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“I’m glad you think so.” His expression turned grave. “You’ll be getting it when I die.”
I hated that his surgery was making both of us face his immortality. “As much as I love this house, I would happily trade it for a little more time with you.”
“Which is why it’s going to you, McKenna. Your grandmother would have wanted her beloved home to be in the hands of someone who appreciates it as much as she did,” he explained with a determined gleam in his eyes. “Everybody else sees dollar bills when they look at this house, except for you.”
I pressed my lips together to hold back my tears. “I promise to take good care of it when the time comes…many years from now, hopefully.”
“Now you just need to find someone to share this place with while I’m still young enough to walk you down the aisle.”
I rolled my eyes. “Didn’t you hear the doctor? You’ll be good as new and able to hand me off to my future husband—whenever I finally find the man I want to spend the rest of my life with—more easily than before the surgery.” Wagging my finger at him, I added, “That is, if you do the exercises the physical therapist tells you to do.”
“I’m trying,” he grunted. “But these old bones of mine aren’t what they used to be.”
“Yet you insisted you weren’t too old when I found you on a ladder, messing with the gutters last month,” I reminded him.
He shrugged, and a mischievous glint filled his eyes. “If you had a man in your life, I could’ve asked him to do it instead.”
“You only have yourself to blame for me being perpetually single,” I teased. “I’ve never met a man who could live up to the standard you set. I’m afraid the bar is impossibly high.”
“It would probably also help if you ever left your studio,” he retorted.
That was a fair point since I spent most of my time painting. “Hey, I’m here, aren’t I?”
“You are,” he agreed, tapping his finger against his bottom lip. “Maybe I should bribe you to get out there and meet someone.”
“I’m not five,” I huffed. “You can’t bribe me with an ice cream cone anymore.”
“What about with this house?” he asked with a grin. “When you get engaged, I’ll sign it over to you. No need to wait until after I’m gone. You can get ready to build your family here, sooner rather than later.”
“Sure, Grandpa.” It was easy to agree when I knew darn well that wasn't going to happen anytime soon. “I’ll take the house when I get engaged, but I don’t want to hear any more talk about you dying.”
2
JEREMY
“The deal for the waterfront property in Malibu went through today,” I informed Jason, one of my two brothers, who were also my business partners.
“That’s the second to last house on Palm Court, right?” he clarified.
“Yeah,” I answered as I shuffled through some of the papers on my desk.
“What about the last one? You know this will only work if we get them all.”
“No shit, Sherlock,” I grunted as I ran a hand through my short brown hair. “I was finally able to get a meeting with the owner tomorrow morning.”
We’d all been slightly nervous about taking on the Palm Court project when the owner of the largest and most beautiful house on the somewhat private, oceanfront street refused to even take our call.
It was the biggest project we’d done since we’d started our real estate development company nearly ten years ago. And we usually chose projects where we knew that we could acquire all of the assets before making the first purchase.
Jason, James, and I had been dealt a shitty hand growing up. We were poorer than dirt, and when our parents weren’t gone for weeks at a time, they were partying or passed out from the drugs and alcohol. Triplets certainly hadn’t made things easy on them, but I didn’t have any sympathy when they hadn’t even attempted to take care of us. The only reason we didn’t end up in foster care was because then they would lose the welfare benefits they received from the state.
At least my brothers and I had each other. We’d grown up tough and understood the value of hard work if we wanted to get out of that hellhole. We worked our asses off at our jobs and school, which paid off when we each received scholarships for college. They didn’t pay for everything, so we all got jobs on local construction crews. Whatever was left after school and living expenses, which we kept as low as possible—meaning we shared a one-bedroom apartment and ate a lot of ramen—we stashed away.
We graduated in three years, each of us earning some kind of business degree. Then we put our experience in construction—which was how we made it through school—to good use. With the three of us busting our asses together, we launched a successful business flipping houses, making us all billionaires. We still flipped houses, but on a much larger scale—those projects were really about passion, though. We made most of our money by bankrolling the building of new developments, houses, business complexes, even skyscrapers.
And we’d expanded the business. Jason still ran the office in Wisconsin—where we'd spent our childhood. James ran our Chicago office, and I headed up the Los Angeles location. Although, James and I split our time between Wisconsin and our respective offices. All three of us owned multiple houses around the world, but for some reason, we always kept a home near where we grew up. And we made sure to connect with each other once or twice a month for a poker night with several friends.
When Palm Court hit my radar, I instantly wanted it. It was a dead-end road that jutted out into the ocean so that the properties on both sides had beaches. It felt like its own little world when you turned onto the street. The houses were older but had tremendous potential. I knew that if we could get our hands on every one of them, we could renovate them and turn the court into a tiny, luxury community, even installing a guard shack to create a sense of exclusivity.
