on the Millbrook job. Materials went missing to the tune of $13,500. Bill’s investigating.”
“Shit.” It happened, and it wasn’t a huge number in the scope of the job’s ten million dollar budget, but it was enough to put a strain on everyone while we got to the bottom of things.
In the past when this happened, sometimes it turned out to be an inventory or accounting error.
Other times we followed the trail straight to the thieves, who could be anyone from stupid teenagers looking for a thrill to someone making a living stealing materials off jobsites and then reselling them.
And sometimes we never found out what happened, and our insurance kicked in. I hated all of those scenarios.
“I’ll talk to Bill.” And file a police report. And contact the insurance company… “Gotta go.”
“Over and out,” my smart-ass brother said.
Fifteen minutes later, I parked at Nell’s house. Because my mind apparently has its own mind, I looked for Penny’s car, but she wasn’t here. Refusing to acknowledge the flash of disappointment, I headed up the walk.
The door opened and Nell stood there in an orange track suit and matching lipstick, looking like a pumpkin latte. “Hey, hon, come on in. Your dad’s working on a puzzle on the back porch while I try to fix a leaky faucet.”
I followed her to the kitchen. A worthless lightweight hammer and one of those tiny screwdrivers people used to fix glasses lay on the counter next to the sink—neither of which were going to fix a leaky faucet.
“Be right back,” I said, and returned with tools from my truck.
Nell eyed them when I returned. “What’s all that?”
“Allen wrench, spanner wrench, slip-joint pliers, utility knife, and a real screwdriver.”
“I need to get me some of these,” she said.
“It’s okay, I’ll fix the sink.”
“You should know I’ve called a bunch of plumbers over the years, but no one’s ever been able to fix it. You think you’re the man for the job?”
“Yep.” I’d just popped off the faucet handle to access the mechanism when Nell tapped me on the shoulder.
“Honey, maybe you’re new at this, but it’s leaking from the faucet part, not the handle.”
“See this ridge that goes over the valve seat? Inside’s a washer that presses against the valve seat to create a tight seal.
It gets a lot of wear and tear from repeated use.
That’s your leak.” I showed her where it was cracked and all stretched out.
“You just need a faucet repair kit. I’ll bring one tomorrow.
” I eyed the ladder leaning against the countertop. “What’s that for?”
“Penny borrowed it from a neighbor. The lights are flickering and giving us headaches, but she hasn’t had a spare second to look yet. Thought I’d have a go.”