Bad Girl Reputation (Avalon Bay #2)(2)

This isn’t how I pictured coming back to Avalon Bay. The house I grew up in crowded with mourners. Flower arrangements and sympathy cards on every table. We left the funeral hours ago, but I guess these things follow you. For days. Weeks. Never knowing when it’s acceptable to say, okay, enough, go back to your lives and let me go back to mine. How do you even throw out a three-foot flower heart?

As Cary’s story winds down, my dad taps me on the shoulder and nods toward the hallway, pulling me aside. He’s wearing a suit for maybe the third time in his life, and I can’t get used to it. It’s just another thing that’s out of sorts. Coming home to a place I don’t quite recognize, as if waking up in an alternate reality where everything is familiar but not. Just a little off-center. I guess I’ve changed too.

“Wanted to grab you for a minute,” he says as we duck away from the somber festivities. He can’t keep his hands off his tie or from tugging at the collar of his shirt. Loosening it, then seemingly talking himself into straightening and tightening it again, like he feels guilty about it. “Look, I know there isn’t a great time to bring this up, so I just got to ask.”

“What’s going on?”

“Well, I wanted to see if you might be planning to stick around for a while.”

Shit.

“I don’t know, Dad. I hadn’t given it much thought.” I didn’t expect to get cornered so soon. Figured I’d have time, maybe a couple days, to see how things went and decide then. I left Avalon Bay a year ago for a reason and would have preferred to stay gone if not for the circumstances. I have a life back in Charleston. A job, an apartment. Amazon deliveries piling up at my door.

“See, I was hoping you could help with the business. Your mom managed all the office stuff, and things have kind of gone to hell on that since …” He stops himself. None of us know how to talk about it—her. It feels wrong no matter from which angle we try to approach it. So we trail off into silence and nod at each other to say, yeah, I don’t know either, but I understand. “I thought, if you weren’t in too much of a rush, you wouldn’t mind jumping in there and making sense of it all.”

I expected he might be depressed for a while and need some time to himself to cope, to get his head around it all. Maybe run off and go fishing or something. But this is … a lot to ask.

“What about Kellan, or Shane? Either one of them have got to know more about running that place than I do. Doesn’t seem like they’d want me striding in there jumping the line.”

My two oldest brothers have been working for Dad for years. In addition to a small hardware store, he also owns a stone business that caters to landscapers and people embarking on home renovations. Since I was a kid, my mom managed the inside stuff—orders, invoices, payroll—so Dad could worry about the dirty work outside.

“Kellan’s the best foreman I’ve got, and with all these hurricane rebuilds we’re doing down on the south coast, I can’t afford to take him off the jobsites. And Shane spent the last year driving around on an expired license because the boy never opens his damn mail. I’d be bankrupt in a month if I let him anywhere near the books.”

He’s not wrong. I mean, I love my brothers, but the one time our parents had Shane babysit us, he let Jay and Billy climb onto the roof with a box of cherry bombs. The fire department showed up after the three boys started launching bombs with a slingshot at the neighbor’s teenage sons in their pool. Growing up with two younger brothers and three older ones was entertaining, to say the least.

Still, I’m not getting roped into being a permanent replacement for Mom.

I bite my lip. “How long are you thinking?”

“A month, maybe two?”

Fuck.

I think it over for a moment, then sigh. “On one condition,” I tell him. “You have to start looking to hire a new office manager in the next few weeks. I’ll stick around until you find the right fit, but this isn’t going to become a long-term arrangement. Deal?”

Dad wraps an arm around my shoulder and kisses the side of my head. “Thanks, kiddo. You’re really helping me out of a jam.”

I can’t ever say no to him, even when I know I’m getting hosed. Ronan West might come off as a hard-ass, but he’s always been a good father. Gave us enough freedom to get in trouble but was always there to bail us out. Even when he was pissed at us, we knew he cared.

“Grab your brothers, will ya? We gotta talk about a couple things.”

He sends me off with foreboding and a pat on the back. Past experience has taught me that family meetings are never a positive affair. Family meetings mean more upheaval. Which is terrifying, because wasn’t getting me to uproot my life to temporarily move back home already the big ask? I’m running through things in my head like breaking my lease or getting a subletter, quitting my job or pleading for a sabbatical, and my dad’s still got more on the docket?

“Hey, shithead.” Jay, who’s sitting on the arm of the sofa in the living room, kicks my shin as I walk up. “Grab me another beer.”

“Get it yourself, butt sniffer.”

He’s already ditched his jacket and tie, his white dress shirt unbuttoned at the top and sleeves rolled up. The others aren’t much better, all of them in various states of giving up on the whole suit thing since getting back from the cemetery.