Cherish Hard
Page 55

“Jenni,” he said, one hand braced on the steering wheel and his eyes looking through the windshield at the sun-golden school grounds. “I wasn’t expecting a call until after the new year.”
“I’m working between the public holidays, taking my break later, and I wanted to get back to you as fast as possible.”
“Good news or bad?” He and the loan officer had a friendly relationship—Sailor had already taken out and paid back a couple of smaller loans.
This one, however, would be a much bigger risk for the bank.
“Good and bad,” Jenni replied in a tone as no-nonsense as her steel-gray bob. “The good is that the bank will give you the loan.”
Sailor didn’t start celebrating. “I’m waiting for the bad.”
“You’re going to need someone to cosign. You just don’t have the assets to borrow against. Not at this amount.”
Sailor’s hand clenched on the steering wheel. “Thanks for trying anyway.” He knew Jenni had gone to bat for him with the higher-ups.
“What?” Jenni’s tone rose. “Sailor, this isn’t a big deal. Your folks cosigned that first loan when you were eighteen.”
Even then, it had been difficult for Sailor to accept any help. He’d done so only because he’d seen how much his parents wanted to be a part of his journey. But he wasn’t eighteen anymore, and the need inside him to achieve this through his own hard work, it had become a second heartbeat that pounded day and night.
“Some things,” he said to Jenni, “a man has to do on his own.”
Jenni was made of stern stuff, didn’t give up. “What about your brother?”
“Gabe would do it in a heartbeat,” Sailor told her because it was true—and because he didn’t want anyone thinking badly of his brother. “This is my call.”
Gabriel had forged his own path, broken the chains of the past.
His brother’s determination was legendary—Sailor had spent endless weekends running drills with Gabe, even more evenings going for runs with his brother, had watched game after game while Gabe analyzed plays.
Sailor felt the same way about his business. And Gabe had done for him what he’d done for Gabe. Over the years, his brother had dug countless gardens, helped unload trucks of seedlings, hauled bags of soil and fertilizer around, kept Sailor company on the drive out to the nursery he rented some distance away.
But money was a different matter.
Sailor wasn’t going to ask his brother to subsidize his dream in any form or shape. That would destroy the dream. Sailor needed to do this without expecting the people he loved to pay for what he wanted. That was the whole fucking point. To not be a taker. A user.
To give back to the people who loved him.
“You sure, Sailor?” Jenni asked.
“Yeah. How big a loan can I get on my own?”
It proved to be a far smaller amount, but it was better than nothing.
After setting up a meeting with Jenni to go over the paperwork, he just sat in his truck for long minutes, staring out at the late-afternoon sunshine. The brightness seemed to mock the shadows threatening to swallow his dream.
Without the money, he couldn’t implement the next step of his plan. And if he didn’t implement it within the next year, then it was inevitable that someone else would step in and fill the gap in the market. This would only work if Sailor stayed ahead of the competition.
For that, he needed cold, hard cash.
“No,” he said with a scowl. “It’s just a hurdle. You’ve jumped hurdles before.”
Ten minutes of doing the mental math and he realized he could make enough money to launch exactly when he’d always planned to launch. But he’d have to work from dawn to dusk, seven days a week. Holidays included.
Sailor tapped his finger on the wheel. Working hard wasn’t an issue. Neither was finding enough work to fill those hours. Yes, big corporate jobs made it easier, but multiple residential jobs would do as well—and he had enough experience at this to know where to advertise to find clients.
As for his family, his brothers didn’t mind hanging out with him on the job, so he’d see them often. He could shoehorn in time to watch a few of Jake’s and Danny’s games, while Gabe would understand Sailor’s obsession with his dream. And he still had to eat, so he could drop by for dinner now and then to keep his folks happy.
What was at issue was his redhead.
Ísa deserved to be cherished and treated like a priority in his life. By working as many hours as he needed to work, Sailor would inevitably be shoving her to the sidelines when he hadn’t yet earned the right to ask for her patience, when he hadn’t yet shown her that she could trust him to only do this for a year. Not only that, he’d be expecting her to fit her life around his.
His jaw clenched. If he did that, he was no fucking better than her parents.
And he risked losing her.
But if he didn’t do what he needed to do, he risked losing his self-respect, risked becoming the kind of man he’d always despised. A man who gave up when the going got hard. A man who just fucking quit.
32
The Family Christmas Fiasco & a Love Muffin
ÍSA WORKED TILL EIGHT THAT night without a break, not just handling the usual duties of a VP but also going over the information she’d collected about the people who’d been in and out of Jacqueline’s office. She had to admit she had a favorite suspect, but she knew it was based on nothing but her personal bias against slimy swamp creatures. Just because she disliked Trevor didn’t mean her stepbrother—yeah, no, that description was never going to fly with her—was a louse who’d leak information to the media. Not when he wanted to be in Jacqueline’s good books.
On the flip side, Ísa couldn’t ignore that he’d been in and out of the company—and Jacqueline’s office—far more often than explicable for a man who had absolutely nothing to do with the business. Unless you factored in his campaign to convince Jacqueline to give him an executive position at Crafty Corners.
Which could put Trevor the Creeper in the clear.
“Argh!” Ísa threw down her pen and gave up—for tonight at least—and decided she needed to get some food into her. Normally she’d have hit Nayna up for a dinner date, but today she found herself thinking first of Sailor.
Her thighs pressed together, butterflies flittering in her stomach as a goofy smile lit up her face at the thought of seeing him again. She’d missed him over the past few days, had kept on wanting to whisper asides to him during the Christmas Eve dinner in her apartment.
Like when her father, having flown in for a couple of days, had put his arm around Elizabeth Anne Victoria and quite seriously declared they were soul mates.
At which point, Jacqueline had shaken her head and said—in Icelandic—“Stefán, you’re a handsome man, but if you’re not careful, you’re going to turn into a caricature of a lecherous old man. Your ‘soul mate’ is an infant.”
While the sweet but sadly vacuous Elizabeth Anne Victoria giggled and said how “amazing” it was that her “love muffin” spoke so many languages, Ísa’s father had replied to Jacqueline, also in Icelandic. “She doesn’t try to take over my corporations. I consider that a wonderful trait in a wife.”
“That’s because she doesn’t know a balance sheet from a bedsheet.”