Chapter 22
CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO
RYDER
The feel of Penny’s mouth on mine detonated all common sense, and my body reacted without permission, hauling her into me, making us both let out a soft moan just as someone cleared their throat behind us.
Caleb stood in the doorway, juggling a laptop under his arm, two coffees, and an eye roll.
Penny slid out of my arms and hugged herself. “Sorry.”
“Nothing to be sorry for,” he assured her. “You good? ’Cause I can kick his ass if needed. Anything for my future wife.”
“No,” she said on a startled laugh. “I was…we were just, um, saying goodbye.”
Caleb smiled gently at her, then turned to me. “You never kiss any of us goodbye like that.”
My brother, the family comedian. I pointed to the door.
But it was Penny who headed toward it. “Don’t let him work too hard,” she said to Caleb. “Also, don’t let him do dangerous shit alone. Watch his back, you got me?”
He saluted her with a smart-ass, “Yes, ma’am.”
And then she was gone. A ray of sunshine loose in the world.
He grinned my way. “Your girl’s hot as hell.”
True story. If she was really mine, that is.
“We’ve got a bunch of stuff to go over before the Tuscany site meeting this afternoon,” Caleb said. “Your office?”
“Yeah. Give me ten minutes though.”
“After that kiss, I’d need at least ten.”
I flipped him off and had just entered my office when my cell rang.
If it’d been anyone other than my sister, I’d have ignored the call, but Kiera rarely contacted me first. Three days a week, I picked up her and Auggie’s wild wolf cub rug rats, took them to breakfast, and then dropped them off at preschool.
This gave me time with two of my very favorite people, but also gave Kiera a break because mornings at her house were like being at the circus.
Unfortunately, one of my other favorite people, Kiera herself, did her best to keep interactions with me at a minimum.
With all of us actually. She was doing better, but it was a slow process.
She still got overwhelmed easily, so we’d done our best to protect her from things she didn’t need to worry about.
Things like Hank not being in assisted living.
It hadn’t been easy. More than once, Kiera had caught a sighting of one of us with Hank out and about.
Doctor appointments, I’d told her, and the fact that she’d readily accepted the simple explanation without any follow-up questions told me we’d done the right thing in not telling her more.
But…the longer we waited, the harder it would be. We had no idea how she’d react. Would she hate us for keeping her out of the loop or thank us? It could go either way.
I connected the call with, “You okay?”
“Define okay.”
Fuck. “Alive,” I said tightly.
She snorted. “Then yeah, I’m okay. I mean, one toddler’s refusing to eat, and another’s sobbing because I won’t give him a second cookie, and I’m staring at Laundry Mountain, plus I’ve run out of peanut M&Ms, but hey, we can’t have everything.”
I took a deep breath. This was good, right? She didn’t have an emergency, and yet she’d still called to talk to me. Progress. “I can have M&Ms delivered by end of day. What else can I do? You know I’m shit at laundry.”
She snorted. “I need to go to Costco, but I can’t bring the kids.”
“Why not? They love Costco and their ‘examples.’”
“Yeah, well, apparently, toddlers can scream when they’re tired, but if I do it, I’m ‘being difficult.’ I need a kid-less trip to Costco?—”
“Sure.”
“—in Hawaii. I want to go to the Costco that’s in Hawaii. For like a week.”
A week with the cutest, most adorable heathens I’d ever met. I’d need reinforcements. Two of them, named Tucker and Caleb.
“Consider it done. I’ll handle the kids and anything else while you’re gone.”
She was quiet a moment, and the million things I wanted to say floated in my head.
I’m sorry.
I miss you.
I love you.
Do you still hate me as much as I hate me for what happened to Auggie?
But we Colburns had learned how to keep our emotions buried six feet deep—the price of growing up with a hard-ass, military, all-gruff-no-bluff father, who believed that children were to be quiet, obedient, little soldiers. So I said nothing and hoped she would keep talking.
“You’d actually do that?” she asked, sounding stunned. “Take the kids for a week? Are you insane?”
“Yes. And probably.” When I heard a suspicious sniff, my heart sank. “Are you…crying?”
“No!” she said soggily, definitely crying.
“I’ve just got something in my eye.” She blew her nose.
“I’m sorry. I didn’t expect you to be sweet.
I was just kidding about the week. Well, mostly.
I love my wild, feral wolf cubs with everything I’ve got, I really do.
It’s just that some days are harder than others. I just want an hour alone at Costco.”
“Tonight?”
“No, I’m too tired.”
“Okay, how about this? I’m coming in tomorrow morning to take the kiddos to breakfast—do you want to go then? I can also do any evening.”
“Yes! Our Costco opens at seven, and they have a bunch of really great breakfast samples.”
“Whatever floats your boat.”
“I can’t wait,” she said, the words warm and genuine. “And Ryder? ”
“Yeah?”
“Thanks.”
My throat tightened. “Any time. Maybe we could pick a day for us to hang out?—”
“Alex just put a crayon up his nose, gotta go.”
Sounded about right.
Caleb ambled into my office, dropped into the chair across from my desk and leaned back, kicking his feet up onto the wood, the picture of indolence plus a shit-eating grin.
“What?” I demanded.
“Nothing.”
“Spit it out.”
“You’re less grouchy since you started seeing Penny.”
“You know I’m not… seeing her,” I said.
“Have you told that to your tongue?”
I rolled my eyes. “Does anything you say actually make sense in your head before you say it?”
He smirked. “Tell me you’re not into her, I dare you. Can you even say it with a straight face?”
I let out a breath. “I’ve got no idea what I’m doing.”
“No kidding.”
“This isn’t funny.”
“Oh, but it is,” Caleb said. “My big, bad, tough brother, brought down hard by a cute slip of a girl who?—”
“She’s not a girl.”
His smile widened.
“Shit.” I swiped a hand over my face. “I just proved your point.”
“Yeah. But it’s a good look on you, man.”
I shook my head. “No, I mean it. I don’t know what the hell I’m doing. It’s not like I’m any good at being emotionally available.” I tilted back in my chair and stared at the ceiling. “And then there’s the fact that she’s way too good for me.”
When Caleb didn’t say anything, I straightened and looked at him.
He was staring at me with a mixture of grief, regret, and a rare bad temper. “Wrong,” he said tightly.
“You’re biased.”
“Of course I am. But you still deserve all the good things.” He said this fiercely, all good humor long gone.
“And if you want me to beat that shit into you, I’m game.
” He stood, palms on my desk, eyes intense as he leaned over me.
“If you keep yourself emotionally unavailable, you let Captain Asshole win. If you allow what happened to Auggie to take you out, you let the tragedy win. You gotta fight that bullshit.”
“Why do you sound like the older brother right now?”
A humorless laugh rumbled out of him. “Again, happy to beat that shit into you.” And then, as if he knew I needed to move on from this conversation, he plopped back into his seat. “Did Bill tell you he found out what happened with the missing materials?”
“Yes.”
“Do you believe it was a simple inventory mistake?”
I opened my mouth, and then closed it.
“You don’t,” Caleb said, straightening.
“I don’t know what I think yet.”
“Well, I know what I think. It smells bad.”
I nodded.
He studied me. “You have a plan.”
“I do. I started this company with just a few people, and we all had access to everything, but things have changed. The business has changed. We’ve got too many hands in the pie.” I paused. “People aren’t going to like the changes I have in mind.”
“Tough shit,” Caleb said.
I nodded. “First up, new levels of access, depending on the employee. Project managers don’t need direct access to inventory, they can go through material acquisitions. Foremen don’t need direct access to the accounts, they can go through bookkeeping.”
“How about an internal audit?”
I nodded. “That’s happening too. An in-depth audit by our accounting firm from top to bottom. Next, we’ll revisit our current tracking system, which is clearly flawed. And finally, we’re going to update our software, which I’ve been putting off for two years. We become Fort Knox.”
“We?”
I met my brother’s gaze. “If you were serious about picking up more responsibility, then yeah. We.”
Caleb smiled. His kick-ass, gonna-win-this-game smile.
“All of this is need-to-know only,” I said. “No one without the last name of Colburn is in on any of it until we’re finished with the internal audit.”
My brother paused. “No one? Not even Bill?”
“No one.”
He let out a slow breath. “You think someone’s doing this from the inside?”
“I don’t want to think that, but I need to eliminate the possibility without making anyone here feel like I don’t trust them.
So far all I know is there’s been too much blurring of the lines between jobs—and that’s on me.
It was nice having things more informal, and knowing that most of us can pick up the slack here on multiple trades as needed, but… ”
He nodded. “But…we need to batten down the hatches.”
“Yeah.”
“Damn.”
“It could be nothing more than simple errors and genuine mistakes,” I said. “But until we know for sure, we’re on our own.”
Caleb shrugged, unbothered by that. “Nothing new there, man.”
True enough.
He headed to the door, then stopped, his hand on the handle, head bowed. Swearing softly, he turned back.
“Forget something?”
“You missed our staff team-building rock climb last night. I wasn’t going to say anything, but…”
But I hadn’t been able to rock climb since losing Auggie, even though it’d been a favorite pastime since being a kid. “I was busy.”
His knowing eyes never left mine. “You’re the one who set up the exercise, using the twelve-story side of the Adams Center as a climbing wall to celebrate finishing the job. The owners were thrilled to host us, by the way. A great time was had by all.”
“That’s good.”
“You were missed.”
“I was busy,” I repeated.
“Yeah.” Caleb stood there for a beat, hands on hips, giving me the look of frustration I usually gave him.
“You’re the fearless leader, man,” he finally said.
“You’re the one who pushes us to take risks and step out of our comfort zone.
We’ve always followed you without question because you walked the talk and lived the dream.
” He paused, took a breath. “But you don’t do that anymore. ”
Kill shot.
“We’re not talking about this now.”
“Then when, Ry? Ever since Auggie died, you stopped living. You just stopped.” He shook his head. “I know how much you worry about Kiera. But do you have any idea how much we worry about you?”
I forced myself to meet his gaze. “No one needs to worry about me. We done here? We’ve got a meeting.”
“Shit. Yeah.” Caleb hesitated. “But Ry?”
“What?”
“We already lost Auggie. Don’t you dare make us lose you too.”
“You’re not going to lose me, drama .”
“Damn right we’re not going to lose you. And for the record, you’re the drama.” On that, he shut the door behind him.