No, Lily did not see.
Char pushed Lily’s phone across her worktable. “Now make it good, okay? You know how to make it good, right? So that he can’t refuse coming over and seeing you?”
Lily hadn’t the foggiest but she nodded.
Char waited expectantly.
“Oh, you mean right now?” Lily asked, looking to the empty waiting area. Where was a hair emergency when she needed one?
“Yes, now,” Char said. “Better than yesterday, don’t you think?”
And now she knew where Aidan had gotten all of his sarcasm. She picked up her phone and stared at it for a minute, like maybe it could somehow get her out of this.
It didn’t.
Seriously, not even a dead battery?
“Do you have any brownies?” Char asked. “Because brownies would get him here really fast.”
She’d had cookies, but she’d eaten them all. “No.”
“Too bad,” Char said. “It’s just that he’s working so hard, and on top of that he’s also trying to help save the resort.”
“Save the resort?”
“Yes. He Who Shall Not Be Named left them debts.”
Lily remembered what Lenny had said. “How come I feel like I’m the only person in town who doesn’t know what’s going on with the resort?”
“Well, you’ve been gone a long time, honey,” Char reminded her. “But this goes back a ways too. My ex—the son of a bitch—racked up a lot of gambling debts and then took a loan out on the business. None of us knew of course, not for a long time. And by then it was too late. Now the balloon payment’s coming due and it’s in my name and the boys are killing themselves trying to figure the entire mess out. Gray’s been tearing his hair out about it for a couple of years now. They’ve been working hard on some options, but nothing’s come through yet.”
“I’m so sorry,” Lily said. She knew how much the resort and property meant to the Kincaids. She couldn’t imagine how betrayed they must all feel. And Aidan. Her heart hurt for him. “Will they lose the place?” she asked softly, half afraid of the answer.
“They might. The boys are certainly going to have to cut staff this next quarter to try to lower costs.” Char’s eyes sparkled with unshed tears that she sniffed away. “Okay, listen to me run my mouth. They’d hate it if they knew I was talking about this. They’d also hate to see me cry over it. So they won’t,” she said with determination, lifting her chin. “But if the worst happens, I’ll tell you what, I’m going to hunt that man down myself and finish what I started all those years ago and I’ll use more than my frying pan this time.”
Lily didn’t know Hudson or Jacob as well as she knew Aidan and Gray, but she did know that not a single one of them would let that happen. She drew a deep breath and called Aidan.
“Kincaid,” he answered after the third ring, not sounding particularly happy to hear from her.
She held her breath and nearly hung up.
“Lily,” he said, still impatiently but with something else as well.
And that something else coiled through the connection, jump-starting her heartbeat and scraping across her belly. And farther south as well. She closed her eyes. “Remember that favor I owe ya?”
He paused. “Yeah.”
“I’d like to repay it. Now.”
Crickets.
“So if you could come over,” she said.
“I just got down off the mountain from a rescue, I’m filthy dirty.”
Oh, the images that conjured up in her mind … She shook them off. “It’s okay. It won’t matter for what I have in mind.”
A shorter silence this time, filled with a new kind of tension.
And her nipples went hard. “Aidan? You still there?”
“Your place in ten.”
Her place? What the— Omigod. “No, I’m at the Mane Attraction! I have a treatment I want to give you!”
More crickets.
“Aidan?”
“In ten,” he repeated.
“Okay, good—” But she was talking to dead air. She looked at Char. “He needs to work on his phone etiquette.”
“God himself couldn’t teach those boys of mine phone etiquette. So is he coming?”
“In ten.”
Char smiled wide. “Yep. He likes you.” Her gaze went speculative. “So what’s your stance on children?”
Lily’s mouth fell open.
“Kidding!” Char said, and laughed, the sound a little evil actually.
“He doesn’t like me like that,” Lily said.
“Honey, let me tell you something about my boy. It takes an act of Congress for me to get him to do anything he doesn’t want to do. You follow me?”
Lily was afraid she did but she shook her head no.
“It’s the middle of the day and he’s busier than a priest in a whorehouse. So if he’s coming now, he dropped a million things to do so. For you.”
Oh, God. “Why are we doing this again?” Lily asked desperately.
“Because the mess-ees are going to become the mess-ors.”
Lily stared at Char. Yep. Evil. “Promise me something.”
“Anything,” Char said.
“If you ever get mad at me, you’ll just kill me dead. You won’t pin me to a board and slowly pull off my legs.”
Char laughed again, sounding delighted now. “I’d better get out of here.”