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I sigh, a smile settling on my face as I get back to work.
Chapter 3
Logan
“Doyouwantmeto pick you up a scarf while I’m in Rome, Mum?” I ask as I flick the coffee machine on in her kitchen.
Despite having my own house, I like coming back here for breakfast. Dad suggested that their housekeeper start earlier, but Mum insists that she likes to make Dad breakfast herself before he goes to work each morning.
I lean against the marble counter as she whisks eggs in a bowl. Forty years of marriage and they’re still the most in love couple I’ve ever seen. I’ve never known them to argue. It’s the classic rags to riches story. Dad met Mum at a local dance hall at seventeen, spent months courting her, then they married when they turned eighteen. Not a penny to either of their names. But Dad’s stubborn, and he promised my mother he would build her a palace and treat her like a queen. And that’s exactly what he did.
Long hours working two jobs so he could fund his degree in design and engineering, plus some dumb luck when he landed a job with a big car engine manufacturer has led him to this—the owner of the country’s largest luxury engine design company. The business produces modern engines for sports cars, super yachts, and private jets. And now, the new project I’m working on with him is for an environmentally friendly bio-fuel rocket engine. Most engines can only operate with a partial biofuel mix rather than one hundred percent biofuel. But we’ve designed aircraft engines that use it at one hundred percent. And now we’re working on one for rockets, aiming to work with NASA once we have a tested prototype. It’s ground-breaking.
I have to pinch myself, because even living and breathing it every day as we’ve been doing the past six months, it still sounds damn cool.
“No.” Mum laughs. “Your father keeps buying them. I told him I only have one neck. I can’t wear twenty at once.”
“Can’t wear twenty what?” Dad walks into the room, fastening his tie. “All right, son?” He pats me on the back, then walks over to Mum.
She places the whisk down in the bowl and fixes his tie for him and folds his collar down. “You don’t look so good. How much sleep did you get?”
Dad sighs before kissing her on the forehead. “I’m fine.”
“Len.”
Dad runs a hand around the back of his neck and his shoulders sag. Today, he looks downtrodden, beaten… drained.
“I woke up at two AM and you still weren’t in bed,” Mum continues.
Dad’s eyes lack their usual glint. “I came to bed late. Work. You know how it is.”
Mum holds his eyes. “Tell me.”
“Dad?” I ask, ignoring the flashing green light on the coffee machine indicating that it’s ready.
I’ve spent time in and out of the family business over the years. My friend, Dax, who runs a distillery, needed my help. And I persuaded Dad it was a good idea for me to experience working with other companies before joining him permanently. But now I’m firmly back in the family business. If something is going on, then I should know about it.
“Sit down. Both of you.”
Mum’s worried expression matches the increasing tightness in my chest.
“What’s wrong? Are you sick?” I sit at the shiny glass kitchen table and wait for him to say something.
“No. Not sick.” Dad laughs, even though nothing about the sudden tension in the air tells me that what he’s about to say is funny.
“Len?” Mum’s questioning gaze from the seat next to his matches my own as we stare at my father, the most capable man I’ve ever known.
Dad exhales slowly as he looks around the room. “This.” He holds his palms up and gestures at the luxury marble kitchen they had designed and installed last year. “We built this. Our family, the Riches. Years of hard graft. But what we have, the business, the houses, the jet… Everything… It’s ours. We built this together as a family. I couldn’t have done it without you both.”
His eyes shine as he reaches out and clasps Mum’s hand.
Fuck, he is sick. He must be. This is a dying man’s speech.
“And we must do whatever it takes to protect it.” His eyes meet mine, a new determination filling in them. “Whateverit takes.”
“Of course we will, Dad. This new project, it’s—”
“A drain on resources.” He drops his gaze to the side like he can’t bring himself to meet my eyes.
