Page 79 of The Hometown Heartbreaker

“I am,” I said finally.

He grunted, as if this was the answer he’d been waiting for. “Sadie?” His tone was softer now.

I nodded, eyes fixed on the grid of ancient floor tiles. “Yeah.”

Before he could comment more, Mom’s office door swung open, and the volume inside the building doubled. My mother’s voice had a way of filling every available cubic inch, something she claimed to have inherited from her own mother. Apparently, my abuelita could call cows down from a hilltop and shame men into better behavior in the same breath.

“I can’t tell you how grateful I am,” said a female voice I didn’t recognize, high and bright with nerves. “I didn’t expect…well, any of this, really.”

Mom came through the door first, slight and graceful, wearing her favorite gray cashmere sweater and jeans. She was beaming, which meant something had gone very right, or very wrong in a way that allowed her to fix it.

She was followed by a woman I’d never seen before—she was petite but had an hourglass figure. Her face was flushed, color rising high on her cheekbones. She wore a ocean blue wrap dress that matched her eyes exactly, and her hair—long, honey-blonde—fell over her shoulders in a way that looked both accidental and deliberate.

The woman’s hand was locked in my mother’s, their knuckles pressed together with the fierce solidarity of survivors. I could tell, even before my mother spoke in a tone she reserved for people fresh out of wreckage, that this was another one of Mom’s projects: a wounded bird in need of a soft nest and a hot meal. She collected people the way some grandmothers collected porcelain figurines—the battered, the mismatched, the ones with stories written in cracks and chips—until the house felt packed to the gills with a revolving cast of beautiful strangers. Some stuck around and were now employees, some moved on, but every single one left a piece of themselves behind, like stray buttons in a junk drawer.

This one was different, though. There was something about the way she held herself—shoulders squared, chin tilted in permanent defiance—that told me she wasn’t here because she needed saving. She was here because she’d finally run out of other places to go. The dress she wore was form-fitting and exuded confidence and grace, but her white-knuckle grip on the leather portfolio said otherwise.

She was jaw-dropping, yeah, but not in the fragile, glass-doll way I’d come to expect from Mom’s parade of strays. There was a sturdiness to her, a physical presence that demanded you meet her gaze and keep it there. A curtain of gold-blonde hair tumbled down her back, shimmering like a damn shampoo commercial. Her face was all cheekbones and full lips, the kind of beauty that made you stare without meaning to. Her eyes—startlingly blue, almost aquatic—shuttered from my mom to Dean to me and back again, doing a quick threat assessment.

As soon as our eyes met, the comparison hit me so fast it felt like a punch to the gut: she was the living, breathing, doppelganger of Cameron Diaz in her late ’90s prime, only a very petite, five foot two version. The Mask, but with the intensity of Gangs of New York.

I flicked a glance at Dean, whose first crush had been Cameron, he had posters of her on his walls, to see if the resemblance had registered for him. Dean prided himself on never being rattled by anything, but his posture—normally all loose-jointed confidence—had gone stiff, and his jaw flexed like a guy chewing glass.

“Oh, perfect timing, boys. This is Felicity, she is interviewing for the events coordinator position.” Mom motioned to us. “Felicity, these are two of my sons, Dawson and Dean.”

Felicity’s gaze caught mine for a fraction of a second, her lips twitching like she was fighting the urge to laugh at the introduction. “Nice to meet you,” I said, offering her my hand, which she took with a quick, businesslike shake.

“You too,” she replied, and I could’ve sworn her eyes flicked up and down, measuring me up, not in a flirtatious way, just in a self-protective way, as if to calculate whether or not I was a threat. When her shoulders relaxed, I felt I’d passed the test.

But when her focus slid to Dean, the whole room seemed to shift. Her smile widened, teeth flashing, and a light flickered on behind her eyes, electric and unmistakable. “Oh,” she said, her voice suddenly softer and very familiar, “hello, Sunshine.”

Sunshine? I’d heard my brother called a lot of things, Sunshine was never one of them.

“You two know each other?” Mom asked, eyebrows up.

“Not formally,” Felicity vague-splained, performing a balancing act between truth and misdirection that only the truly interesting could manage.

I liked her immediately.

I shot a look at Dean. He held himself with the slack-jawed vacancy of a man who’d just been hit in the head with a two-by-four. His pupils were dilated to the point of cartoonishness.

That was new. I’d seen him cut deals with millionaires over the phone while simultaneously field-dressing a wounded steer. I’d watched him drop a full-grown man with a single punch on the Fourth of July, then step over the body to refill an apple juice for a crying toddler without missing a beat. The man ran at a constant simmer, never boiled over, and if he had feelings, he kept them locked up with the same combination that secured Mom’s stockpile of top-shelf tequila.

“Okay, well, Felicity, if you’d like to take a seat in the conference room?” Mom’s tone was the bright, competent chirp she used when she sensed the danger of an awkward silence. “Dean will be in with you shortly for round two of the interview.”

“Oh.” Felicity’s eyes widened, just a blink, but enough to suggest she hadn’t realized there was more to come. “Okay.”

Mom guided her down the hallway with the gentle authority of a hotel concierge, narrating the route as though the admin wing might at any moment rearrange itself behind their backs. “Last door on the left, darling, watch the dip in the floor, it always catches people off guard.” Felicity followed, back straight and steps measured, her wrap dress swirling with each stride.

Dean stared after the closed conference room door like a retriever fixated on a duck in flight. I let the silence hang until it started to vibrate with potential energy.

“Real smooth, Romeo,” I teased, grinning.

He blinked twice, like an old television set powering back on after a blackout. “What?”

It was the first time I’d ever witnessed someone be lovestruck. I was glad it was my brother. He was full-blown twitterpated.

“Sorry, should I say, Sunshine?” I corrected.