The Firefly Cafe (Billionaire Brothers, #1)(4)

He twitched a bit, clearly as repulsed by the moniker as she was. “Sounds like a douche bag.”

That shocked a laugh out of her. She leaned against the doorjamb and admired the play of light over his muscles. It was so sweet of him not to have put his damp shirt back on. “I don’t know the man personally—gosh, I can’t even remember his first name. But apparently he’s quite popular with the ladies.”

“I hate this guy.”

Penny grinned at him. “Don’t sweat it. Any woman who’s worth having would prefer a man like you, who makes an honest living working with his hands, over a guy who cats around enough to be a breeding ground for sexually transmitted diseases.”

His eyes went wide, and Penny felt herself flush. Could she be any more awkward and obvious about her attraction?

“Anyway, I’ll let you get back to work! And, shoot, I’d better get to my other job. I wait tables at the Firefly Café,” she explained. “Hey, if you get peckish later, you should come over to the restaurant. The food isn’t fancy, but it’s delicious.”

“Sounds great.” He stood there, bare chest gleaming and so, so distracting, with a smile lurking in the depths of those ocean-blue eyes.

“Okay. Great,” Penny echoed, flustered by the way she couldn’t seem to look away from him. “So maybe I’ll see you later, um…”

She stopped, shocked at herself. “Wow. Here you are, half nekkid in my powder room, and I don’t even know your name.”

“Dylan,” he said at once. Sticking out a large, square-palmed hand, he cleared his throat. “And I can put my shirt back on, if it makes you uncomfortable.”

“Penny Little,” she replied. “It’s nice to meet you. And please don’t put your shirt on!”

The hint of a smile graduated to full-on wicked smirk. “No?”


Face flaming with heat, Penny soldiered on. “I mean, because it’s all wet. At least let me wash it for you first.”

And if he had to stay shirtless while his tee was stain treated, laundered, and dried on the line in the backyard, well. Sometimes life was hard.

Grinning, Dylan picked up his shirt from the pedestal sink and stepped close enough to drape it around her shoulders, since her hands were still full of glass shards.

“Thanks. Careful though,” he said, hoarse and deep. “It’s my favorite.”

The dark scent of sweet tea and working man surrounded her, and Penny drank it in gratefully. “I’ll treat it like it’s one of my bosses’ custom-tailored silk suits,” she promised.

“No worries,” he said, flashing that charming grin. She didn’t want it to be as effective as it was. “It’s been through worse than a tea bath. It’ll survive.”

Great. The shirt would survive. But as Penny hightailed it out of the powder room and gasped in her first breath of non-Dylan-scented air in minutes, she wondered.

Would she survive this house renovation with her sanity—and her heart—intact?





Chapter 3



The moment the front door closed behind Penny, Dylan had his phone in hand, fingers frantically touch-typing out a query to his middle brother’s frighteningly efficient personal assistant. If anyone had the scoop on the caretaker in charge of the Sanctuary Island house, it was Jessica Bell.

But when the ringing of the phone clicked through to voice mail, it was Logan’s voice in his ear.

“Jessica can’t come to the phone right now,” his brother intoned solemnly. “She’s too busy inserting herself into every aspect of my life and making sure I waste time eating and sleeping instead of working in my lab. When she’s ready to stop annoying me, she can have her phone back. Until then, leave a message, I guess. I certainly won’t be checking them or passing them along to her, though.”

Dylan hung up before the beep. No extra info from Jessica, then. Fine, he’d have to figure out what Penny Little’s deal was the old-fashioned way—with a generous dose of charm.

He didn’t question his desire to spend more time here, in this house with this woman, and without the heavy baggage of the reputation he’d recklessly built back in New York. Penny Little was interesting. Working on the house was surprisingly interesting, or at least satisfying.

The whole thing felt like a vacation from the boring, predictable cynicism of his real life.

So yeah, he hadn’t come clean about who he was. But seriously, as if he admitted to being the Bad Boy Billionaire Penny despised? That would end things in a hurry. No, he’d decided on the spur of the moment to play this out a little longer, and even though he felt an uncomfortable tickle of guilt at lying to Penny, he shrugged it off.

He wasn’t hurting anyone. In fact, he was saving Penny from the embarrassment of realizing she’d bad-mouthed him and his entire family right to his face. Plus, Penny was getting the help she needed with the house repairs. Everybody won.

Syrupy afternoon light was pouring through the newly polished windows by the time Dylan had made his way through the first quarter of the to-do list Penny had left. Some of the tasks were self-explanatory—it didn’t take a genius to wash a window, just a good ladder and a guy with zero fear of heights. For the rest, well, thank God for Google. And the local hardware store.

He’d gotten a fair number of tips from the tall, athletic woman behind the counter. For instance, apparently crumpled-up newspaper was the only way to get glass clean with no streaking. She’d talked herself out of a sale with that one, since Dylan had been about to buy a bundle of microfiber cloths, but she didn’t seem to mind.