“Work stuff?”
Tanner worked for Nate, managing one of the regional sales divisions. Dad liked to start his kids at the bottom and make them work their way up from merchandiser—stocking product in grocery store freezers—before letting them advance through the company ranks. It was how both Nate and Manny had started, and Tanner was supposed to be following the same career path. Only he hadn’t taken to it the way they had. Ever since he’d moved into sales management he’d been seriously fucking miserable.
He nodded as he rolled his shoulders. “I’ve gotta go to Oklahoma next week.”
“How long?”
His frown got deeper. “I don’t know. Hopefully only a few days. As long as it takes to figure out why our numbers are down.”
“You should just quit,” I told him even though I knew he’d never do it. Quitting was more my style than Tanner’s. I’d quit that merchandiser job after three days. I’d quit college after a semester. I’d quit on every woman I’d ever tried to be in a relationship with, and then I’d quit trying to be in relationships altogether.
Tanner was Mr. Dependable. The guy who was in for the long haul. The one who kept showing up, no matter how hard it got.
“And do what?” he shot back with a snort.
“I don’t know. How about literally anything else? Maybe try writing that book you’ve been talking about forever.”
When we were kids, Tanner’s nose had always been stuck in a book. He’d go off on his own and do nothing but read for hours. He’d even majored in English in college, which seemed like a waste now that he was stuck working in sales.
He snorted. “Sure, like it’s that easy.”
“I didn’t say it was easy, I said you should do it.”
“I don’t want to talk about this.” He shot me a sidelong look. “No offense, but you’re the last person I’m interested in taking career advice from.”
“Fine,” I said. “Keep martyring yourself, then.”
“Once I fix this mess, things will get better.” His knuckles were turning white on the steering wheel again. “At least it’s only Nate’s wrath I’ve got to deal with for now. Dad’s been too distracted by this new real estate thing to breathe down my neck like usual.”
“What real estate thing?” I was pretty far out of the loop these days when it came to Dad’s business dealings.
Tanner shrugged. “One of his buddies from the Chamber of Commerce talked him into partnering on some real estate startup. They’re buying up properties around town on the cheap so they can squeeze a bunch of condos onto each lot and flip them all for a tidy profit.”
“Great.” I shook my head as I stared out the window at the bluebonnets that sprang up all over the place every spring and would be gone again in just a few weeks. “Just what this town needs. A bunch of overpriced, shoddily built eyesores.”
My dad had cultivated a public image as this benevolent, earth-loving peacenik to align with the company’s socially conscious branding. But behind closed doors he’d always been all about the money. It was his barracuda-like business instincts and not his affinity for progressive causes that had grown the family business from a dinky regional ice cream company to one of the top brands in the country.
The only thing Dad loved more than making money was using his money to make everyone else do whatever he wanted.
“Anyway,” Tanner said as he turned onto the tree-lined drive leading to the house we’d grown up in, “I’m just going to spend the next two hours trying to avoid Nate and Dad.”
The King family villa was a mammoth ranch-style house Dad had custom built in the late eighties after the business had started to take off. It squatted on forty acres of land on the outskirts of town that featured a pond, fishing pier, horse barn, greenhouse, gazebo, and swimming pool.
Tanner parked behind our brother Ryan’s big silver truck on the circular drive out front, and we both trudged inside. Neither of us were overflowing with good memories from those days, so it wasn’t our favorite place to spend time.
Our stepmother Heather had a mimosa bar set up in the kitchen, but I bypassed it and headed straight to the fridge for a beer. Winking at my little sister, Riley, who was helping her mom set up the buffet, I wandered out to the patio and collapsed into a lounge chair next to Ryan. We were having a rare bout of perfect spring weather, but I wasn’t in any mood to appreciate it.
“You look like shit,” he told me, arching a ginger eyebrow. Ryan was nine years older than me, the same age as Manny, and my half-brother by my mother—the stepson my dad had inherited when he married my mom.
I held up my middle finger as I chugged half my beer, and Ryan laughed.
“I sure as hell hope the other guy looks worse than you.”
“Probably not,” I admitted. “I was kind of drunk.”
“I know I taught you better than that.”
Ryan was a burly, mountain of a dude with forearms as big as my biceps and our mom’s red hair. He’d been the one who first taught me how to make a fist, how to throw a punch, and—most importantly—how to evade one. I hadn’t exactly done him proud last night.
“Too bad you weren’t at the Palace last night,” I said. “It would have been nice to watch you wipe the floor with him.”
“I’m too old to go around getting into fights. Besides, I was working last night. A drunk flipped his car on 71 and caused a three-car pileup.” Ryan was a fireman, but he spent more time using the jaws of life to cut people out of crumpled cars on the highway than he did putting out fires.
“Did everybody make it?”
“Everybody but the drunk.” His eyebrow arched again as he directed a pointed look at the beer in my hand.
I might be an irresponsible, hard-partying slacker, but I didn’t fuck around with drunk driving. “I didn’t drive here,” I told him. “And I didn’t drive last night either.”
“Good.” Ryan lifted a meaty paw to give my head a rough swipe. “I really don’t ever want to have to scrape you off the asphalt.”
“Chow’s on!” Heather called out, ringing the loud-ass fucking dinner bell Dad had mounted next to the patio doors. It went with the nouveau-riche dude ranch aesthetic of the house, and it made my head throb.
I pushed myself to my feet and followed Ryan to the buffet, where I piled my plate high with migas, bacon, sausage, and tortillas. Heather’s housekeeper was a damn good cook, and I managed to snag a seat at the opposite end of the table from Nate and Dad, which made the meal itself pretty enjoyable. I stuffed my face while Cody, my youngest brother, told me about the college courses he was taking this semester at Bowman, the local university where he was a freshman. Riley was directly across from me, doing that bored, sullen teenager thing, and I amused myself by making dumb faces until I got a laugh out of her.
Sometimes hanging out with my family wasn’t half bad. I should have known it couldn’t last though. After the meal, when we were all milling around again, Dad came and found me.
“Let’s you and me talk,” he said, jerking his head toward his office.
A sense of impending doom obliterated all the pleasant feelings I’d managed to build over the last hour. I followed Dad into his office, and he nodded at me to shut the door.