Homecoming: The Billionaire Brothers (8 page)

He had to tell her. Now.

Tuning back in to the one side of Penny’s call that he could hear, Dylan drummed impatient fingers on his raised knee and waited for her to be done.

“Jessica, hi! No, it’s fine, I can talk.”

Penny’s gaze lifted to his for a moment, her brow furrowing as she listened to Jessica Bell, his brother Logan’s assistant. “You are? That’s—well, that’s great! I’ll look forward to finally meeting you in person.”

Horror crawled down Dylan’s spine. Crap. Jessica was coming here. He was about to be outed as part of the wealthy family who paid Penny’s salary.

“Alrighty then,” Penny said, determinedly cheerful even though Dylan could read the panic in her white-knuckled grip on the phone. “When should we expect you?”

The words were no sooner out of her mouth than the doorbell chimed its deep, mellow tones through the house.

Dylan’s lungs seized. No. This couldn’t be happening.

Beside him on the bed, Penny turned around, panicked eyes on Dylan. “Oh,” she said faintly. “I see.”

The phone fell away from her ear.

“The door,” Dylan said through numb lips.

It wasn’t a question, but Penny nodded, still shell-shocked. The doorbell chimed again, insistently, and Dylan experienced a moment of intense irrational rage at himself for fixing the damn thing five days ago.

The second bell catapulted Penny into action. She leapt off the bed and into her clothes, hair flying behind her like an unfurling flag. “Get dressed! Where are my socks? Who cares—I don’t need socks. I do need a bra, though, oh thank goodness…”

Any chance Dylan had to tell Penny the truth was draining away like sands through an hourglass. He stood up and tried to catch her shoulders and make her stand still for a second, but it was like trying to catch a sunbeam. She slipped through his fingers, a constant whirl of frantic motion as she rushed over to the mirror and moaned at the sex-tousled state of her curls.

“Penny, please,” he said, hating the desperation so naked in his voice, but unable to cover it up.

She glanced at his reflection in the mirror, jaw working. “Put some clothes on, I’m begging you. Unless you want to meet my boss in your birthday suit.”

“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 Ten

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.

And then Penny was left alone in the parlor with the man to whom she’d given her body and her heart … before she even knew his real name.

*   *   *

“I’m sorry,” Dylan said. He wasn’t sure what to say to keep from getting swallowed up by the black hole of guilt and regret in his gut, but he definitely owed Penny an apology. Might as well start there.

As expected, it wasn’t anywhere near enough. Penny shook her head in disbelief. “You’re sorry. You mean, you’re sorry your brother showed up here and exposed your lie.”

The bitterness in her voice pierced him like broken glass. “No, Penny…”

But she wasn’t listening. Dropping onto one of the overstuffed chintz love seats, Penny covered her face with trembling hands. “Your
brother,
” she groaned. “Lord almighty. Dylan
Harrington.
I feel like such a fool. You must have laughed yourself sick over how easy I was to seduce. Some silly, gullible waitress to play around with because she doesn’t know any better. Are you going to go back to all your rich friends and have a good chuckle over your latest sexual exploits as Dylan Workman?”

“Of course not.” Dylan stood in the center of the perfect, fussy little room full of touches that reminded him of his grandmother, and knew without a doubt that Bette Harrington would cry if she knew how the boy she raised had turned out. “It wasn’t like that,” he tried to say past the thick lump in his throat. “I never wanted to make a fool of you, Penny, I swear. And nothing about you is easy or gullible.”

“No?” She raised her face to his, and though he’d braced himself for tears, her eyes were dry, burning with a fierce light. “‘Kid brother,’ Logan said. That makes you the youngest of the Harrington brothers, the one who refused to take any responsibility for the family company. The playboy. Oh, God—the Bad Boy Billionaire.”

It stung to hear his whole life, decisions he’d agonized and suffered over, reduced to a single biting summation, but he couldn’t deny it.

When he stayed silent, Penny swallowed and shut her eyes briefly. “Two weeks. That’s all it took to make me fall in love—and into bed—with you. Tell me, Mr. Harrington, is that a record for you?”

Every word stabbed him like a knife, but Dylan forced himself to stand there and take it. He deserved whatever Penny dished out, and worse. With her tender, generous heart, there was no way she’d dole out a punishment severe enough to fit the crime.

But still, he had to try to explain. He couldn’t let her compare herself to the models and celebutantes he’d casually slept with and discarded ever since he’d called his wedding off three years ago.

“Honestly,” he told her, “no. Two weeks is an eternity for me to stay focused on one woman.”

She winced, laughing thinly. “Great, so I guess I should be flattered. What was it that made me so special? Was I a novelty to you, Dylan? A single, working-class mom, someone so far beneath you it made me exotic?” She shook her head with a sad smile. “There I go flattering myself again. I’m sure you sleep with all the help, don’t you?”

“Of course not,” he said firmly. “And you’re not ‘the help,’ Penny. You’re the most amazing woman I’ve ever met. You’re strong and warm and kind. You’re an amazing mother. You’re beautiful inside and out, and I don’t think you even realize it. If you believe nothing else I ever tell you—and I wouldn’t blame you for that—at least listen and believe this. What happened between us was real. I didn’t tell you everything about myself, but what I did tell you was true. And I never lied about what I felt for you, or about how much I wanted you.”

After a long moment of silence, during which Dylan imagined every possible response ranging from Penny falling into his arms to ordering him out of the house, she said quietly, “I think you can see how I’d find it difficult to put my trust in that.”

At least she was listening. Pressing his advantage, Dylan sat down on the love seat with her, careful of the nearly visible wall of empty space she’d erected around herself. “I get that, and I’m not making any excuses. It was a stupid, childish stunt…” He paused, hearing himself, then shook his head. “Which, if you ask my oldest brother, Miles, is a fair characterization of my entire life.”

“Miles Harrington. The head of Harrington International,” Penny said, as if she were still trying to get all the players in this awful farce straight in her head.

“That’s right.”

“He—and that man out in the summer cottage—those are the brothers who went off to college and left you to deal with your parents’ deaths alone? So Logan is the workaholic loner, and Miles is the controlling robot.”

Startled that she remembered what he’d said about his brothers that first night, Dylan shook his head. “No. I mean, yeah, they weren’t around much, but I wasn’t completely alone. I had my grandparents, who were great. Although, like I mentioned before—I wasn’t the easiest kid to raise.”

She changed tack. “And when you said you spent years drifting through life aimlessly until you finally got a job—you meant until you decided on a whim to impersonate a handyman to fix up your own family’s property.”

Against his will, Dylan stiffened. “Yep. I ditched college and turned down every one of Miles’s offers to come work for the family company, thereby breaking his heart—or whatever piece of well-oiled machinery he uses in place of a heart. You’re now part of a very elite club, Penny Little: the Society of People Who Expected Better from Dylan Harrington and Were Disappointed.”

“Stop that,” she said sharply, getting to her feet and hugging her arms tightly around her rib cage. “You don’t get to make me feel sorry for you. This is hard enough already.”

Dylan blinked. “I wasn’t trying to—but okay. Fine. Look, Penny, I’ll make this right however you want. Just tell me what to do, and I’ll do it.”

Lifting her chin, a challenge glinted in Penny’s hazel eyes. “I have to go to my shift at the café now. I want you out of this house before I get home. And if you ever come back to Sanctuary Island, I swear I’ll quit this job, because I never want to see you again.”

Chapter Eleven

“What are you doing?”

The tense young voice jolted Dylan from his mechanical stuffing of dirty work clothes into his duffel bag.

Matt stood in the doorway of the guest room, arms crossed tightly over his wiry chest and looking so much like his mother that Dylan went light-headed for a humiliating instant.

He turned back to his packing and hoped Matt didn’t notice the way his hands shook. “I’m leaving.”