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So much for a harmless flirt-and-run. Dammit. And his day was about to get a whole lot worse, because he needed to talk to Cory.
His mistake was taking a quick loop of the store before he headed toward Cory’s office. He’d needed to work off some of his frustration, and instead he got an armload of his mom.
“Sweetie!”
Dillon grinned at his mother’s warm hug. “Hiya, Mom.”
“You haven’t lost weight, have you?” She moved back to hold him at arm’s length, her blue eyes radiating worry. “You don’t come over for dinner enough.”
“I’ve been working on the apartments most nights lately. With Cory’s insistence that we get them up to full occupancy, I’ve been scrambling to get them ready.”
And apparently not succeeding, considering the sorry state of Alexa’s apartment. But he’d been doing triage on the Rison’s worst ones first, and hers hadn’t been among them. He’d make it up to her, one way or another. If he had to slip into the place when she was at the floral shop and do the improvements piecemeal, he would.
“You could hire help. No one ever said you had to handle it all yourself. Not that you’d have any trouble, strong, strapping guy like you.” She squeezed his biceps and made him laugh.
He loved hanging with her, something he hadn’t been doing nearly enough of lately. He’d buried himself in fixing up their income properties and at the house he was helping to rehab for a returning veteran for more than one reason. He loved the work, true, but he was also trying to avoid—
“Such a strapping guy should have his pick of dates for the Helping Hands benefit.” She tilted her head and gave him a sweet, disarming smile. Her narrowing-in-for-the-kill-you-with-kindness look. “Have you found one yet?”
That.
“Do we have to talk about this right now?” He scraped a hand over the back of his head and resisted the urge to scuff the toe of his boot along the floor. Almost thirty or not, when Corinne Santangelo gave him that look, he regressed to about fifteen in his head. Especially since he knew it was just the beginning.
“Yes, we do. It’s in just a couple weeks. I know you’ve been tied up, sweetie, but maybe if you put half as much effort into finding a date as you did in planning the fund-raiser, you’d have a better selection of dates to pick from.”
Yep, here it came. She was about to chide him about bringing what his stepfather, Raymond, called “floozies” to the event. They both claimed they just wanted him to be happy with someone who wasn’t a gold digger, as the so-called floozies usually turned out to be, but he knew the company’s reputation was also on the line.
As Value Hardware’s primary annual fund-raising benefit, the Helping Hands charity got a lot of notice. It was Dillon’s brainchild, his baby, the part of the business that made sense to him beyond the profit-and-loss statements that Cory lived and breathed. But it was also his yearly chance to remind his parents he wouldn’t embrace a role in the spotlight, even if that meant hearing an earful afterward about whom he selected to accompany him.
Plus, he’d discovered one indisputable fact—“bad” girls were better in bed. So shoot him.
“I’m sure I’ll be able to find someone.” He smothered a grin. Whether she approved of his choice, however…
/> His parents were picky. If he didn’t bring just the right kind of woman to the event to get his folks off his back, pretty soon they’d start setting him up on blind dates with “suitable” women he didn’t even want to share a meal with, never mind seriously date.
He’d gone out with those women before. Ones who pretended to really enjoy watching the sun set on a rickety old fishing boat, at least until they thought they had him snagged. He was the prime catch, not the fish.
“Uh-huh.” She waved at a passing customer and chitchatted for a moment about an arthritic poodle, then returned her attention to Dillon. “I’m onto you, kid.”
“Oh really?”
“Come back to my office.”
Uh-oh. Not good. Office talks were only one step better than when she called him by his full name. “I have this part I need to get—” And some questions I need to ask your other son.
“It’ll keep for a few minutes.”
Smiling at more customers, she led the way down the power tools aisle. She inspired waves of greeting in almost everyone she passed. Such was her magic. Just because he didn’t think he was cut out for the corporate blueprint didn’t mean he couldn’t appreciate all the hard work his mom and stepfather had put into making the company a success.
People stopped him as well, and he couldn’t say he minded talking tools. Haven was a small, close-knit town, and he’d known many of these people since he’d been in diapers. The three years he’d spent living in New Jersey had been a welcome getaway, but he’d always known he’d come back. This was his legacy.
Once they reached the back of the store, they bypassed Dillon’s own closet-sized office and continued on to her larger one. At the end of the hall were his stepfather’s office and Cory’s lair. It was easy to differentiate the two. From Raymond’s open door came the low tones of the Beatles’ White Album, whereas Cory never played music. He also never opened his door.
His mom led him inside her office, then circled her wide carved rosewood desk to take a seat behind it. The room held all the touches of home—framed pictures, a soft, knitted blanket over the back of her chair for when the AC made it too cold, a few thriving plants. Even the sea-green walls made the space seem soothing rather than like an office.
But Dillon still knew what it was. And every time he locked himself inside one of these enlarged coffins, he couldn’t stop thinking about everything he was missing. Sunshine. Fresh air. The burn of his muscles as the hours passed in a blur of exertion.
She leaned forward, her auburn bob swinging against her jaw. Though she and her husband were near retirement, something they told everyone who would listen, she fought the battle against gray hair and wrinkles with steely determination. “Dad and I want to sit down with you and your brother sometime in the next few weeks.”
