Demise of a Self-Centered Playboy

Cleo

Denver leaves with only the lingering scent of what I assume must be day-old cologne after a night of partying.

“Thank you, Mr. Lloyd.” I nod and take the letter. The one piece of advice my dad gave me when it comes to the city of Lake Starlight is that you never know who you’re talking to, so be polite.

According to him, my mom made a lasting impression on this town. I never asked if it was when she showed up or when she fled.

“You’re welcome, Miss Dawson.”

I catch his expression. The one that says, ‘I’m not sure why your dad left you everything he had when you couldn’t even visit him.’ He can think what he wants. It makes no difference to me.

My mom and Bridget are already standing. Phil is on his phone. His cowboy hat, pressed jeans, and button-down with silver snaps on the pockets says we’re out-of-towners.

I’m surprised he came today and that he didn’t fly out right after the funeral. My mom stuck around because she wants to see what she left all those years ago.

My stepsister, Bridget, would never allow me to deal with this on my own, so I expected her to stay.

Bridget slides her arm through mine. “He’s kind of hot.”

“He’s the enemy,” I remind her for the fourth time. “And now he owns half the company.”

Bridget rips the paperwork out of my hands and reads it as though she understands the legal jargon. I’m not saying anything bad about her.

It’s just that people in her circle pay others to read the legalese to them.

We were sixteen when my mom married Phil. By that time, we’d each been through so many stepsiblings and stepparents, we decided to embrace one another rather than fight.

It helped that she had a closet five times the size of mine. People in Dallas still comment about how surprising it is we turned out to be the best of friends.

When our friend Miguel is lost in half a bottle of Patron and has failed yet again to get either of us into his bed for the night, he always says that we should wait until the will is read.

We’ll hate one another then. But I don’t really care if she inherits all of Phil’s money. At least my mother wouldn’t get what she married him for.

A lesson she’s yet to learn from her previous five husbands.

I could dissect each marriage and why it didn’t work out, but it’s the same story for each of them—they weren’t built on a foundation of love. Someone was always in it for the advantage.

My father was the first rung on Mom’s ladder of marrying for money. Phil is by far her most successful catch, which is why it makes sense that she’s still married to him all these years later.

“What do you mean he gets half?” My mom holds out her hand.

Bridget shrugs as though she doesn’t understand any of the words written on the papers and hands them over to my mom.

“We own the company fifty-fifty.”

Mom reads the papers, and I tuck the letter into my purse before she notices it.

“You’re going to work side-by-side with that man every day?” Bridget obviously doesn’t share my opinion that nothing could be worse. Her eyes soak him in across the parking lot.

“I’ve always thought there was something about a man in a truck.”

I look down the hall and see him nearing the stairwell and blow out a breath, ignoring the way his jeans hang off him. He makes fun of my heels while he wears those Vans. Idiot.

“He has that look like ‘who gives a shit what life throws at you, I’ll catch it with my bare hands.’”

“You mean the one that says, ‘I dodge responsibility’?” I deadpan.

“No, the laid-back look.”

Bridget’s only accompanied me once to Lake Starlight for a week during my last summer with Chip, before I turned eighteen. But I’ve heard the rumors and seen Denver in action.

A man who still behaves like a boy can only run my dad’s company one way—into the ground.

“Do I have to blindfold you?” I say to Bridget.

She laughs as we descend the stairs. When we reach the bottom of the stairway, Denver pulls his truck to a stop in front of us.

The sidewalk is wide so we’re about ten feet apart at least but I glare at him, hoping he can feel the animosity rolling off me. Rolling down his window, his face appears from behind the tinted glass.

He really is a beautiful man. Not that I’d admit that to him or anyone else.

“I’ll be at Lifetime Adventures if you care to discuss anything, sweetheart.” His smile is huge and his ego even bigger.

Anger spurs through me like a kickstart only he can ignite, and I straighten my back to walk over and give him a piece of my mind.

He must see something on my face because he puts the truck into park to wait for me. Bridget’s arm slides out from mine, and my mom and Phil stay behind, discussing the paperwork.

Mostly, it’s Phil explaining it to my mom. I guess she can only read a divorce decree like a pro.

I want to buy his half, but that entails asking Phil for money, which spurs an entirely different feeling in my stomach. “We need to set up a meeting.”

“Watch out.”

He points at the ground and I look down, losing my footing on a patch of ice. My purse flies in the air and the cold, hard, wet ground welcomes my ass.

Denver opens his door and climbs out like the gentleman I’m sure he is not. “If you’re going to stay in Lake Starlight, you should go shopping for some new footwear.”

Once he helps me up, I yank my arm out of his hand. As I straighten my jacket, Bridget hands me my purse.

“I’m Bridget,” she says to Denver in her flirty bar voice—the one that earns her free drinks all night.

Denver looks over, shakes her hand, then turns his attention back to me. “You okay?”

“What do you care?”

What the hell? Do you not see me standing here? ~

Bridget might be a millisecond away from unbuttoning her coat to show off her figure. I love the girl, but she can be a tad self-involved.

“Hey, I know we don’t see eye-to-eye on a lot, but I’m not a dick,” he says.

“You aren’t?” I ask.

I transfix on his lips. I can’t help it. They’re pink from a fresh swipe of Chapstick, and he runs his tongue over them. It’s the way he moves one side up in amusement that does me in.

It’s sexy and tempting and I should not be having these thoughts.

Bad Cleo. I mentally slap my wrist.

“No. You wanna ask my sisters?” He steps forward to the side of me and leans around behind me.

I shift my ass away from his prying eyes. “What the hell do you think you’re doing?”

“I don’t understand,” Bridget says to herself, probably still trying to figure out why Denver’s tongue isn’t hanging out of his mouth for her.

“I was making sure you weren’t too wet. I have a blanket in the—”

I put my hand in his face. “Nope. I don’t need anything from you.”

He holds his hands in the air and backs away one step. “Have it your way.”

Opening his truck door, he looks at the rented SUV with a driver that’s pulling around from the parking lot out back. “I assume that’s your ride?”

“Yes.” I make my back ramrod-straight, so he doesn’t think my ass hurts like a bitch right now.

“Like I said, I’ll be at Lifetime for a few hours. If you wanna talk.”

“Bye,” Bridget says.

Denver lazily raises his hand to her, but his eyes remain on me. He’s so doing it on purpose. No one ignores Bridget. She’s like a shiny object. You can’t look away.

“Put some ice on your ass.” He winks and shuts the door before driving away.

As our car pulls up, my mom and Phil huddle inside.

Bridget stops me, placing her hand on my arm. “Am I too beautiful for this place? Do they like their women more outdoorsy or something?”

I should tell her ignoring her is probably Denver’s plan. He seems like the type of man who always has an agenda. I just need to figure out what it is.

Then again, maybe he’s already achieved it—he does own half of my dad’s company.

***

Two hours later, after a long lunch where I was too chicken-shit to ask Phil for money, we sit at the airport, waiting for his private jet to be ready for takeoff.

Mom is grabbing magazines and trying to find some fresh fruit and vegetables.

Bridget is at the desk, flirting with the guy who works there, still trying to prove that her attractiveness didn’t vanish on the flight from Dallas to Alaska. Which leaves Phil and me alone.

“I can send the plane back whenever you’re ready to come home,” he mindlessly says, his eyes on his phone.

I cross and uncross my legs. “I have to clear out his house and stuff.”

“Good thing you have time now.” He smiles at me before burying his head back into what I assume are emails.

I could respond with a dig, because the reason I have free time is that he recently fired me from the ranch. Not that he didn’t have a good reason.

I accidentally gave our organic feed animals the feed with growth hormones. Yeah, not my brightest moment. But in my defense, they should mark the containers better.

So Phil lost money since he can no longer say the meat he butchers from the poor animals is organic. He was nice about it but let me know in a kind way that maybe ranch life wasn’t for me.

I’m a business graduate from the University of Indiana. After graduation, I interviewed at so many places, but nothing panned out. Finally, I hung my head and asked Phil if he knew of anyone looking.

I told myself I was networking and using my connections like any smart person would do, but I hated having to do it.

Two weeks in, I wheeled my mail cart into the studio.

Delivering to the offices behind the set, I stopped my cart and got to chatting with a co-worker about the episode of Roswell on the night before.

I guess I forgot to put the brake on the cart because a guy rushing around bumped it and it went rolling, so I ran after it. Luckily it stopped right before getting into a camera shot.

After receiving scathing looks from the producer and cameramen, I tiptoed to retrieve it, but a cord wrapped around the wheel.

When I yanked harder to free it, the mic attached to the camera fell, then the camera guy moved to see what all the action was about—putting me on live TV. My mom calls it my ten seconds of fame.

It made the news that night in a funny blooper reel. Technically it was the guy who bumped the cart’s fault, not mine, but I was fired.

My second attempt at employment came in the form of an assistant position. My boss always got the same thing every morning—a poppyseed lemon muffin and a large coffee.

We were becoming friends, chatting about our morning commute and the weather as I set them on her desk.

Except that morning I didn’t double-check the order and she didn’t bother to look away from her computer while grabbing a bite. Turns out it was a banana nut muffin. I know what you’re thinking.

So what? Who can’t handle a different type of muffin? As I was calling 9-1-1 and stabbing her thigh with an EpiPen, I was thinking the same thing.

Add on the froyo place where I forgot to put the refrigerated items away at night or the bookstore where I was caught too many times in the corner of the romance section reading during working hours…

Things just haven’t worked out for me.

But I’m determined to make my next job work, come hell or high water.

But I can’t do that with Denver Bailey breathing down my neck, so I swallow past the big lump in my throat. “Hey, Phil?”

He peeks up and smiles. “I think this is good for you. You can figure out some things up here. Away from your regular life.”

“Well, I can’t do it with Denver Bailey.” I lay down hint number one. I’ve seen Bridget coerce him into giving her money a million times. I’m a quick learner.

“Running a business isn’t easy. You have to surround yourself with people smarter than you.”

“Meaning?”

His smile grows. “Right now, that boy is smarter than you. He knows how to run that company. Knows everything involved. You have to find a way for it to work.

“Think about it.” He taps his finger to his forehead. “You can’t take people up to the mountains. You’d get lost or eaten by a bear.” He laughs.

A tight smile strains my face. “Yeah, of course.”

“Don’t be all sour about it. Truth is truth. Facts are facts, darlin’. You’ll find what you’re meant to do one of these days but take your time up here. Go through your dad’s things. Take some time to mourn.”

“But don’t run the company?” I should hide the bitterness in my tone, but I can’t be bothered to mask it right now.

“If it was a coffee shop or a bakery, I could see it maybe. But an outdoor excursion company in Alaska?” His too-tanned face looks as though it might crack with how big his smile is.

“I just don’t think that’s you.”

So I guess that’s a no to the loan then.

“Why do you look like you’re sick?” My mom sits down next to Phil with nothing but a magazine in hand.

“I’m fine.”

“We’re talking about her future. I told her to take her time up here to figure things out.”

My mom smiles at Phil as though he’s as smart as Einstein. “Not too long. I’d hate for my daughter to turn into one of these people.”

I slide back in my chair and pull out my phone to distract myself until they leave. Don’t say I never bite my tongue.