Hott Hotter Hottest (Hott Springs Eternal #5)

Chapter 1

Tucker

This sucks.

I’ve provided security to all kinds of people—princesses, CEOs, scientists, actors, singers, and once a guy who ran a punk-rock nail salon out of a cart in Chicago.

But since I left the Army, I’ve never had to watch my own back.

I peer out the windows of my shithole Rush Creek apartment, checking what I can see of the parking lot. I need to install some cameras, because there are still a few corners I can’t catch from this angle.

I do a quick scan of the hallway before stepping out and locking the door behind me, then scope out the stairwell before creeping down the steps (which desperately need a vacuuming).

Keeping an eye on the nooks and crannies of the building, I hurry toward my truck, making sure to stick to the shadows and dart across open areas.

I wonder what my drill sergeants and executive-protection instructors would say about me using my elite training to hide from a seventy-something blowhard who wears royal-blue and kelly-green suits.

Of course, if they knew what I was really trying to escape, they might have more respect for the whole operation.

When Arthur Weggers, my grandfather’s lawyer, catches up to me, he’s going to read me my letter from my grandfather’s will.

And if it’s anything like the letters for my four brothers, it’s gonna suck.

A lot. So far, my grumpy scientist brother got stuck being the receptionist at a spa, my movie-star brother had to fake his own celebrity wedding, my uptight finance brother had to plan a fun calendar for our family’s resort, and my cynical divorce-lawyer brother had to become a wedding planner.

My grandfather could have dreamt up fucking anything for me.

Kindergarten teacher. Tarot-card reader. Toe-fungus expert.

But of course right now, he’s managed to make me do the one thing I swore never to do again: Be a bodyguard. My own.

Even dead, my grandfather’s a complete pain in my ass…but at least I’m only in charge of my own safety.

The coast is clear. I cross the parking lot, briefly basking in late-May Oregon sun, climb into my truck, and drive into town.

I’m supposed to meet my sister, Hanna, for a beer.

Pretty sure this is her way of getting proof of life.

But if that’s what it takes to keep her and the rest of my siblings off my back, so be it.

I make it to town no problem, then run the gauntlet of tourists strolling through crosswalks like car traffic isn’t a thing.

Rush Creek is a popular tourist destination, partly because it’s near Oregon’s big ski mountains but mainly because it used to be the home of one of our state’s most famous rodeos.

After the rodeo shut down, it looked like Rush Creek might turn into a ghost town, but then some hot springs popped to the surface, and all of a sudden we were swamped in weddings and vacationers.

You can hardly drive into town without hitting someone so blissed out on their vacation vibes that they step into the street like Wile E. Coyote striding off a cliff.

Thankfully, I make it to Oscar’s Saloon and Grill without endangering any lives and pull into a parking space right out front.

I head inside, registering several faces I know, including a few stuffed buffalo, moose, and elk heads that are more familiar to me than most of the bar and wait staff.

Pushing through the saloon doors, I spot Hanna.

She slides out of the booth and wraps her arms around me.

I hug her back, hard. Hanna’s barely over five feet, with short dark hair and a round face.

She says what she means, she means what she says, and she doesn’t talk shit to or about anyone.

I’ve got so much fucking respect for my sister, and that was even before she took a bunch of worn-out ranch land and turned it into a successful wedding resort.

Hanna’s the main reason I’ve stayed in Rush Creek since I came back almost two years ago.

Otherwise, there’s no way I’d still be living in my paper-box apartment in my childhood town, desperately trying to dodge Weggers.

“How are you?” she asks as we sit down on opposite sides of the booth.

I shrug.

She rolls her eyes.

“What?”

“Even I know a shrug isn’t an answer to that question.”

“I’m fine.”

Hanna looks like she’s going to say more, but then I glance up and groan. My two oldest brothers, Preston and Rhys, are coming toward us.

“What are they doing here?”

She gets a squirrelly look on her face. She’s up to something.

Shit. This is why I try to avoid family gatherings.

They always end with someone wanting to get me talking about how I’m doing.

And the honest answer to that question would inevitably lead to my revealing what happened two years ago, which is something I still haven’t told any of my siblings.

“Hey, man,” Preston says, sliding in next to me.

I grunt.

“Loquacious as ever,” Rhys says, joining us on Hanna’s side of the booth. He’s the lawyer, the one with the big vocabulary.

“What does that even mean?” Preston asks.

Rhys smirks. “Talkative.”

“Just say talkative, then.” Pres scowls.

“But loquacious annoys you so much more. Kills two birds with one stone.”

If you’d asked me two years ago to describe Preston and Rhys, I would have said, Picture the two most uptight guys you can imagine, in expensive suits, glaring at each other.

These days they’re a lot chiller. In fact, hell may have frozen over, because they’re both wearing jeans.

But they still fight as much as they did as kids.

Some things never change.

“Hey-o,” another familiar voice says, and there they are, my youngest brother, Quinn, and my middle brother, Shane, easing into the booth, crowding me into the corner. I glare at Hanna. She looks away.

Yeah. Up to something. But I’m trapped now, and short of shoving my way out, I got nothing.

Quinn missed his calling in personal security—he’s maybe an inch or two shorter than I am and built like a mountain man, kind of a waste for a nerdy scientist—but Shane looks exactly like what he is: a movie star.

Gold-streaked brown hair, slightly too long in the front.

He wears clothes that cost more than my rent per month, and even I have to admit he looks good on a red carpet, where’s he’s taken a few turns.

I shift uneasily in the corner. I’m a sitting duck here for Arthur Weggers, but also, I’ve got nowhere to go if my siblings start the Inquisition, and I can’t imagine any other reason they’ve ambushed me. For now, all I can do is keep my mouth shut and order cowboy nachos and a pale ale.

“So how’s everyone?” Hanna asks as the beers arrive, and I grudgingly participate in their over-the-top cheers-ing ritual. Two years ago none of us were talking, and now everyone’s glass has to touch everyone else’s.

My brothers start chiming in, and it’s like the Toxic Positivity Recovery “Before” segment.

It’s all good and great and couldn’t be better, and then they’re breaking it down: Ivy’s pregnant (cheers, hugs for Shane, an omigod and a few tears from Hanna, who just had her second baby), Rhys and Eden bought a new place together…

you get the drill. Five perfect Domestic Bliss Units.

And I’m happy for all of them—of course I fucking am.

But it’s like looking through a slightly wavy piece of glass…

everything happening on the other side feels distant and impossible.

And then, like their heads are on a coordinated swivel, five sets of eyes focus on me.

“Tuck,” Rhys says. “How goes it, man?”

It’s gentle. Too gentle. That You’re brittle and we know it thing I fucking hate. Here comes the third degree. I couldn’t feel any more trapped if they bound my wrists and ankles and shone a bare light bulb in my face. So I do what any sane person would do in this situation and lie my ass off.

“Great.”

But I’ve overcompensated, because now they’re all staring at me like I’m a big fucking liar.

“Tucker,” Hanna says, and I wince. This is why I’ve been avoiding sibling get-togethers. “We’ve been thinking—”

“What is this, an intervention?”

Hanna flinches.

“I wouldn’t call it that,” Rhys says evenly.

Liar.

“We’re just worried about you,” Shane says.

When a guy who two years ago was tearing through the parties of Hollywood like they were toilet paper is worried about you, you’re epically fucked. My brain is paging through possible exit strategies. The best one I can think of is faking a sudden attack of food poisoning.

“We had some ideas,” Preston says. “Therapy, maybe—”

“No.” I tried it, but therapy is for people who talk, and I don’t talk.

It was forty-eight minutes of awkward silence and unanswerable questions.

Not too long after that I found meditation, which is also silence but for some reason not awkward.

Like, that’s the rule: You shut the fuck up and sit quietly, and no one is supposed to bare their soul or expose their trauma or whatever.

But I don’t tell my siblings that, not because I don’t think they’d get it but because Quinn of all people is already jumping in: “Or a dog. You know, something to focus on. Something to take care of—”

“No dog.”

I’m not trying to be a dick; I just don’t want therapy and I don’t want a dog. I don’t need anyone to fix me. I’m doing okay on my own. I’m about to explain that to them, that they need to get off my back, that I don’t want to talk about it, when a voice off to my right says, “Tucker Hott.”

Oh, shit. And not a little pile of rabbit droppings, either. The big honking cow pie you realize you just stepped in.

Arthur Weggers stands at the end of our booth, and I consider all my exit routes—but there are, in fact, none.

“‘Tucker Hott, I know you’ll do the right thing,’” the short, bald-as-an-egg lawyer intones, eyes fixed on a piece of expensive, linen-textured paper.

I don’t know if the fancy-paper bullshit is a Weggers thing or a Granddad thing, but I do know that it’s an asshole thing.

If I never see a piece of cream-colored paper again in my life, it’ll still be too soon.

My brothers have caught on to the unfolding disaster and are sliding out of the booth to let me escape, but it’s too fucking late now. Once Weggers starts reading the goddamned thing aloud, there’s no way out. It’s like being served with divorce papers or by a collection agency. Served is served.

This is not our first rodeo.

I gesture at them to sit the fuck down.

Murmuring apologies because they know they inadvertently made me a sitting duck for Weggers, they return to the table and give me sympathetic looks. And then we all stare expectantly at Weggers, waiting for the rest of it.

Except apparently there’s no “rest of it.” Instead he folds the paper and tucks it into the pocket of his peach-colored suit. The suit’s almost the same color as the skin of his face, which is definitely a look. Esquire will not be contacting him this week for his fashion advice. Or ever.

“That’s it,” he says.

Wait, what?

“What do you mean ‘That’s it’?” Hanna demands. That was my question, too.

“That’s the only part for Tucker. The rest of it says that I’m in charge of deciding what constitutes the right thing and enforcing Tucker’s execution of whatever the right thing turns out to be.”

“You know that’s absurd, right?” Rhys says. “You know that’s not remotely legally enforceable. That wouldn’t hold up for twenty seconds in a court of law.”

My brother is a kickass lawyer, but right now he sounds tired. Like a fourth grader reciting the Pledge of Allegiance.

“Yes,” Weggers says. “I know.” He turns and looks at me. “However that’s all moot if Tucker wants to do the right thing. If he does, then it doesn’t matter whether it’s legally enforceable or not. It only matters whether he does it.”

“What is the right thing?” Hanna’s voice is almost a whine, and I can’t blame her. This is our fifth go-round with this bullshit, and it was old before it started.

“That’s for Tucker to know in his heart, for him to tell me, and for me to put the rubber stamp on,” Weggers says, enunciating his consonants like the self-important prick he is.

“But whatever it is, it must be completed to my approval by June seventh of this year, two years from the original reading of the will, or Blue Iron Mining will receive the family land.” He gives each of us a stern look, in turn, over the top of his—also peach-colored—reading glasses. “That’s two weeks from today.”

“That’s bullshit,” Quinn roars. “He can’t ‘do the right thing’ in less than two weeks if he doesn’t even know what the right thing is.”

Weggers doesn’t look remotely cowed. We’ve never been able to intimidate him, despite our collective thousand pounds of Hott muscle, billions of dollars in accumulated wealth, and lion-worthy vocalizations.

“I have faith that something will present itself,” he says with a shrug.

“Tucker? Your mission, should you choose to accept it…?”

I rake a palm down my face. It’s not like refusing is really an option.

We’ve all taken our lumps in turn, not because there’s no way out—we probably would win in court, or at least would have if we’d challenged the will way back when this all started.

No, we go through with it because we owe Hanna an act of faith or two.

We all left Rush Creek and abandoned her to Granddad’s tender mercies and the running of a failing ranch, and we’ve all been doing penance, one way or another, since.

And it’s my turn. Follow the kooky instructions of my sadistic grandfather and his troll of a lawyer and save the Hott land—which is Hanna’s home and business and lifeblood.

It’s her everything, and we owe her some acknowledgment of that.

How bad can it be, right? Go ahead, hire me to host talking tours through the flower gardens of Rush Creek. Put me in charge of leading city council meetings. I don’t know—what’s the worst thing you can do to a guy who doesn’t like humans or conversation? I mean, besides making him go to therapy?

He’s not going to make me go to therapy, is he?

Actually, therapy isn’t the worst thing I can think of.

Bodyguarding is. Which maybe sounds fucking nuts because that is—was—my actual job. And I was good at it—until I wasn’t.

So I should be fine, as long as whatever Weggers cooks up isn’t private security. As long as I’m not responsible for anyone’s safety or continued well-being. As long as there are no ethical decisions that put someone’s life on the line.

But given that my granddad’s and Weggers’s mode of operation seems to be landing people with the most absurd possible jobs for them, I think I’m safe.

“No therapy,” I tell Preston. “No dogs,” I tell Quinn. “No more fucking interventions,” I tell them all with a sweep of my glare around the table.

“But yeah,” I tell Weggers with a glance in Hanna’s direction—soaking up the grateful look on her face. “Yeah, I’ll do the right thing, whatever the fuck that means. For Hanna.”