Emily had started to worry that her business venture into house flipping wasn’t going to stick, either, although it had started out promising. She’d participated in a dozen or so successful flips with her friend Jewel, but their most recent project had spiraled out of control. A disaster wrapped in a catastrophe sitting on a pile of misfortune. A Calamity-ville horror plagued by mold and termites and a faulty foundation. Every day had brought them more bad news, more issues that cost money to fix. Now Emily was up to her earlobes in debt, and this financial drama had forced her to make a deal with the very devil. A clandestine deal with strings attached that were like fishing lines. Invisible yet impossible to break. And in this case, the devil didn’t wear Prada so much as she wore a pink nylon tracksuit, polka-dotted bifocals, and answered to the name Gigi.
Yes, Emily had been reduced to borrowing money from her own grandmother. Gigi had been her last resort. Oh sure, Emily could have asked Nick for money, but since he never even paid his child support, she wasn’t likely to get any additional support from him. He was a last, last resort. And there was Harlan, of course, but if the strings attached to her deal with Gigi were fishing lines, any loan from her father would be wrapped in barbed wire. Electric barbed wire. He was her last, last, last resort, so technically, Gigi, her seventy-five-year-old thrice-widowed granny, had come in third from the bottom of Emily’s last resorts. There was little comfort in knowing that she could have sunk even further.
Emily bit back her own sigh, wishing she could indulge in feeling sorry for herself. In that moment, she wanted nothing more than to fling herself onto one of those incredibly uncomfortable plastic chairs and weep—delicately and beautifully, of course. Not the ugly cry. No one ever wants to indulge in the ugly cry. Maybe she could just whimper a little and have a single tear run down one cheek. But she had to put on a brave face for Chloe. Plus, she was wearing her very best and most expensive business suit. It was white, and those chairs looked none too clean. So her fainting and weeping and whimpering would just have to wait.
She stepped over to the dinged-up vending machine instead and jabbed at a few buttons without much optimism. The vintage contraption was held together with duct tape and only took coins. No dollar bills or credit cards, which meant no snacks for them. She tapped hard on the glass, gazing with pointless longing at an ancient bag of pretzels, hoping it might fall on its own. No such luck. If a bag fell, she’d have to give the pretzels to Chloe, of course, but maybe she could just eat the salty bits at the bottom of the bag. Damn, she was hungry. Her stomach growled in response. She tried again. Tap, tap, tap. The bag stayed solidly in place.
Hoping to score some loose change at the very bottom of her purse, Emily dug a hand inside her bag just as the door next to Chloe burst open, pushed by a strong wind and man in a navy-blue business suit. A red tie hung loosely around his neck, and he hauled a shiny black suitcase with one hand while pressing a phone against his ear with the other. An overstuffed computer bag hung from his broad shoulder and caught on the door handle. He tugged it free with an impatient huff and continued on inside.
“No, I’m not there yet, Bryce. Your secretary booked me on the worst flights imaginable, and don’t think I don’t know you put her up to it. Next time I’m flying charter.” He walked over to the chairs, somehow not seeming to notice either Emily or Chloe in spite of how small the area was. “Yeah, very funny, jackass. I just landed in Outer Effing Mongolia. Someplace called . . . Wigwam, or Woebegone, or . . .” He glanced at the sign. “Wawatam. Yeah, that’s it. Wawatam. Wherever the hell that is.”
Emily bristled at his obvious disdain of the place since she’d grown up near here, but he wasn’t wrong. This airport was one D-list operation. The check-in counter was nothing more than a folding table in front of a doorway leading to an office barely spacious enough for a gray metal desk littered with papers. A crooked old man had been playing solitaire in there with an actual deck of cards when she and Chloe had arrived. Emily estimated his age to be somewhere between eighty-five and infinity, and come to think of it, he hadn’t moved in a full fifteen minutes. Emily peered at him a little more closely, suddenly wondering if perhaps his old soul had wandered off to that big airport lobby in the sky. Great. She seriously hoped he wasn’t dead. If he was, she was really going to regret not spending the extra money and flying through the Pellston airport. It was much nicer, and the people there, to the best of her knowledge, were younger and healthier.
The man in the power suit set down his luggage, taking up one of the premium chairs with his computer bag, and continued talking loudly. “I’ll do my best, Bryce, but I’m sure you’re worried over nothing. This is Dad we’re talking about, and he’s certainly not going to just up and marry some bimbo that he hardly knows. That’s your area.”
Bimbo? Emily’s attention shifted from the elderly, potentially deceased airport worker to the oblivious phone-talker, taking a quick inventory of his various attributes. He was tall, maybe six-two, with dark brown hair, cut short. Not marine sergeant kind of short, but short enough that it didn’t take much fussing other than to style the front upward. Square jaw, big hands. Power suit. Good looking in a Corporate America, I’m King of the World kind of way. She knew the type. He oozed confidence and an I must win demeanor.
As a house flipper, most of the guys Emily dealt with these days were subcontractors who wore tool belts and cargo pants and suffered from chronic ass-crack reveal. Or they were prospective home buyers dressed by their wives in a dad-bod uniform of khaki pants and golf shirts. Unlike those guys, though, this one didn’t sport a beer belly, a bald spot, or a wedding band. Emily offered up a short, silent sigh at his businesslike hotness. Never underestimate the allure of a man in a well-cut suit.
Emily cleared her throat and went to sit down in one of the other chairs. He took note of her then and gave an awkward I’m on the phone here kind of nod. His eyes trailed lower, and she noticed him noticing her legs. Millennia of evolution took a backseat to the primordial part of her that felt validated by his subtle appraisal. Sure, she was a girl-power feminist all day long, but it was still nice to have someone notice your legs. Out of curiosity or boredom or just pure feminine empowerment, she repositioned herself on the chair, slowly recrossing her damn fine legs to her best advantage. Chloe frowned at her from across the tiny room. Really, Mom? Emily was quite accustomed to that look.
“Yeah, okay,” the man said, turning away after another glance at Emily. “I’ll call you when I actually get to the island. I’m assuming they have cell service over there. If not, watch for a carrier pigeon.”
As he turned away, Emily crossed her arms and tucked her legs under the chair. So much for captivating him. He kept talking, and his loud voice was too big for this space. She wished he’d hang up. Her head was starting to ache from the day’s traveling, her lack of sustenance, and the knowledge that her next stop would deposit her right into the clutches of Gigi and the rest of her family.
“Carrier pigeon,” the man repeated with his outside voice. “Not an owl. Why the hell would I send you a letter by owl?”
Chloe burst out laughing, and he looked up at her quizzically.
“Harry Potter,” she said to him, as if she were part of the conversation.