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“I’m on day shift right now, so I get off at six. I could meet you over at Woody’s after that.”
“Sure,” Logan nodded. “Pepper has my number. Just text me when you find a day that works. Most of my evenings are free.”
“Will do.”
Grant headed in the direction of the checkout stands, and Logan went to the pharmacy for some cold medicine. The minute he’d agreed to all this, he’d started praying to catch something contagious so he could avoid it.
The bar cleared out shortly after closing Sunday night. Emmett cleaned up, cashed out, and headed upstairs. After a long and confusing night, he was looking forward to crashing in bed, watching a movie, and putting unproductive thoughts of Madelyn Chamberlain out of his mind.
He wasn’t sure what he’d been thinking when he asked her out that morning. Or when he’d kissed her the night before. She had that spell over him, making him do stupid things when she looked at him with those big blue eyes. He tried to think positive about it. A date might be nice. It might also go horribly awry and tear their truce to shreds. He supposed he would find out tomorrow night.
Emmett was popping a bag of microwave popcorn when he noticed a voice mail message on his phone. He hadn’t heard it ring earlier, but when things got busy, he was lucky to notice if the smoke alarms were going off.
Swiping at his screen, he noticed the call was from Adelia Chamberlain. Huh, that was unusual. She was either having some kind of rich-person financial crisis, or she’d somehow found out that he was snogging her granddaughter. Curious to find out which it was, he hit the button to play back the message.
“Hello, Emmett. This is Adelia Chamberlain,” she said as though he wouldn’t recognize the sound of her voice instantly. Not many people had his private cell phone number, and those who did sounded nothing like an elderly southern woman with good breeding. “I need to talk to you about my portfolio. I think I want to make some adjustments. I’ve also got a fairly large chunk of income that I’d like to invest. Can we get together next week to discuss it? I’m not sure if I have any reason to come into town, but perhaps you could come out to the house. Helen is away next week, vacationing with some of her old sorority sisters, so you shouldn’t run into anyone at the house. Please call me and let me know.”
Emmett hung up and deleted the message. He didn’t want to risk anyone seeing it. It was paranoid; no one gave a crap who called his phone, but it was that kind of paranoia that had earned him three stress-free years living in Rosewood with only a single soul in town who knew about his past.
Adelia was that person. She was the reason he’d come to Rosewood; how he’d managed to move from Florida and trip over a tiny southern town with the perfect business opportunity for him. He was forever thankful for that chance, and as such, was forever in the employ, albeit secretly, of the Chamberlain matriarch.
He pulled the popcorn out of the microwave and dumped it into a bowl. He took it, a soda, and his phone with him into the bedroom, where he climbed into some cotton pajama pants and settled into bed.
Adelia didn’t call often. She was a fairly conservative investor. She didn’t like moving things around a lot; she wasn’t interested in buying and selling to turn a quick buck. She was in it for the long haul and that had served her well. She’d bought Apple stock back when Steve Jobs had hair. She’d had Coca-Cola stock long before they wanted to teach the world to sing. The rest of her portfolio was like the blueprint for progress: steel, oil, electronics, and pharmaceuticals. She made smart choices, both investing in solid businesses and having enough vision to see what had potential in the future.
As her portfolio manager, she wasn’t the client who made him the most money by making constant commissioned transactions, but he did enjoy working with her. She wasn’t demanding or irritable if a stock didn’t perform as expected. After a while, he noted how well her accounts performed and tried to model part of his own portfolio after hers. He had spent several years buying risky, high-yield stocks, and he tried to balance some of that out with longer-range investments like hers. The combination had served him well, allowing him the unheard-of luxury of retiring from that backbiting business at twenty-eight.
Emmett had made a fortune, fast, and gotten the hell out. He thought he’d like the exciting world of finance and investments, but there was a dark side to it that made him uncomfortable. His firm was always pressuring him to sell stocks to his clients when he didn’t feel good about them. He’d seen people’s financial futures get wiped out from bad advice and manipulative stock-trading tactics. It was a morally ambiguous business and he was happy to take his money and run.
At least he tried. When he called all his clients to let them know about his “retirement,” most of them didn’t care. They were handed off to other financial managers without a hiccup. But not Adelia. Oh, no. She wanted to know exactly where he was going and why he was abandoning her. He’d been the first person she’d actually enjoyed working with in all her years of investing and she wasn’t about to just let him go.
He’d opened up to her and told her about what he was doing. That he wanted out and was looking for a quieter, less complicated life. That’s when Adelia told him about the little town where she lived. It sounded like something out of a movie: the quaint southern town with magnolia trees lining the streets and lightning bugs dancing across the summer twilight. Emmett had lived in Tampa his whole life, but Rosewood sounded like the kind of place—and the kind of pace—he needed.
Then she’d mentioned that the local bar was for sale. She’d billed it as having rustic charm, a prime downtown location, and complete with an apartment over it to live in. Honestly, the woman should’ve been in sales herself. He caught a flight to Birmingham the next day and drove his rental car to the middle of nowhere to track down his future.
The bar had been a little more rustic than she’d claimed and the town a little more sleepy than he’d expected, but it’d worked out. He sold his waterfront condo, traded his Porsche for a pickup truck, and moved to Rosewood.
Renovating the bar gave him the perfect cover story when he moved to town. He was a craftsman, a woodworker, as far as anyone in town knew thanks to a hobby he’d picked up from his father. No one would expect a young millionaire to move to a small town and live in a thousand-square-foot apartment over a bar. His past in Florida and the fortune in his portfolio stayed secret.
That was how he liked it. He was able to put his life behind him, aside from Adelia. The price for her silence was that he had to continue managing her portfolio. To protect this cover, they rarely met up in person, but when she needed to give him a check or have a chat, she would call. She hated talking on the phone and would insist on him coming to the mansion, or on rare occasions, she would come to the bar when it was closed.
Emmett wasn’t quite sure he’d ever be able to erase the image of such a proper lady sitting on a barstool sipping a beer while they talked stocks and bonds. She wasn’t quite as uptight as people seemed to think.
He couldn’t imagine Madelyn doing the same thing, but maybe he was wrong. She’d thrown caution to the wind last night, but he wasn’t sure she’d ever really be able to give in to their attraction. At least not unless she knew who he really was. She would probably think owning a bar and living like he did was charming if she knew he was a secret millionaire. Living the same life with less money in the bank made it pathetic, sad, and likely beneath her. And yet, she’d said yes to their date.
It made him wonder . . . had her grandmother somehow leaked the truth? He couldn’t ima
gine why Adelia would spill the beans, especially to Madelyn, but you never know. He’d have to check with her and make certain their secret was still theirs.
If Madelyn wanted him with the smell of whiskey on his clothes and a quiet, weekday burger date in their future, great. But he wasn’t going to let himself fall for Fancy Pants if her change of heart had anything to do with realizing he had money.
Emmett flipped on the television to an old Western he’d seen a hundred times, and reached for his laptop. He shoveled some popcorn into his mouth while he waited for it to boot up, then pulled up his investment software. He idly poked around, looking at a few performance trends before he dumped some stock and bought something else. He might not have liked the business as a whole, but he still enjoyed the excitement of taking a risk and seeing how it turned out.
As he finished and sat his computer aside, he realized that perhaps he was filling that same risk-taking urge with Madelyn. She wasn’t the kind of woman he usually went for. She was beautiful and independent, running her own business, which was nice. But she was also high-maintenance, stuffy, and her sense of humor was questionable. Even then, he was drawn to her for some reason. Whether they were fighting or making out in her car, he couldn’t get her out of his head.
He’d asked her out, hoping she could accept him as he seemed, not as he was. If he wasn’t willing to take a chance with someone who didn’t fit into his usual mold, how could he expect her to?
Maddie stayed later than usual at her grandmother’s house. Sunday supper was delayed until the evening, since Maddie’s sleep had been disrupted by her late-night antics. Blake picked her up, since her car was in the shop. She carefully avoided the topic of the giant genitalia on her car, but she knew when those photos hit the papers tomorrow, she would get her fair share of ragging from her brothers. For now, they just thought she was having a little fender-bender work done.
