The Firefly Cafe (Billionaire Brothers, #1)(19)

“I will in a second, Penny, but first just let me—”

The doorbell echoed through the house once more, making Penny squeak and rush for the door. “No time! I promise, we’ll talk later! I have to answer the door.”

And with that, she was gone, taking with her most of Dylan’s hope for a way out of this mess he’d created.

Unless …

Jerking his pants up over his thighs and zipping them, Dylan dug through the pockets for his phone. Maybe, he thought crazily as searched, maybe he could text Jessica, explain the situation, get her to promise not to say anything …

Except his phone wasn’t there.

Dylan cursed fluently while tugging his shirt over his head. He snagged his boots and jammed his feet into them to pound down the stairs toward the last place he remembered having his cell phone, in the kitchen. If he could get to it in time, before Penny opened the door and welcomed Jessica Bell in—but he was too late.

He skidded to a stop at the bottom of the staircase just as the heavy front door swung open. Over Penny’s head, Dylan made eye contact with Jessica first—her perfectly manicured auburn brows arched into an infinitesimal lift as she took in his disheveled appearance.

But that wasn’t the worst of it.

Behind Jessica stood her boss, Logan Harrington, pale and swaying in a rumpled three-thousand-dollar suit. Before Dylan could do more than plead with his eyes, Logan cocked his head and said roughly, “What the hell is my kid brother doing here?”





Chapter 10



Penny kept her welcoming smile firmly in place, sure she must have heard wrong. Or Mr. Harrington was making a mistake—reading between the lines of Jessica’s unusually tense manner when she’d called, and the gray-faced, wild-haired, lanky man on the front porch, Penny was pretty sure this Mr. Logan Harrington was about a heartbeat away from exhausted collapse.

“Y’all come on in, you must be tired from your trip. Just let me freshen up the master bedroom. Won’t take me but a second,” Penny said soothingly, darting a commiserating glance at the tall, svelte redhead whose voice Penny recognized from the phone as her liaison with the Harrington family.

Jessica, who’d been frozen on the welcome mat since Mr. Harrington’s crazy question, unthawed and moved forward briskly. “Thank you very much, but that won’t be necessary. I took the liberty of accessing the house plans, and I saw that there’s a garden cottage behind the house. That will do perfectly well for Mr. Harrington.”

Penny blinked. Accessed the house plans? Who did that? Well, apparently the perfect assistant did. Mind racing with the list of tasks she’d need to accomplish in order to get the cottage ready for occupants—Lord, she going to have to call in sick to the Firefly, there was just no way to be done before her shift—Penny turned to lead the two guests into the foyer. She stopped dead when she all but collided with Dylan.

Standing at the foot of the stairs in an unbuttoned shirt with his jeans sagging low on his hips and his boots unlaced, Dylan stared at Mr. Harrington with his shoulders squared and his jaw set, as if he were bracing for a punch.

As she glanced back and forth between the two men, her heart began to race.

After a couple of weeks of working outside, Dylan’s skin was a healthy, burnished gold, unlike Mr. Harrington’s weary pallor. Dylan’s hair was cropped close to his skull while Mr. Harrington’s was long enough to stick up as if he’d been running his fingers through it. But both men had light brown hair, broad shoulders and muscular arms, although Mr. Harrington was built along slightly leaner lines. They both had sharp, angular cheekbones and jaws.

But what really sent Penny’s heart leaping into her throat was the realization that hidden under the heavy lids and deep purple shadows wrought by exhaustion, Mr. Logan Harrington’s eyes were the blue of a glorious summer sky.

The exact same shade she’d become so fond of in the last few weeks.

Behind her, Mr. Harrington was still confused and getting cranky about it. “Damn it, is this another intervention? Tink, you’re fired. Dylan, go away, I’m fine.”

Penny shuddered in a gasp that sounded horribly like a sob, and because she couldn’t close her eyes against the train wreck of her own life, she saw the moment when Dylan realized that she knew.

His shoulders went even more rigid, until his entire body was as stiff and defensive as a suit of armor. “I tried to tell you,” he grated out harshly, almost sounding as if he were angry at Penny for the way things had gone down.

“You had two weeks to tell me the truth,” Penny hissed. “Fourteen days and nights…”

“Okay then!” Jessica spun into motion, taking charge of the situation with an effortless ease that Penny could only numbly admire. “First of all, Harrington, you can’t fire me because you don’t pay my salary. Harrington International, aka your older brother, Miles, does. So here’s what’s going to happen now.”

She herded Dylan and a feebly resisting Penny toward the empty front parlor no one ever sat in. “You two kids clearly need to talk. I’m going to take Mr. Big Mouth out back to the cottage and get him settled in—no, don’t worry about towels or clean sheets, a bare mattress would be a step up for Logan at this point, so long as it’s horizontal.”


“There’s nothing worse than a woman who thinks she can manage the entire world,” Logan growled, but out of the corner of her eye, Penny noticed that he didn’t put up much of a fight when Jessica led him back out the front door and closed it gently behind them.