The Firefly Cafe (8 page)

“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 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.

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 11

“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.”

“Why?”

Dylan pinched his eyes shut, hanging his head over the bag sitting on his bed. “No
one told you.”

“That your name is Dylan Harrington and you’re related to the people who pay us to
live in this house? Yeah, I know all that. I heard everything that went on downstairs.”
Matt marched into the room and grabbed Dylan’s shoulder, jerking him around until
they were face-to-face.

“What I don’t know,” Matt continued, thrusting his chin out pugnaciously, “is why
you’re running out on us like … like a coward.”

The kid was trembling with the force of emotions too strong for someone so young to
have to handle, and it hurt Dylan to see it. “Matthew. I lied to you and your mother.
She doesn’t want me around anymore, and you can’t blame her.”

Matt made a frustrated noise, his dark blond brows like thunder. “I
don’t
blame her. I blame you, for not getting it.”

It was as if his rib cage had grown rows of lethally sharp spikes. Every breath hurt.
“She told me she never wants to see me again. She was very clear. One strike and I’m
out. What, Matt? Tell me what I’m missing.”

Sending him a pitying look, Matt shook his head. “It’s totally obvious. Don’t you
see it? Everyone leaves. She doesn’t want you to go. So she’s testing you, to see
if you’ll fight to stay. And you’re about to flunk, man.”

With that, Matt stalked out of the room and down the hall to slam his own door shut,
leaving Dylan alone and staggering with his thoughts.