Savannah brushed the bangs off her forehead, then stepped back to survey her work. She only had another half hour before the sun set completely, but she’d gotten far more demo accomplished than she’d expected. The bones of the front porch were in a mountain beside the old house, filled with timbers and shingles and the first few floorboards she’d ripped off. The fresh pile of lumber she’d ordered this morning sat on the front lawn, waiting.
She should have been working on the sales-territory realignment, but as the end of the day had ticked away, Savannah had grown anxious and worried about the company. And most of all, powerless, because Hillstrand Solar was still struggling, and turning that ship in a new direction was a slow, painful process. She’d felt stifled by the walls around her, the recirculated air filling the cubicles.
Five seconds later she’d been in her car, heading for the beach house. She’d followed the twisting dirt road, then parked on the side of the house and grabbed her toolbox from the trunk. She missed her pickup truck, but figured if she’d gone home to load the old Chevy, she would have lost too much daylight. Her toolbox and tools were still in the trunk of her car from a temporary porch repair she’d done after a storm a couple months ago.
She’d changed into some shorts and a T-shirt she kept at the house, then set to work. By the time she’d dismantled most of the porch, her head felt clearer, her shoulders less tense and her mind had stepped back from the razor edge of stress she’d been riding for months.
Just as she was about to get back to work, she heard a low roar, then a crunch of tires. A moment later, Mac and his Harley swung into view. Her breath caught at the sight of him, sexy as hell with the black leather jacket and the riding boots. He made bad-boy businessman look good. Very, very good.
Ever since that kiss she hadn’t been able to think of much else but him. His smile. His eyes. His touch. She told herself she didn’t want that kiss—the complications it came with—but truth be told, she’d wanted it more than she’d ever wanted another kiss before. There was something electric about that moment when they had turned at the same time, something that had awakened a deep need in Savannah’s gut. She’d barely been able to concentrate at work, knowing he was only a few feet away. And now...
He was here. And Lord help her, but she was a weak woman right now, with all the willpower of a mouse in a cheese factory.
Mac kicked out the stand, then swung off the bike, removing his helmet at the same time. Once his blue eyes met hers, Savannah’s heart trilled.
“What are you doing?” he said.
“Thinking.”
He arched a brow. “Thinking? With a crowbar in your hand?”
“That’s how I do my best planning.” She wiped her bangs away again with the back of her hand and let out a sigh. As excited as her body might be to see him, she knew better than to think he’d come by on a social call. He was probably here to discuss more business stuff with her. As much as she wanted to save Hillstrand Solar, right now she couldn’t stand to look at another spreadsheet or read another report. She needed open spaces, ocean breezes, hard work to clear her head and help her refocus in the morning.
“When I didn’t find you at the office I figured this was where you’d be,” he said.
“Listen, I know I said I’d go over that sales-territory thing tonight,” she began. “But the numbers and names started swimming in front of me, and I just needed some fresh air and something...constructive to do.”
“Or deconstructive.” He nodded toward the pile of debris.
“Yeah. That’s even more satisfying sometimes.” She gestured toward the remaining floorboards. “Anyway, I was only going to work for another half hour or so, then get back to the sales-territory thing.”
Okay, so she’d had no such intention. What she wanted was several hours working with her hands, watching the fruits of her labor change what was dying into something new and vibrant. She doubted she could get the entire porch rebuilt tonight, but maybe just the first few timbers would give her that sense of satisfaction. And then she could breathe and think and concentrate on the business. Because after the past few months, Savannah desperately needed a way to decompress, to find her...center again. And being here with the tools and the wood and the work did that for her.
“This demo thing...does it really help relieve stress?” Mac asked.
“It does indeed.” She glanced at his face, and saw the tension in his features, the set of his shoulders. Apparently she wasn’t the only one who needed a little time outside the office. She held out the crowbar to him. “Try it and see. Help me rip out the rest of the floorboards.”
He gave the tool a dubious glance. “You sure you want me doing this? It’s your family’s home and—”
“If you screw anything up, I’ll let you know. Start on that end and work toward me. We’ll meet in the middle.” She grabbed a claw hammer from the toolbox and headed for the far side of the porch. “If you can leave the boards mostly whole, I’m going to build a storage chest out of them later.”
“Really? I’m impressed.”
She laughed. “Don’t be. My carpentry skills are pretty rudimentary. I can frame a wall and build a box, but anything more complex and I have to call in an expert. I’m awesome at demo, though.” She raised her hammer and flexed her biceps.
He chuckled. “Okay, we’ll see about that, Hercules.” He hung his jacket on the front door knob, then rolled up his sleeves and settled in at the other end of the porch. Her heart skipped again at the sight of his exposed forearms, this new, relaxed Mac Barlow.
Mac already had finished removing two boards before Savannah recovered her senses and stopped staring at him. The man was too damned handsome. And distracting. She’d come out here to clear her head, not fill it with images of Mac Barlow taking her upstairs and running his hands over her naked body.
Savannah got to work, and once she was immersed in the repetitive motion of prying up the boards, pounding out the nails, then adding the wood to the pile, she almost forgot Mac was there. Almost, because he was always in her peripheral vision and thus always in her peripheral thoughts. Not to mention that each board she removed brought her closer to meeting him in the middle of the porch.
Fifteen minutes later they pried off the last two boards. Savannah and Mac balanced on the joists beneath the old floor, then gave each other a quick high five. It was a satisfying feeling to see the old, damaged boards gone, and the porch ready for a new life.
“That was awesome, I have to say,” Mac said, sending the board sailing onto the pile on the grass. “What can we demo next?”
Savannah laughed. “The sun’s going to set pretty soon. I think we can just get started on laying the new floor and maybe framing part of the new roof before we’ll have to quit. If you’re up for that, that is.”
“Sure. Whatever you want. You were right. This kind of work... It feels good. Satisfying.”
She laughed. “I had the exact same thought.”
“It’s been a long time since I’ve done anything like this.” Mac followed her down the steps and over to the new pile of wood. “And back then it was just small projects with my dad. My brother Jack is the one who loves building things.”
“And you love tearing things down.” She dipped her head. “Sorry. That was out of line.”
“I don’t tear everything down,” he said quietly. Then, before she could ask him what he meant by that, he gestured toward the wood. “How are we going to cut the boards for the new floor?”
“I brought along my saw.” She pulled a chop saw out of her trunk, then set it up on a sawhorse she’d found in the shed earlier. Savannah unclipped her tape measure from her tool belt and thumbed toward the porch. “I’ll measure and you can cut.”
He grinned. “Do you know how incredibly sexy you look with that on?”
She blushed. He thought she was sexy? “With sawdust in my hair and cobwebs on my shoulders and—”
Mac closed the distance between them. “Incredibly sexy.”
“Thank you.” Her gaze dropped to his lips and a slow warmth spread through her belly. He’d undone the top two buttons on his shirt, giving her a too-brief glimpse of his chest. She wanted more. She wanted to see all of him. Wanted to touch all of him.
A moment passed. Another. The world was quiet, save for the call of a few birds and the low distant glub-glub of a passing motorboat. Savannah heard nothing, saw nothing except Mac. Her throat was tight, her pulse running at double speed. His cologne whispered between them, dark and tempting, and it took everything for Savannah not to haul his body against hers.
He tipped a finger under her chin and lifted her lips until they were just below his. It was sexy and sweet and made a part of her melt.
“You can start an engine, drive a boat, operate a chop saw and rebuild a house,” he said. “Is there anything you can’t do, Savannah Hillstrand?”
“Run a company.” Her eyes watered. It was the truth. She could fix a lot of things, but she couldn’t fix Hillstrand Solar.
“That can be learned,” Mac said. “You already have passion for the business. That’s important.”
She had a promise. That wasn’t the same as passion, but she didn’t correct Mac, because if she did, he might see it as an opportunity to convince her to sell. And right now, doing the work that she truly loved, far from the offices and spreadsheets, it wouldn’t take much before she was signing the papers over to Mac.
Nor did she want to discuss business with Mac’s finger on her chin. Then again she didn’t want to work, either, with him touching her. Getting too close to him was like getting too close to quicksand. Savannah worried she’d forget that he was supposed to be the enemy and get swept into something that was nothing more than a fantasy.
With great reluctance she stepped away and nodded toward the porch. The air seemed to chill a bit. “Right now I’m passionate about laying a floor before the sun sets. Do you know how to run that thing?”
He nodded, then crossed to the sawhorse and connected the chop saw’s plug to a waiting extension cord. “I think I’ve got it under control.”
“Okay. Good.” She headed back up to the porch and started working before Mac Barlow could see another moment of vulnerability or read the desire in her eyes. How long had it been since she’d been to bed with a man?
Far too long, that was for sure. The past four months had been a whirlwind of caring for her father, then taking over for him. There’d been no time for dating, and no one beating down her door for a date. Savannah had worked so long in a man’s world—construction and production—that she found most men were intimidated and felt more comfortable treating her like one of the guys instead of a girl. The few men she had dated had been big on words, not so good at actions that rang true.
But not Mac Barlow. He treated her as an equal, and then, in too brief snippets, like a woman to be desired. It was a heady sensation. Intoxicating.
Savannah cleared her throat and concentrated on the tape measure. It took three tries before she read the measurement right, but once her mind refocused, the rhythm of work got her back on track. To what was important—saving the company and saving the house. Restoring what was falling down, before it was all lost. Promise me.
That was what mattered, Savannah reminded herself. Not a fleeting attraction to the man who ultimately wanted her to give up the company.
She called out measurements, Mac cut the wood, and she hammered the new boards into place. One after another, laying in the fresh boards like a row of teeth in a wide, happy smile, watching the porch come to life again, giving her the satisfaction of seeing one thing her father loved being restored to its former glory.
A little at a time.
* * *
The last floorboard went in just as the sun began to disappear behind the trees on the western side of the property. Savannah turned on the porch lights, then headed inside and returned a moment later with two beers. She handed one to Mac, then the two of them sat on the top step and watched darkness steal over the bay. The scent of fresh-cut wood heightened the salty tang in the air with a homey scent.
Mac rested his elbows on his knees and drew in a deep breath. He hadn’t felt such a sense of satisfaction in a long time. His shoulders ached, and he had the beginnings of a sunburn on his arms and face, but every inch of him was sated by the feeling of good, hard work. “Thanks.”
Savannah glanced over at him, surprised. “For what?”
“For the beer, but mostly for letting me help you.” He drew in another breath. What was it about newly cut wood that carried that scent of new beginnings? Fresh starts. Hope. They were all feelings alien to Mac for far too long. “I needed that today.”
“Bad day in corporate-takeover world?” She bit her lip and shook her head. “I’m sorry. I keep saying things like that and I shouldn’t. You helped me, and I appreciate it.”
“What I needed today wasn’t about work. It was...personal.” Even as he said the last word he could feel himself closing that door, the one that divided him from the people in his life. Outside of his brothers, Mac had few friends. Almost no close friends. Something about being the man at the top created an automatic dividing line, and the guys he used to shoot hoops with or play a few rounds of golf with suddenly saw him as an outsider. Then his days had become consumed by work, and except for working lunches and dinners, and the occasional run through Boston Public Garden, there wasn’t much time for hanging out with buddies. And certainly not enough time for heart-to-heart conversations about the ups and downs in his life. Especially not the latest monkey wrench.
He couldn’t go to his brothers with this thing about Colton. Not yet anyway. Nor did he really want to drop that information in their laps, as it had been done to him. They were moving on with their own lives, marrying great women. The last thing Jack and Luke needed was to be saddled with another stress. Some would argue Mac didn’t need it, either, but the monkey wrench was there, nonetheless, expecting him to fix this.
“Do you want to talk about it?” Savannah asked.
“Yes. No.” He let out a breath. “I don’t know. I don’t tell people my personal problems.”
“Okay.” She leaned back on her elbows, the beer dangling from her fingers. She didn’t push him, didn’t seem the least bit bothered that he didn’t want to open up. Which had the inverse effect...
He wanted to let her in. What was it about Savannah and her easygoing attitude that drew him to her? Led him down roads he’d always avoided?
He debated letting the subject drop. But there was no more work to distract him, and the thought of going back to his hotel room and turning on his computer didn’t fill him with the same sense of relief it normally did. This whole thing with Colton was too big to dismiss with hours of work, even with an entire house renovation. The subject needled at his every thought, hung heavy on his shoulders. He needed to talk about it, figure it out. But this wasn’t a business problem he’d debate with his CFO or a lawyer friend. This was Mac’s life. The life he’d thought was based on one truth and turned out to be based on a lie.
“Oh, look,” Savannah said softly, pointing across the yard at the birdhouse her father had built. Time had weathered the paint job a little, but the bird’s home, sitting atop a high pole, was a damned close match to the main house. “The mama bird is feeding the babies.”
A bright blue bird with a rust-colored chest was perched on the edge of the house, while a smaller hungry mouth extended from the opening and snatched at the worm in the parent’s beak. A loud chorus of hungry chirps came from inside the birdhouse, and soon two more heads pushed their way out, each wanting a piece of the worm. A moment later the mama bird flew off, probably to bring back another treat for her hungry brood. The babies chirped a while longer, then settled back into the box.
“I love seeing the new family every year,” Savannah said. “It’s like they’re part of my family, too.”
“Is it the same birds that return every year?”
“Sometimes. And sometimes the parents die and the fledglings find a mate and return to this birdhouse. I love that their family is constantly changing.”
A constantly changing family. He had that right now. If there was one thing Mac had always counted on, it was the steadiness of the Barlow family. He knew whenever he came home to Stone Gap, his parents would be living in the same house, and his brothers would tease him with the same jokes. There was something...comforting in that, as much as he said it annoyed him. But now those dynamics were changing, and he wasn’t sure what to do about it or who to turn to for advice.
He glanced over at Savannah, at this woman who would do pretty much anything for the father she had loved, and who got sentimental about a pair of birds. He wondered what she’d have to say if she unearthed a secret sibling. Would she welcome them with open arms or want to bury the truth and pretend it didn’t exist? He wanted to know—wanted to know all that and more about this intriguing, beautiful woman beside him.
Never before had he gotten personally involved with someone whose company he was trying to buy. He’d especially never kissed the owner of one of his potential purchases. Or thought about sleeping with her every five minutes. This thing—whatever it was between himself and Savannah—seemed like more than he’d had in a long time. It wasn’t just about being attracted to her. It was something bigger. Something with deeper roots. Already, he felt as though she wasn’t just a fellow business owner. She was also a...
Friend.
Okay, so maybe he didn’t kiss his friends like he’d kissed Savannah. And maybe he didn’t picture his friends naked a thousand times a day. But one thing was true—Mac Barlow, indomitable millionaire CEO, could sure use a friend right now. He took a long pull off the beer, then let out a breath.
“I have a brother I didn’t know about,” he said.
The words came out surprisingly easy, considering Mac wasn’t a man who shared much—if any—of his private life with people. But there it was, the fact that he had kept concealed from the brothers who shared his DNA and the mother who loved him dearly. Told to a woman he had known for a handful of days.
“Really?” Savannah turned to look at him. “That’d be enough to throw anyone for a loop.”
“I just found out a couple weeks ago from my uncle. He and my dad don’t talk—a family argument gone wrong years ago—and he told me I needed to tell my family about my half brother.” For the hundredth time, Mac wished Uncle Tank had just called Bobby, instead of handing off the task to Mac like a relay baton. “I haven’t told my brothers or my mother yet, but I confronted my dad this evening. That’s where I went after work, to see him.”
“How’d that go?”
“It sure wasn’t sunshine and roses. He didn’t explain, but he also didn’t deny it.” Mac took another drag off the beer. “Turns out my whole childhood was a lie.”
Savannah seemed to think about that for a minute. “I don’t know if the whole thing was a lie. One part, maybe. But the rest was your story.”
“Bookended by this other brother and another woman.” Mac sighed. “My dad never told anyone.”
“Maybe because he didn’t want you to look at him the way you are probably looking at him right now.” Savannah shrugged.
“And how is that?”
“Like he destroyed everything you thought you knew.”
Savannah was right. That was exactly how Mac was feeling. It was as if the world he’d grown up in, the world he had known as well as his own name, had turned out to be a figment of his imagination. He wasn’t born to two people deeply in love. Hell, he wasn’t even the oldest. There had been another, older than he was, and another woman who had had Bobby’s heart. It turned out the Barlows’ solid marriage, which had served as an example to the three boys, had been built on shifting sand.
“But that’s exactly what my father did. My mother, my brothers—they’re all going to be devastated when they find out.”
“They might handle it better than you think.” She took a sip of beer, then set the bottle on the step below her. “People make mistakes, Mac. They screw up, and they hurt the ones they love. Nobody’s perfect, and learning to accept that the people we love and idolize are imperfect is part of life.”
“My father didn’t just make a small mistake. He made an entire family. Do you know how this is going to break my mother’s heart? Their thirty-fifth wedding anniversary is coming up. How the hell am I supposed to tell her before that?”
“You don’t.”
Mac shook his head. “Somebody has to. My half brother said he was coming to town to meet the family, and I can’t just let him show up without giving them fair warning of what happened. I need to make a plan, find a way to break this news without it doing too much collateral damage.”
“No, you don’t.” She laid a hand on his, a hand of friendship, of comfort, connection. “This isn’t a business you can fix up and flip. It’s not a company that needs help increasing its bottom line. It’s life. And life is messy and complicated and sometimes very painful. You clean up the messes you make, but you don’t have to clean up the messes other people made.”
“What, you’re saying trust my father to tell everyone?” Mac shook his head. He couldn’t even imagine that disaster. Bobby with his gruff and direct way dropping this bomb into Della’s life. Into his sons’ lives. “I can’t do that. He’s not the most touchy-feely guy in the world.”
“And you are?”
That made Mac laugh. “Point taken. But still, my father delivering news like this would be like throwing a bowling ball into a china shop.”
“Yes, but it’s his news to deliver.” She took another sip, then set the bottle down again. “And that means you have to do something you don’t like to do.”
“What’s that?”
She grinned. “Give up control and let someone else handle this.”
“I’m not trying to control this.”
“Really?” A bigger smile curved up one side of her face. “Because I hear a man saying that he has to be the one to tell his mother and brothers. That he doesn’t trust his father to do it. That it’s all up to him to deal with this, rather than letting the one who made the mistake deal with the aftermath. This is crappy news for your family, I agree, and no matter how it’s delivered, it’s going to have ramifications. But it’s not your information to deliver.”
Savannah’s words eased the tension in Mac’s shoulders. She was right. He wasn’t the one who had stepped out on his wife. He wasn’t the one who had created another child. He wasn’t the one who had to undo the damage that was going to be done. “So you’re saying I should be support staff instead of CEO?”
She laughed. “I’m saying exactly that.”
He shook his head. “I don’t know. I don’t much like to be the one in the backseat. That kind of thing makes me...uncomfortable.”
“I don’t think you can learn how to be a good leader until you learn how to be a good follower.” She got to her feet and put out a hand to him. When he touched her, it was like sending fire through his veins. Her smile warmed something deep in his gut, made all the tension melt away. “And with that, Mac Barlow, I have the perfect project for you.”