Dillon groaned and ran his hands through his hair. Funny how nothing changed even as everything changed. In high school, Dillon had been homecoming king their junior year before he got outed. He looked like a Backstreet Boy then and now. Although he’d lived in Portland all his life, Dillon wasn’t about to turn into a lumbersexual just because it was the fad. No flannel—silk ties and suits for him. No man bun—he’d rather die. No beard—why hide such a handsome face behind so much hair? Since high school the only thing that had changed about Dillon was the part in his hair and the balance in his bank account. Corporate law had been as good to Dillon as starting his own contracting company had been good to Chris.
“You know this could ruin everything, right?” Dillon asked. “Joey is not a fan of being manipulated. You sleep with her and then offer her a job working for us? She’s going to feel manipulated. I don’t blame her.”
“It just happened, I swear,” Chris said. “I was going to talk to her about the job and then...things. Things happened.”
“Naked things.”
“Yep.”
“You usually have more self-control than that.”
“Not around your sister.”
“I wish I hadn’t heard that.”
“Dillon...did you consider she might want to stay at her old job?” Chris asked, desperate to get off the subject of the naked things he had done to Joey last night.
“I know she wants to stay at her old job. I don’t want her to stay at her old job. I want her back here working for Lost Lake Village Rentals.”
“I do, too.”
“Well, that’s probably not going to happen now that you had to go and fuck it up by, you know...fucking.”
“So you’re not mad I slept with her? You’re just mad that by sleeping with her I might have ruined your business plan?” Chris asked.
“She’s an adult. I don’t care who she sleeps with. I’m not Dad. I’m not her keeper. None of my business. Except now it is literally my business. Joey is the single most perfect person to manage Lost Lake Village Rentals and I need her to do it. I can’t trust anybody else with it.”
“Nobody else?”
“I looked, I swear. I had interviews with almost fifty candidates. Two of them seemed okay until I looked at their Facebook pages. Why do people even have Facebook when they want to remain employed?”
“I like to post Nirvana vids on my MySpace page.”
“MySpace doesn’t exist anymore.”
“Damn, where are all my vids going, then?”
Dillon walked over to Chris and put his hands on his shoulders. “This company is my baby. You don’t trust your baby to a stranger. You trust your baby to someone in your family you know and love and who is a marketing genius.”
“I’ve never met a baby who needed marketing.”
“My baby does if it’s going to get off the ground.”
“You have a weird baby.”
Dillon dropped his hands from Chris’s shoulders and walked back to his desk. Chris had come straight to Dillon’s office first thing this morning. He didn’t have to be at Timber Ridge until eleven, and as much as it went against the grain to kiss and tell, he knew he had to in this case. He and Dillon were business partners now. Dillon had sunk his entire life savings and his fiancé’s into this dream. Lost Lake Village Rentals didn’t exist—yet. But it would in a few months if they could get Joey on board. Ten cabins that ringed the famed Lost Lake on the northwest slope of Mount Hood. Ten cabins for nightly, weekly or monthly rent. Ten barely livable cabins Dillon and Oscar had bought with their nest egg and hired Chris to turn into rustic palaces. And somebody had to manage the cabin complex and somebody had to market them and somebody had to live in one of the cabins year-round to troubleshoot guest issues. And that somebody had to be Joey because only Joey had the marketing expertise, the bookkeeping acumen and the personality to deal with the cabin guests. Chris could handle broken pipes and leaky roofs and turning dumps into dream houses but he was not a people person unless he was sleeping with that person. Bu
t Joey... This job was tailor-made for her. If only they could convince her of that.
“Sit.” Dillon pointed at the chair across from his desk.
“Are you going to kill me in that chair?” Chris asked.
“Do you think I should?”
“I probably would in your shoes.” Chris took a seat and knew it might be his last. Dillon had a nice office—all leather furniture and an ebony-stained floor polished to a high shine. If he was going to die somewhere, he was happy to be dying on nicely maintained white-oak flooring. “In my defense, you told me to woo her. You told me to plant a seed—”
“I meant ‘plant a seed so she’ll think of moving back to Oregon.’ I didn’t mean plant a seed in...you know. Her...her lady garden.”