Top Love: An Alpha Billionaire Romance (Young Adult Stepbrother and Billionaire Romance Stories) (22 page)

With a sigh, she pushed it. She brought the phone to her ear and her mother answered on the third ring.

“Hello?” she asked.

“Hey, mom.”

“Well hi, stranger,” Samantha Hughes said. Even when she wasn’t drinking, her voice had a happy sort of quality to it.

“How are you?”

“Fine,” Lauren said, not sure why she always felt a little uneasy when speaking with her mother.

“Did you make it to the reunion last night?” Samantha asked.

“I did,” Lauren said. “And that’s sort of why I’ calling. I’m still in town and thought I’d swing by for a visit. Would that be okay?”

“Well of course! Do you know when you’d be by?”

“An hour or so maybe.”

“Wonderful.”

“And mom…well, I’ll be bringing someone with me. Is that okay?”

“Someone?” she asked.

“Yes.”

“A male someone?” her mom asked, amusement in her tone.

“Yes.”

“Did you meet someone at the reunion?”

“No. This is a guy I met back home. We’ve been dating for about seven months now.” To call what they had dating felt almost like a disservice but she wasn’t about to get into the depths of it with her mother…especially not on the telephone.”

“That’s nice, dear,” she said, the joy slowly starting to drop out of her voice. “But why am I just now hearing about this?”

“I don’t know,” Lauren said. “We’ve been trying to keep it quiet and sort of private.” This wasn’t the case; in fact, just about everyone at Riley’s company knew about the mysterious every-day woman that he was involved with.

“Well, we’d love to meet him,” her mother said. “An hour you said?”

“Yeah.”

“Well, we’ll see you then. Maybe we can put on lunch.”

“Mom, you don’t have to do that,” Lauren said.

“Oh, it’s no bother. We’ll see you in a bit.”

Before Lauren could say anything else, her mother had ended the call. Lauren sighed and set her phone down just as Riley came back into the room.

“So, that was my mother,” Lauren said.

“Really? How is she?”

“Well, she seems upset that I haven’t told them about you yet. And she’s also set on making lunch for us.”

Riley smiled and walked over to her. “Is that okay with you?” he asked. “Don’t take this the wrong way, but you look sort of horrified.”

“You’ll understand when you meet them,” she said. “They are both very nice people—very kind and sweet. But they—well, they’re very southern. And dad can be sort of gruff.”

“Compared to half the men I deal with in meetings in the course of a single week, he sounds like a pussycat,” Riley said. “It will be fine.” He hugged her and then gave her a playful look. “Are you sure you’re not just embarrassed for them to meet me? Do I embarrass you?”

“God no,” she said. “It’s the opposite. This is my family and they can be embarrassing.”

“It’ll be okay,” he said. “This should be fun. I’m looking forward to it.”

She turned back to her suitcase and started packing with a serious face. “Well, that makes one of us,” she said.

***********************************************************

The house Lauren grew up in—the same one her parents still lived in and, according to her father, they would both die in—was located ten minutes away from the Sunshine Lodge. The Hughes house was located on a secondary road, sitting at the end of a short gravel driveway. The yard was lined with elms and oaks, the driveway curving around a large oak tree that had been struck by lightning when Lauren had been eleven years old.

When Riley pulled his car into the driveway and parked behind a battered old Ford pickup, Lauren realized for the first time that her heart was pounding and her hands were sweating. And with this came yet another realization: this was the first time she was actually bringing a boy home to meet her parents. Of course, to think of Riley as a boy was silly. But still, that’s what it boiled down to.

She nearly spoke this thought out loud but kept it in. She didn’t want to make the next few hours any more awkward than they had to be.

“Ready for this?” she asked, getting out of the car.

“I’ve already told you,” Riley said. “I’m excited for this.”

What really confused Lauren was that he seemed to genuinely mean it.  As they walked across the yard and towards the front porch, he had a large smile on his face. He looked like he might be headed for some grand party and not into the living room of two extreme rightwing southerners that had at one time both been extremely protective of their little girl.

The screen door opened before Lauren could knock. Samantha Hughes stood there with a smile on her face and the first thought that occurred to Lauren was: Damn, mom’s getting old. She hadn’t had this much gray hair the last time she’d seen her (at Christmas last year) and there seemed to be a few new wrinkles around her cheeks. But she still looked a happy as ever and at least five years younger than her actual fifty-eight years.

“Come on in, come on in,” she said, as if Lauren and Riley were neighbors that they saw every day.

Riley stepped in first, Lauren taking a step behind him. When they were inside and the door was closed, the screen door slapping against the frame, Samantha gave Lauren a hug and then peered over at Riley. “No sense in wasting time with introductions,” she said. “Introduce me to your fella.”

As Lauren was about to do just that, her father stepped into the living room. He was dressed in a white tank top and ripped jeans. The dirt and oil smudges on his arms and pants told her that he had likely been out in the shed out back, working on one of the lawn mowers or some other broken equipment.

“Hey, sweetie,” he said.

“Hey, dad,” she said, walking to him and giving him a hug. It was odd, but there was something about the smell of his sweat and the oil and dirt that was almost welcoming. It made her truly feel at home.

“Mom and dad,” she said. “This is Riley.”

Riley shook both of their hands. Lauren watched closely as he shook hands with her father. Cam Hughes wasn’t a big man by any stretch of the imagination, but he had a quality to him that was far more intimidating that a large stature. He had a cold stare and a look about him that seemed to demand respect.

Lauren was relieved to see that her dad smiled at him. And just like that, the tension that she had felt during the short drive between the Sunshine Lodge and her childhood home was broken…for the time being.

***

Lauren had secretly been hoping that her mother would make her chicken salad for lunch. It was a staple of the Hughes household and had always been a highly requested item at pot lucks and community functions around Brenton. Lauren was not disappointed when they all entered the kitchen and there was a large bowl of it in the center of the table.

There were also rolls and an assortment of vegetables. Lauren felt a pang of sweet familiarity at the sight of the sliced red tomato, as she was certain it had been very recently plucked out of her mother’s little garden in the back yard.

Lauren sat down in the same seat she had taken up while she had lived here and Riley took the seat beside her. While her father walked to the bathroom to wash his hands, Lauren wasn’t at all surprised when her mother essentially started asking question after question.

“So, Riley, I might as well ask you how you two met because Lauren tends to skip on the details.”

Lauren panicked for a moment. The summary of how they met might make Riley sound pretty bad. Oh, well, I met her when I was trying to buy out this old man’s shoe store and essentially put him out of business. In the middle of all of that, Lauren and I fell in love and here we are!

But she knew that Riley was great with speaking eloquently on the fly and as he answered the question, she found that now was no different.

“I met Lauren while I was visiting a client,” he said.

“Oh, that’s right,” Samantha said. “Is this in regards to the new job you told me about on the phone three weeks ago?” she asked Lauren. She put extra emphasis on the words on the phone and three weeks ago. They were softly landed, but they were still attacks.

“Sort of,” Lauren said.

And then to Lauren’s surprise, Riley walked her through most of the story: how he had met her at the shoe store and then how he had simply lined things up for her to get the new job. He took great efforts to make sure he told it in a way where Lauren’s own successes were the highlight. She had rocked the interview and she had quickly climbed the ladder.

Halfway through the story, her dad came in and took his seat at the table. At the mention of his daughter getting a pretty quick promotion, he seemed to perk up. He smiled a few times and gave Lauren a few looks that seemed to say “Look at you”, moving up in the world. She’d never seen such looks from her father and, quite frankly, it made her feel very good.

“So what is it, exactly, that you do?” her dad asked.

“I help buyer’s research certain stocks and potential investments so they can—,”

“So numbers and money then, right?” he asked.

“Yes.”

“Say no more. If you do, you’ll just confuse your old man. I’m damn proud of you, though.”

“I am, too,” Riley said.

“And do you mind if I ask what you do for a living?” Cam asked.

“Not at all,” Riley said. “I’m in real estate…mostly in the procuring and developing of land for larger businesses.”

“And how did you find Lauren if she was working in a shoe store before her big job?” Samantha asked.

“Well, I nearly bought out the business owner with the intent of leveling his business to help the development of what was supposed to be a new parking garage and residential lots.”

There it is, Lauren thought, surprised that he’d been so blatant about it.

“Yikes,” Samantha said.

“Not to worry, though,” he said. “Lauren here sort of…well, she sort of talked me out of it. She introduced me to a part of myself that I didn’t know I had.”

Lauren felt herself blushing…and it only got worse when she saw that both of her parents were looking at her with smiles plastered to their faces.

“So with a job like that,” her father said, “I guess you’ve sort of got your future all bright and shiny ahead of you. Sounds like a good living.”

“I do pretty well,” he said. Lauren had no idea why, but there was something about his modesty that was sexy as hell.

Her parents thankfully started to realize that they were centering the conversation on work and starting to seem a little nosy. They then turned the conversation towards the reunion and when Lauren and Riley answered their questions, they conveniently left out the part where Riley had kicked Jason Gellman’s ass.

As lunch went on (her mother’s chicken salad was just a delicious as ever), Lauren was surprised to find that she was enjoying herself. The conversation was going much better than she had expected. She had come into this expecting some sort of culture clash, but there was nothing there. It was as if someone had replaced her parents with new upgrade parents. Either that or—and this was a tough lesson to learn in such a way—she wasn’t giving her parents enough credit.

As she and Riley sat there and spoke with her parents, she got to hear about her parent’s hardships as if she were one of their peers instead of her daughter. It was humbling and a little sad. From time to time, she would peek over at Riley and see that he was paying rapt attention. At one point, he reached under the table, found her hand, and held it.

Her dad told Riley about how he’d been forced to retire about six years earlier than expected because the furniture company he’d been with for thirty-one years went out of business. He would pick up the odd carpentry job here and there and it was just enough to get buy. Her other worked at the bank and had been a teller for the last eight years. There wasn’t much room for advancement and she had come to terms with the fact that she’d be doing it until the day she was finally able to retire…which might be as long as another fifteen years if things didn’t pick up.

“My God,” Cam said after a while. “What a sob story. I don’t want you thinking that Lauren’s parents are washed up and broke. We get by. And if we have anything left at the end of the month, we put it into an account that we won’t touch until Samantha can retire.”

“So what sort of furniture did you build?” Riley asked, sensing the awkwardness in the conversation and instantly steering it elsewhere.

“A bit of everything,” Cam said. “Come on to the living room and I can show you a few pieces.”

With the majority of the chicken salad and veggies gone, the men got up and left the table. When they were gone, Samantha looked to her daughter and gave her a generous smile.

“And so it begins. The menfolk talk about work while the women stay at the table and talk about girl crap.”

“What kind of girl crap, mom?”

“Well, for starters…we can talk about how handsome Riley is. Honey, you did a great job there.”

“Gross, mom.”

“Do you mind me asking how old he is?”

“Thirty-four.”

“So there’s a slight age difference, then.”

“It’s not that big of a difference,” Lauren said. “And who are you to talk? Dad is twelve years older than you!”

Samantha shrugged. “Why don’t you gran some beers from the fridge and we’ll hang with the men in the living room?”

“Sounds like a plan,” Lauren said, although she had no interest in drinking. In fact, seeing her parents in such a new light was one of the most sobering things she had ever experienced.

She grabbed four beers from the fridge—all Coors Light in a can, the only thing she could ever remember her parents drinking—and joined her mom as they walked into the living room. When they got there, she saw Riley on his hands and knees, admiring the grooves and detail in the legs of the coffee table that sat in the center of the room.

The effort he was putting into pleasing her father meant almost as much to her as the proud look on her father’s face. She wondered how long it had been since he’d felt that.

“And how much would a table like this have gone at your shop before it closed?” Riley asked.

“About six hundred.”

“That’s a great deal,” Riley said. “This is really nice. Better than the Ikea crap lazy people like me tend to buy all of the time.”

“Thanks,” Cam said.

“Do you have more?”

“Well, there’s a bureau in my bedroom, Lauren’s old headboard from when she was a little girl, and then a few odds and ends outside in my shed. Cabinets and things like that.”

“I’d like to see those,” Riley said. And because he was so good at speaking to people, Lauren couldn’t tell if he was being sincere or just trying to really grease the wheels with her dad.

“Well come on, then,” Cam said.

As the men walked out of the living room, taking the beers from Lauren, Riley asked: “Do you mind?”

“No,” she said. “My mom and I will just hang out in here and talk about you.”

“Good,” he said. He leaned in, kissed her on the side of the face and then whispered in her ear. “Maybe leave out the nasty stuff,” he said.

Lauren gave him a playful shove out of the living room and watched him go. When he and her dad were out of sight and heading through the back door of the house (she’d forgotten about the god-awful creaking noise that door made), her mother’s voice spoke softly from beside her.

“You love him, don’t you?” she asked.

“Yeah, I do,” Lauren said without any hesitation. “A lot.”

“Be careful around a man like that,” Samantha said. “He seems…well…perfect.”

“Yeah, he sort of does,” Lauren said.

“Is he good to you?”

“More than I deserve,” she said.

“Whatever,” Samantha said. “You deserve the very best. And from what I can tell so far, it seems like that’s what you’re getting. I’m happy for you, honey.”

Lauren’s smile widened and she found herself wiping a tear of joy from her eyes before her mother got a chance to see it.

***

Two and a half hours later, Riley was driving his car up the gravel driveway, back towards the secondary road. It was four thirty in the afternoon and they figured if they could start driving now, they could probably be back home around midnight.