You Never Know Read online

  “I was getting to—”

  His focus turned back on me. “That asshole hired Jeremy Chastain to renovate the house instead of you!” Ben announced. “Can you believe it?”

  I didn’t get the job for reasons that had nothing to do with my ability as a contractor and more to do with the fact Ashford Lennox and I were occasional fuck buddies. I did not mix business and pleasure. It was a recipe for disaster. “I—”

  “I was going to tell him that too,” she said, excited and irritated at the same time. “But the bigger news is that Mitch Thayer is back in town!”

  “What?”

  “Mitch Thayer,” she emphasized, widening her eyes.

  “What?” Ben asked again, this time with more disbelief and judgment in his tone.

  “Are you listening to me?”

  “No, I heard you. I just don’t get why he would care?”

  “Thank you,” I said to her, backing up Ben’s assumption.

  “Are you kidding?” She sounded unhinged.

  “Oh, come on, that’s ancient history.” Ben dismissed her concerns, bumping my chest with the back of his hand. “Am I right?”

  “You are,” I assured him while casting Gail a pained look.

  “What is he doing back, anyway?” Ben asked Gail.

  “He’s moving his business here,” she announced, smiling smugly at us, clearly pleased by being in the know.

  “Seriously? After all this time?”

  “Yep,” she said, beaming. “Iron Age is moving to where the lumber mill was.”

  “Iron Age?” Ben scoffed.

  “It’s a super cute name for a business that makes such gorgeous furniture. You get the idea that it’s rustic right off the bat.”

  “I guess,” he said disdainfully, not sounding impressed in the least. “But there are about a billion places that make furniture in the world. IKEA, anyone?”

  “Mitch only makes very high-end furniture,” she said haughtily.

  “Does he?” Ben yawned, baiting her.

  She growled.

  He laughed and she couldn’t help smiling. We’d all been friends since high school, so we knew the buttons to push for good and evil.

  “So, tell me what’s with this guy Lennox and the Emerson place?”

  “They’re turning it into a B and B,” he informed her, sounding bored. “I mean, that’s exactly what our little picturesque town needs, right? Another bed-and-breakfast.”

  “But at least the others had the good sense not to hire Chastain. The hell is Lennox thinking?” She sounded horrified.

  “He’s thinking that Chastain will clean up the bones of the place and that’s all. I heard from Joanna that Lennox’s going to bring in a whole team from New York to do the finishing and design, he just needs the house reinforced.”

  Toby snorted out a laugh from the passenger seat, the first expression of any kind he’d made in several minutes.

  “I thought you were dead over there,” I teased.

  “I almost was,” he assured me. “Did you see the Fast and Furious move my wife did there in the middle of the street? She was channeling Vin Diesel, man.”

  I chuckled as he clutched his heart.

  “What was so funny about Chastain?” Ben asked him.

  “Please,” Toby scoffed. “Let’s all take a minute to recall what happened to the roof at the high school and the bearing wall at Hempstead Farm.”

  “He’s been lucky both times,” Gail stressed. “For heaven’s sake, the roof at Schrader High caved in last summer when school was out, and the bearing wall in the stable went down just as Preston had taken the horses out to pasture.”

  “Remember how angry Mal was?”

  “Well of course,” Toby apprised him. “Fuckin’ Chastain nearly killed the man’s husband! If someone nearly killed Gail, I’d lose my mind!”

  “Awww, sweetie,” Gail cooed, patting his knee.

  “He sued Chastain for, what—” Ben had to think. “—six million dollars or something? I think it was a million per horse that could have died.”

  “Well, he breeds those horses, for heaven’s sake. That’s his income.” Gail was back to commenting. “That would have killed his business, not to mention the fact that those poor animals would have been crushed!”

  “Yeah,” I said with a nod. “If he was going to drop a wall on something, Malachi Harel’s Arabians should not have been his first choice.”

  “I bet he was surprised that Mal was keeping horses that cost so much up at his place.”

  “His place?” I mused. “You make it sound so small. Do you know how many acres Mal and Preston own?”

  “They bought the land on both sides of the river, and it butts up against yours, doesn’t it?” Gail asked me. “It’s just you and them up on that mountain next to the preserve, right?”

  “It’s a hill,” I corrected her.

  “Damn high hill,” she volleyed. “But seriously, why in the hell would Lennox go with Chastain over you?”

  “His company is bigger’n mine,” I reminded her, hoping she’d drop it, not needing anyone to know about Ashford Lennox and me. If we’d been serious, I would have told everyone, but since we had just been fucking now and then… I did not feel compelled to share.

  “Yeah, but all you have to do is look at reviews of the service and the work,” she defended me. “Jesus, Hagen, the man’s a menace.”

  I could not disagree. Doing business with Jeremy Chastain was iffy. I’d told Ashford—Ash to me—to have someone go in behind him and check his work.

  “But back to the Mitch thing,” she said somberly. “What are you going to do?”

  All eyes on me.

  “What?”

  “Hagen!” Gail barked.

  “No, really, what?”

  “This is Mitch!”

  “Why’re you yelling at me?”

  “The love of your life is back.”

  Was she kidding? “Are you kidding?”

  Her wide eyes told me she was not.

  “I don’t have to do anything,” I assured her. “It’s been like, what, now—seventeen years or something? I doubt he even remembers who I am.”

  That drew laughter from everyone, even Toby, who had met Gail in college and moved back to Benson with her to raise their kids, and had no idea, except what he’d been told, who and what Mitch Thayer was to me.

  “It was a long time ago,” I reiterated for my friends.

  “True,” Gail agreed. “But that doesn’t make it any less important.”

  But it did.

  It had been one of those things. Mitch got a football scholarship to go and play for the University of Florida, and even though he promised to call and write while we were apart for my senior year, and said I could go there and live with him the second I graduated, all of that quickly evaporated once he left. And I understood. I truly did. He was a freshman wide receiver, trying to fit in and play and create a future for himself that included a degree not dependent on professional sports. When he started up with the string of beauty queens on his arm, some of the most beautiful beards I’d ever seen, I knew the plan for our future was a bust. He was on his own path, I needed to find mine.

  Since I didn’t have a sports career to bank on, I joined the military and served for nine years, until I was first wounded in the line of duty, then captured, rescued, and sent home—both body and mind too brutalized to be of any use to the Army anymore. Once I was back home recuperating, staring at the same ceiling I’d slept under for as far back as I could remember, wondering what the hell I was going to do with the rest of my life, I spiraled quickly into self-pity. I didn’t see many options for a man who had a résumé filled with shooting a gun. My mother asked daily what I was going to do, and the answer was always the same.

  Nothing.

  When Gail started coming around, my mother, Jenny Wylie, finally ordered me to go outside, breathe in the morning air, and get some sunshine on my face, and with Gail prodding and my mother
pushing, I went out, just so I didn’t have to hear the nagging.

  The day after my epiphany in the park with Alma, I was up on crutches making breakfast instead of lying on my back first thing in the morning when I noticed my mother was sad. It hit me as I studied her that, for once, she wasn’t crying over me. When I took a seat across from her at the kitchen table, she tipped her head sideways and made me promise to take care of my father.

  “Why?” I asked suspiciously, scowling at her.

  She took my hand in hers and squeezed tight. “Because, love, I’m not going to be around much longer to do it.”

  Instinctively I tightened my own grip, and she sighed and patted my hand.

  “It’s been such a blessing to have not one, but two wonderful men in my life.”

  I lost it. She lost it. And by the time the explanation about stomach cancer came pouring out, I begged her, through my tears, to give me something, anything, to do.

  “I want a treehouse.”

  It was not the answer I was expecting. I gulped and rubbed at my eyes so I could see her clearly. “I’m sorry?”

  She giggled. “You were going to be a contractor, so make with the building, Obadiah,” she teased, using the middle name I hated. “Learn how to build—you’ve always loved it—and make me a treehouse. That’s what I want to live in.”

  “You’re kidding.”

  Her grin was evil. “No, my love, really not.”

  A treehouse. “You’re sure?”

  She nodded.

  It was what she wanted, and I decided I’d be damned if she wouldn’t have it.

  I went to see Oscar Mendoza and asked him what it would cost to build my mother a treehouse. He was happy to build it, but even more so, he wanted to talk to me about a job. I’d worked construction for him all four years of high school, and since his son, Hector, hadn’t returned from Iraq, having me back on his payroll would be a blessing. It was funny how I had no idea Mr. Mendoza wanted to give me a helping hand until I stopped being angry and bitter and started thinking about my mother instead.

  It took a year to build, her little oasis in the trees, thirty feet off the ground with windows on all sides and french doors she left open all the time leading out to a wide balcony. I made her a cozy reading nook with built-in shelves lining the walls on both sides, and her bed stood under the A-frame window that looked out at the redwoods, and beyond, the sea. She loved the rolling ladder that led up to the treehouse’s loft which I made into a sunroom so she could watch the birds in spring, follow the clouds in summer, watch the leaves turn in autumn, and count the snowflakes in winter. She told me often that the whole room being glass—especially the ceiling—and the fact that the windows louvered outward so she could leave them open even in the rain, was the best thing she could imagine.

  “You did it,” she sighed, kissing me on the cheek. “You built me my castle.”

  I never forgot the look on her face when she told me her men had come through for her. I built her dream house. My father, Fenwick Wylie, took her to Italy. She would go to the next life a happy woman.

  “I’d rather I went first,” I had confessed. She wasn’t strong enough to smack me anymore, but, man, could she pinch. “The hell, woman,” I whined, rubbing the underside of my right bicep where I was certain there was going to be a bruise.

  Her glower was dark. “A parent should never outlive their child—that’s against nature—and I’ve already lived through that fear, thank you.”

  I opened my mouth to rebut.

  “So you just sit there and be strong for your father and miss me and live well because that’s what I want, Hage. That’s all I’ve ever wanted.”

  I grabbed her and hugged her, and she pretended to fight me off even as she succumbed to a fit of laughter that brought my father running when he heard the joyous sound. She had always charmed him completely, and that time was no exception.

  After she passed, my father and I exchanged rooms. He didn’t want the one at the top of the house connected to the loft with the ladder. For me, it wasn’t weird to be in their room. We lived in the treehouse for only a year after we built it, and it was instead a comfort knowing all her love and all her joy was basically bursting from the walls. Her house that I built had transformed her life as well as mine.

  “You’re a keeper,” my father told me.

  I snorted out a laugh because, yeah, succinct as always.

  He beaned me with a pair of rolled-up socks and told me I needed to get my contractor license so I could make other people’s dreams come true too.

  “Mr. Mendoza needs an heir, and I’m pretty sure he wants that to be you.”

  I turned to look at him. “I’m not his kid, I’m yours.”

  “I can share,” he said, smiling at me.

  It turned out Mr. Mendoza did, in fact, want me, and if possible, even more so when he saw the treehouse with the gradual stairs, solar panels, and view of the sky and the sea.

  “You’ll be my vision man,” he told me.

  I didn’t understand until he put me in charge of builds that were fanciful, of renovations that needed to look not remotely like what they’d started out as, and of making small areas seem big and cavernous spaces seem cozy. I got a reputation for being that guy, the one who could look at a building and know what it was supposed to be.

  “You’re like Michelangelo,” Mr. Mendoza explained. “You can see the statue inside the pillar of marble.”

  I shot him a look.

  “I say what you are,” he said, daring me to contradict him.

  There was no argument.

  When I got my license, my father was so proud. But even then, I saw him winding down. He still hugged me tight and told me he loved me, but he couldn’t live just for me, and it wasn’t fair to ask him to. He was tired. He aged when I was in the service—I’d been shocked by how much older he’d looked when I came home—and my mother’s illness had taken the rest. He was done, and I told him I understood as we watched his last sunset together through the trees.

  “Yeah,” he sighed, patting the railing of the porch before turning to step into my arms. “I did good.”

  “You did good?” I teased him as I hugged him tight.

  “Yessir,” he assured me, kissing my cheek. “I married a good woman, and I raised a good man. Kudos to me.”

  I chuckled softly as he held on longer than usual. He was gone the following morning. After the funeral, at the reception at the treehouse, Mr. Mendoza asked me to be his partner.

  “You don’t have to do that just because you feel sorry that my dad died,” I told him.

  He hit me on the back of the head. Apparently parental smacking was still in my future. “The hell?” I groused.

  “You are like my son, and seeing you thrive in your new role has been a blessing. Why wouldn’t I want more of that?”

  He had a point.

  “Just do what I say, we’ll sign papers tomorrow.”

  A month later, when everything was legal and official, we had a small private party at the Castaway Grill to celebrate. Mr. Mendoza was touched when I told him absolutely not, we weren’t changing the name of the business. I explained that Mendoza and Son Contracting was short and to the point without being cutesy or punny or too serious, and he seemed very pleased.

  “I haven’t seen him this happy in so long,” Blanca Mendoza had told me, smiling at her husband as she held my hand. “I thank God every day that you came home safely.”

  I squeezed her hand back and would have left, but she held on and I was surprised by the glare I was getting.

  “Ma’am?”

  One eyebrow lifted in question.

  “What?” Now she was making me nervous.

  “You had no one to bring with you tonight?”

  I groaned.

  “What’s so wrong with Taylor Ealy?” she interrogated. “He’s nice, he’s a school teacher, he’s cute. What happened?”

  How was I supposed to explain to her that while I w
as, in fact, now looking for a relationship—though one-night stands were still on the table, I wasn’t a monk, for fuck’s sake—guys who were physically demanding, vocal about their wants, and active in the sack were the only ones I could even see giving a chance to. Passive partners were not my thing. Taylor, though a sweet guy, was not for me. I also had my own darker reasons.

  I grimaced. She waited.

  “Maybe you should try less hard to marry me off, huh?”

  She was not moved in the least. Blanca was certain I needed a nice boy to come home to. So was her daughter, Marisol.

  “Leave him alone,” Mr. Mendoza urged them. “He’ll find someone when he’s ready. For now, we have work to do.”

  And now, after three years and hundreds of jobs later, he had finally taken his wife and daughter and her family on the trip to Europe that his son, Hector, had always dreamed of and not lived to do. It was cathartic, and the pictures being texted to me, most recently from Germany, were truly stunning. Mr. Mendoza had quite the eye for photography and had been taking more and more time off to turn his hobby into a business. He had sold quite a few prints after a show at a local art gallery in town. I was thrilled that he trusted me enough to leave everything in my care, the trust implicit in the act.

  What I was not loving was the fact that even as far away as Bremen, both Blanca and Marisol were still texting me, asking if I’d gone on any dates since they left. I could only imagine the excitement in their voices if they found out Mitchell Thayer was back in town.

  The horror.

  “Well?”

  I’d zoned out and Gail caught me. “Sorry.”

  “It’s fine. Just tell me, what are you going to do when you see him?”

  I played dumb. “Who?”

  “Mitch!”

  I rolled my eyes. “Oh yeah.”

  “Oh yeah?” she repeated irritably.

  I exhaled, loudly. “Again, you’re talking about someone I knew a lifetime ago.”

  “Yeah, but—”

  “And isn’t he married?” I asked, unsure but fairly certain I’d seen something about that awhile back. “I thought he was married.”

  “That was ages ago when he was still playing in the NFL before he got hurt and had the hip replacement surgery.”

  I waggled my eyebrows. “You haven’t been keeping tabs on him at all.”