Sunshine (Aster Springs #2)

1. Dylan

one

Dylan

I twist a little, trying to find a more comfortable position next to my daughter on her tiny twin mattress, then risk a whisper in the darkness. “Are you asleep, Little Bee?”

“Not yet.” Izzy opens her big, brown eyes, and her sweet breath caresses my cheek. “Don’t go, Daddy.”

“It’s okay.” I press my lips to her forehead and move my palm in circles over her back while ignoring the cramp in my calf and reminding myself that she won’t be six years old forever. “I’m not going anywhere.”

Twenty minutes later, I still haven’t moved. My arm is numb where it’s been wedged under my head for too long, there’s a twinge in my neck from the odd angle of Izzy’s pillow, and my abdominal muscles ache with the tension of keeping myself balanced on the edge of the bed. When the rise and fall of her chest is slow and even, and when her death grip on her stuffed bunny finally slackens, I extract myself with ninja-level care and crouch beside her bed.

I tuck the blankets up under her chin, and as my chest tightens at the picture of her sleeping face on the pillow, I brush a stray lock of her dark hair from her sleep-kissed cheek. It’s a new thing, this staying with her at night until she falls asleep. At first, I assumed it was a phase. Just a game that’d pass in a couple of weeks. But it’s been two months without any sign she’ll give it up, and I’m not about to tell her no . If that’s what she needs from me, that’s what she gets. I’ll snuggle her to sleep for as long as it takes to reassure her that she’s safe. Protected. Loved.

“What’s going on in that clever little head of yours?” I ask in a whisper, speaking into the night all the hopes and fears I can’t face in the day. “What more can I do to make sure you’re okay?”

It’s no surprise that the answers don’t miraculously come to me, so I tiptoe from her room and close her door, pausing with a grimace as I try to stretch out a persistent knot in my trap. Curling my six-foot-two body into Izzy’s little bed every night might explain the tension in my neck and shoulders—and long hours running the kitchen at my family’s restaurant certainly don’t help—but it’s more than that. It’s life . I’m so fucking stressed. All the fucking time.

Running a business is hard. Being the only man to live on the family ranch for most of the last nine years was hard. Single parenting is hard, and raising a daughter on my own has me questioning my judgment every day. I want to believe that Izzy’s anxiety isn’t my fault and that it’s only a coincidence it started after her mother’s most recent visit, but the worry gnaws at me constantly. Izzy’s well-being is on me, and if my daughter has any shot of having a happy, well-adjusted childhood, I’ve got to pull my head out of my ass and make some changes. Fast.

The house is as quiet as it can be when I live with my two sisters in our old family home. It’s after nine p.m., so the lights are low to make it easy for Izzy to sleep, but a golden glow leaks out from under my older sister Charlie’s closed door, and the sound of a shower running tells me that my younger sister Daisy’s home too. So, like I’ve done every night this week, I head downstairs to where my stresses lay strewn across the kitchen table.

With a resigned groan, I jog down the stairs and cross the living room, round the corner to the kitchen, and freeze on the spot. With her reddish-blonde hair piled in a messy knot on her head and her small yet curvy frame swamped by a sunshine-yellow hoodie, my sister’s best friend sits at my dining table as if she lives here. She doesn’t notice me at first, her dark lashes lowered as we both watch a spoon piled high with Froot Loops disappear between her pillowy pink lips.

My heart thuds, and my throat catches when I try to swallow. I tell myself it’s because I wasn’t expecting to find anyone in the kitchen. It’s got nothing to do with the fact that even though I’ve known Poppy Golightly all her life, she’s only had the power to make my stomach flip since she returned to Aster Springs last summer. It’s been six months, and my nervous system is still at the mercy of her eyes. Her skin. Her curves. Her lips. She’s more captivating than she was all those years ago. Brighter and softer. Almost incandescent. And all I keep thinking is…was she always this pretty?

“Hey, Pippi,” I say as I pass behind her and tug her hair loose on my way to the fridge. I grab a beer, crack it open, then take a chair on the opposite side of the table.

Poppy tries to smack me as I pass, misses completely, and then rolls her gray-green eyes as she reaches up to reassemble her messy twist. “Are we still doing this? Seriously?” Her mouth twitches, and I pretend she likes it when I tease her. “I wore braids once . You really should be over it by now.”

I shrug and open my laptop, the screen buzzing to life as I recall the afternoon twenty-odd years ago when she showed up at our house rocking twin braids, a gap-toothed grin, and a spray of pale freckles that made her look like Pippi Longstocking.

“Guess it stuck. Sucks to be you.”

She huffs out an amused breath. “What’s your age again?”

I ignore the question. I turn thirty this year, and I’m still not sure how I feel about it. Unfortunately, the subject of my age isn’t so easy to dodge.

At the exact moment I notice my reading glasses still sitting where I tossed them carelessly on a stack of paperwork, Poppy sees them, too, and she snatches them up a second before I can get my hand on them.

“Oh, my God.” She laughs musically as she balances the black frames on the tip of her narrow nose. “Are these yours?”

I glower and extend my hand, ignoring the flush creeping up my neck. “They’re for computer work.”

Poppy pretends to be contrite as she takes off my glasses, slowly folds in the arms, and places them on my upturned palm.

I tuck them out of sight under a stack of paperwork. “Thank you. Now quit being a brat.”

“Quit being a buzzkill,” she retorts. “And what is all this anyway?”

Poppy gestures to the piles of papers and folders and sticky notes covering the kitchen table, an oversized and well-worn timber piece that seats twelve and has been here since I was a child and my parents were alive. We needed something this big to fit our family—Mom and Dad and the five of us kids, plus the friends and teammates and variety of strays we’d bring home for dinner. Poppy never counted as one of those strays. She’s been a fixture at this table since the day she was born—literally. Our moms met at the hospital when Daisy was born two days before Poppy, and she’s been part of our lives ever since.

“It’s— Wait.” I glance at Poppy’s almost-empty bowl of cereal, the loose-fitting sweats, and the fuzzy blue slippers on her feet. “What are you doing here?”

It’s funny how Daisy and Poppy went out into the world to search for adventure, but ten years later, it’s like they never left. Sometimes, I forget we’re not kids anymore and that these two aren’t eight years old jumping rope on the porch. Or twelve and sneaking field mice into my gym bag. Or fourteen and setting the curtains on fire trying to cast spells in Daisy’s bedroom. Sixteen and asking me to pick them up from parties they aren’t supposed to be at. Seventeen and expecting me to cover for them while they cut class to get high in our old barn. Half my life was spent keeping the girls safe, and it drove me crazy, but I cared too much not to be there when they called.

When the girls left Aster Springs not long after they graduated—Poppy almost the moment her diploma was in her hand, Daisy a year later after our dad died—it should have been my ticket to freedom. I was only twenty then, young enough and dumb enough to get into plenty of trouble on my own, but with Mom and Dad gone and my two brothers off chasing dreams of their own, it fell on me to run the ranch with Charlie. More responsibility. More stress. More people depending on me to be the man they needed me to be.

And then Izzy came along—precious, precocious, and proof that I can be reckless sometimes too. She’s the best thing to ever happen to me, but having any freedom as a father? Forget it. Every thought and action and spare minute I have belongs to that little girl.

“Rude,” Poppy replies flatly, interrupting my thoughts as she slurps up the last spoon of milky cereal. “I’m waiting for Daisy, and then we’re watching The Notebook .”

“ The Notebook ?”

She doesn’t register my teasing tone and instead sighs as her smile turns wistful. That little gap between her teeth is still there all these years later, and I fixate on it as she replies, “Yes. It’s so romantic.”

“But a movie?” I won’t be happy until I’ve properly annoyed her, so I bait her with a disdainful eyebrow. “On a Friday night?”

Poppy’s expression goes from glazed and dreamy to sharp in an instant, and she narrows her eyes in a pretty glare. Bullseye.

“Yes,” she says. “We’re old like you now.”

“Be serious.” I shake my head to hide a satisfied smirk, take a swig of beer, and tap at my computer, expanding one of my spreadsheets to full screen and then navigating to the browser with a billion open tabs. “I’ve only got two years on you.”

“Oh, but you’ve always been so much more mature.”

Poppy bats her thick lashes as she reaches around to the back of her chair to dig around for something in the comically oversized tote hanging there. She pulls out a pot of lip balm, screws off the lid to press a finger into the gloss, then dabs the pink cherry-scented substance over her mouth.

It’s the most compelling thing I’ve seen all week.

When I realize I’m staring, I blink a couple of times before refocusing on the computer screen, ignoring the need to put on my glasses as I squint at the blurry letters.

“So?” Poppy asks again. “What’s all this stuff?”

She holds up an information pack for Izzy’s new private school, and I take a breath to cover a surge of overwhelm. My daughter is transferring the week after next, and it’s kicked off a cascade of changes in her schedule, which is why the table is littered with lists and forms for her extracurricular activities. Then there are the wrinkled napkins scrawled with my early drafts of spring menus for The Hill—our family restaurant at Silver Leaf Ranch. Under those is a stack of inventory reports as well as lists of our winter crops. Then there are the requests from our farm manager for extra workers when the warmer weather comes our way.

It’s a fucking mess, is what it is. Kind of like the inside of my head right now. Kind of like my life.

“It’s Dylan trying to control the world,” Daisy declares as she stomps into the room and heads straight for the pantry. She’s in a pair of navy plaid pajamas, gray wool-lined boots, and a black headband holding her long blonde waves back from her face, which is hidden behind a sticky paper mask. Neither Poppy nor I bat an eyelid.

“I’m not trying to control the world,” I argue. “Just my world.”

Daisy drops a bag of corn chips, another of popcorn, a packet of marshmallows, and a slab of white chocolate on the table, then takes a seat. “And how’s that working out for you, big brother?”

“Yeah, good.” I snatch up the corn chips, yanking them past Daisy’s outstretched hand, and ignore her whiny protest as I toss them out of her reach. “Thanks for asking.”

“You’re doing too much.” Daisy gets to her feet and circles the table to retrieve her snack. She pokes my side as she passes, right between the ribs where it hurts as much as it tickles, and I grunt. “You’re going to burn yourself out.”

“Thanks for the tip,” I reply. “Meanwhile, this crap will rot your insides.”

Daisy nods solemnly as she stuffs a corn chip in her mouth and then licks the powdered cheese from her fingers. “Noted.”

“Everything you see here, Daze?” I circle my palm over the papers covering more than half the tabletop. “These are my responsibilities . Things other people count on me to manage, and there’s nobody else around to do it.”

Growing up, my little sister never understood the concept of consequences, never had to worry about letting anyone down, and never had to bear the weight of caring for an entire family. That’s the way I wanted it, even if her cluelessness annoys the shit out of me sometimes.

I lift my beer to my mouth as Daisy cocks her head and narrows her eyes. “You know what you need?”

“A good dicking?” Poppy replies, and when I choke on my drink, she cackles. “Sorry. I thought she was talking to me.”

Jesus Christ. I wipe my mouth, set down the bottle, and try hard not to shift in my seat. Do not think about Poppy naked. Do not think about Poppy naked.

“What you need ,” Daisy continues, briefly rounding her eyes at Poppy to shut her up before turning to me, “is help.”

I shake my head before the final word leaves her lips because we’ve had this conversation a dozen times and my answer is always the same. There’s nothing on this table that I can outsource. Not a single thing.

Daisy lifts a bunch of napkins covered with my messy scrawl and shoves them in my face. “I refuse to believe there isn’t anyone else at the restaurant who can design next season’s menu.”

I get to my feet and lean across the table, making a grab for the napkins as Daisy waves them over her head. She passes them to Poppy, who grins like the devil as she tucks them between her thighs. I stare as the squares of paper disappear between the soft fabric of her sweatpants and Poppy clenches her muscles as if daring me to pry her knees apart.

Do not think about spreading Poppy’s thighs. Do not think about spreading Poppy’s thighs.

I sink back into my chair. “I’m the executive chef, and it’s our family restaurant,” I tell Daisy with a voice that barely cracks at all. “My name— our name—is on the line, plus coming up with new dishes is my favorite part of the job.”

“Then hire someone to run the kitchen on weekends,” Daisy suggests.

“I’m working on it,” I hedge, and it’s not a total lie. It’s number eight hundred and nine on a list titled Things I Need to Think About.

“Fine.” Daisy heaves a manila folder stuffed with papers into the air. “How about the farm? Finn can help with that. He’s got time.”

Finn, our middle brother, was discharged from the military nearly a year ago, and after backpacking around the country for a few months, he showed up out of nowhere last summer with his duffel and a rescue dog. He claimed Mom and Dad’s old bungalow by the river, moved himself in, and has barely said more than a dozen words at a time ever since.

“Finn already pitches in with the farm labor,” I argue, using Daisy as an excuse to ignore the warm weight of Poppy’s gaze as it bounces back and forth between my sister and me. “He works with the maintenance team every other afternoon, and—correct me if I’m wrong, but we both know I’m not—you need his help with the horses. You can’t manage five of them and the trail rides on your own.”

Daisy scowls but drops the papers because she does, in fact, know I’m right.

Next, she sifts through the debris until she finds a copy of Izzy’s schedule. I pluck it from between her fingertips and speak firmly over whatever’s about to come out of her open mouth.

“Absolutely not.”

“You don’t even know what I was going to say!” she protests.

“Yeah, I do. Something about hiring a nanny to help with Izzy, and the answer is no fucking way.”

“Dylan—”

“Nope. Not going to happen.”

I push back my chair, ignoring the way it screeches against the hardwood floors, drop my empty bottle in the recycling bin, and then stick my head in the fridge for another beer.

Of all the people who need me to be there for them, nobody is more important than Izzy. Her mother glides in and out of her life when it suits her, and if I wasn’t already feeling guilty about not setting firmer boundaries around Annalise’s role in our lives, I am now that Izzy can’t fucking fall asleep without her tiny hand tucked into mine. I refuse to give my daughter another reason to believe her parents don’t love her, so it’s a hard no on asking a stranger to share any part of my duties as her dad. End of story.

When I return to the table empty-handed, the beer I was looking for forgotten, Daisy has removed the paper mask from her face and replaced it with a thoughtful frown. Poppy’s expression is too still. Too passive. Too…innocent.

They’re up to something.

“What?” I ask.

“Tell Poppy what’s going on with Izzy,” Daisy orders.

I cock an eyebrow. I know what she means, and I have no problem sharing it with Poppy, but I’m suspicious about Daisy’s motives, so if she wants my cooperation, she’s going to have to work for it.

“You mean you haven’t already told her everything?”

It’s a valid question. The two of them are so tight that I doubt there’s a single secret between them.

Daisy kicks my ankle under the table, and I wince. “Just explain the details because it’s kind of complicated. Tell her about the tests and Annalise and the money.” Daisy tilts her head in Poppy’s direction. “You know. The plan .”

Poppy watches me with patient expectation, and I know that whatever these two have up their sleeves, they genuinely care about Izzy. That’ll always be my weak spot, and it doesn’t take much to convince me to talk about my daughter.

I release a heavy sigh and drag a hand down my face. I’m so freaking exhausted. Not tired. Exhausted . The kind of fatigue that can’t be fixed by a good night’s sleep. A fatigue that’ll probably live in my bones until the day I die.

“We always knew there was something special about Izzy,” I explain, wonder tugging at the corner of my mouth as I run a thumb over the edges of Izzy’s report cards. “I know all parents say that about their kids, but this was different. She could hold a pencil and draw a circle before she was a year old. Her vocabulary exploded long before she turned two. She learned to read while other kids her age were still figuring out their letters, and when she started kindergarten…”

I run a hand through my hair, noting for the hundredth time this week that I desperately need a haircut. “Her teachers couldn’t extend her far or fast enough. Reading. Writing. Spelling. Numbers. Izzy raced through her work like she’d done it all before and kept asking for more.”

“Wow. That’s impressive.” Poppy’s focus shifts from me to Daisy, who nods like the proud aunt she is, and back again, this time with a mischievous indentation in her cheek. “She gets her brains from her mother, I assume?”

“ Ha ha .” I throw her a sarcastic smile that she matches with a bright grin, the little gap in her teeth drawing my eye again. “But also…yes.”

There’s no point denying it. I’m a small-town chef running a restaurant I inherited instead of earned, and I’m a single dad living with my two sisters in our family home. Annalise is a high-flying international lawyer who visited Silver Leaf for the first time eight years ago and gifted a cocky young Dylan Davenport with one wild Christmas weekend.

For her, those forty-eight hours were a way to pass time. But me? It was infatuation at first sight. She was ten years older. Infinitely more intelligent. Entirely irresistible and way out of my league. I practically begged her to come back, and we hooked up three or four times a year for the next two years until one day, she showed up with a positive pregnancy test and a proposal—just not the kind I was expecting.

She wasn’t interested in giving up her career for a baby, but she respected my choice as the father, so… Did I want to raise our child by myself?

I didn’t think twice before I said yes.

“After Izzy flew through kindergarten,” I continue, “Annalise and I agreed it was important to know what we’re dealing with, so Izzy had a bunch of assessments and tests, and she was identified as gifted.” I pick up a stack of papers outlining Izzy’s academic requirements and her extracurricular commitments and hand them to Poppy. “My daughter is a freaking genius, and now it’s my job to keep up.”

Poppy homes in on the private school brochures and points at the cover image of happy kids in crisp blue uniforms. “A new school?”

“It’s a day school not too far from here with small class sizes and extended academic programs for kids like Izzy. She starts two weeks from Monday.”

Poppy flicks through the paperwork, and when she reaches the page listing tuition, her eyes grow wide as she lets out a low whistle. “Did you win the lottery or something?”

“Uh…Annalise is covering all the costs.”

I clear my throat and shove aside my ego. It wasn’t my idea to take Izzy out of public school—my eldest brother Chord was an ice hockey prodigy from the day he could stay upright in skates, and I know firsthand what life can be like for kids who are defined by a single talent and raised to pursue it above all else—but Annalise is adamant that Izzy’s education be our top priority, and I can’t argue with that.

“She’s also paying for a bunch of extracurricular activities to balance all the left-brain stuff, isn’t that right, Dylan?” Daisy adds.

“Uh, yeah.”

Poppy helps herself to a random flier and scans the first couple of lines. “Music lessons?”

“Trumpet on Mondays,” I confirm. “Izzy’s choice.”

Poppy hums quietly and trades one flier for another. “Foreign languages?”

“Spanish. On Wednesdays.”

“Ballet,” Poppy murmurs, moving the papers around on the table. “Soccer. Ceramics.”

“Fridays and Saturdays,” I confirm with a nod.

“Plus, horse-riding lessons with me, of course,” Daisy adds.

“And cooking classes at home,” I say.

I dig around for a copy of Izzy’s schedule and pass it to Poppy. Her brows draw in as she scans the grid that outlines Izzy’s whereabouts Monday to Sunday from sunup to sundown.

The school stuff might be Annalise’s idea, but the rest of it is mine. If Izzy is going to be put into a school that extends her intellect, then I want to make sure she’s a well-rounded kid with interests that go beyond what she learns in her classes. Art and music and language and sports.

I saw what happened to my brother when my parents hyper-focused on one talent above all else, and Chord would be the first to agree that he doesn’t want Izzy to turn out the way he did: a legend, sure, but one who woke up one day to realize all anyone saw when they looked at him was a pretty face and a hockey stick. And while he was busy chasing hockey records, he’d lost everything and everyone he cared about. It took falling in love with his personal assistant before my brother realized what he was missing.

And Izzy isn’t going to end up like me either: a single parent living at home with not enough options and so many responsibilities that he can’t find time to get his hair cut.

“This is a lot of stuff for a little girl,” Poppy murmurs.

“It’s a lot of stuff for her father ,” Daisy huffs under her breath and starts tearing apart a helpless pink marshmallow. “She might not care enough to actually be here, but at least Izzy’s mother has given you money to hire a nanny to help out.”

“I don’t need a nanny,” I say, ignoring the comments about Annalise. “And I don’t want a stranger in and out of Izzy’s life right now. She needs stability and certainty and safety.”

I don’t mention the recent changes to Izzy’s bedtime routine. My family hasn’t noticed yet, and causing them worry isn’t going to ease my own.

“I agree,” Daisy says, stuffing the mangled marshmallow in her mouth.

“You do?” I ask with surprise.

“Absolutely. My clever, funny, adorable niece isn’t spending her afternoons and weekends with someone she doesn’t know and adore.”

“So…” What the hell is Daisy getting at? I frown and rub a hand over my jaw, swallowing a tired sigh at the reminder that not only do I need a haircut, but I also need a fucking shave. “So, do you want to be her nanny?”

Daisy leans in and pats my hand. “No, dear brother. Not me.”

I squint at Daisy’s smug expression. As if she beat me at a game I didn’t know we were playing.

“Then…who?”

Her eyes cut to the other side of the table. I follow her gaze to Poppy’s totally unsurprised face, and my stomach drops hard and fast.

“No.” The word shoots out before I even think it, like a reflex.

“ Yes .” Daisy drums her feet under the table like a freaking child. “It’s perfect!”

The perfect solution to my not having enough hours in the day is to hire my sister’s best friend to be my daughter’s nanny? The answer to all my problems is to add one more? Because Poppy may be the first woman to make my palms sweat in ten years, and she may even be a fantastic nanny, but she’s also the biggest temptation I’ve ever had to resist in my life.

I’m not in the market for casual sex anymore—now that I have Izzy, I’m not certain that sex can even be casual—but even if I were, Poppy is the last person I’d hook up with. I care about her too much to treat her like a plaything. And then there’s Daisy. She’s always been funny about my dating her friends, and it’s been an unspoken rule since we were kids that I keep my hands to myself.

But how the hell do I do that if Poppy is here every day? How do I keep pretending that I don’t want to thread my fingers into her hair, pin her against the nearest hard surface, and kiss her until her knees buckle and she can’t catch her breath?

Hiring Poppy is the definition of reckless and there’s no room for recklessness in my life. Not anymore.

“Absolutely not.” I cross my arms and glare at Daisy, trying and failing to ignore the way hurt twitches at the corners of Poppy’s eyes. My forearms tighten against the pang of regret behind my sternum. “Give it up, Daze, because I don’t need help, and Izzy does not need a nanny.”

Especially not one as tempting as Penelope Golightly.