Page 15 of Stirring Up Love
“I have a problem?” Besides an off-base attraction to a terrible human being, of course. That was a big problem.
Darius swept a look down from Finn’s hair, which hadn’t seen scissors since Christmas, to the worn Adidas he’d scored at a thrift shop a few summers back. “Many. But let’s start with your company. If there was a way for you to fund your vision debt-free, what would you say?”
“I would say I don’t need your charity, Dare.”
“It’s not me.” Darius’s eyes were gleaming in a way that made Finn’s stomach clench with nerves. “It’s Constance Rivera and Keith Donovan.”
“You just named one of the richest people in America.” He didn’t go around readingForbes—another of his entrepreneurial failings, according to Darius—but everyone in America knew about Constance Rivera’s astronomical wealth. “And who?”
“Keith Donovan. He’s a quarterback from the nineties, went from professional partier to successful businessman.”
“And they what, teamed up to bail out small businesses?”
“Yes!” Keyed up, Darius squeezed Finn’s shoulder. He was about to be shoved headfirst into something; he could feel it. “Well, not bail them out, but to give would-be entrepreneurs a shot. Ever heard of the reality show calledThe Executives? Contestants get a chance to pitch their business idea, then the studio audience votes. If you score enough votes, Rivera and Donovan make an investment in exchange for a percentage of your company.”
Darius stopped, squinting at him. “Have you really never seen it?”
“You know I pawned my TV last year.” Not much use for it when he gave up the room he rented to put his housing budget toward start-up costs.
Darius winced. “Jeez, no, I’d forgotten. Sometimes your life sounds like a country song.”
“It’s not that bad.”
“You’re right, nothing is. Country.” They shuddered in unison.
Leaning his hip against the prep table, Darius crossed one ankle over the other, the soles of his sneakers bright white against the cracked, dingy tiles of the kitchen. “C’mon, you said it yourself: your sauce company is a means to an end. Well, right now it’s a dead end. Do you really wanna keep working your butt off for nothing? Sleep on the floor of my flips forever?”
Whatever happened to asound financial strategy? Finn kept his eyes on the label stickers for the lunches. Peeling, sticking, avoiding. “I have an air mattress.” One that he needed to reinflate after a few hours, sure, but not an issue since he only slept half the night.
“You know I couldn’t care less about having you there.” Dude wasn’t kidding. Darius once offered to sell him a flip for two thousand bucks. But sleeping at his friend’s properties was totally different from taking full advantage of his generosity. No way would he ever cross that line.
“But what’s gonna happen when I find a buyer for this place? You can’t sleep in the Eighth Street property. We’re in the middle of asbestos remediation.”
Not something he wanted to consider. The thought of packing his duffel bag and moving houses again walloped his heart like a meat mallet on a cutlet. Head down, Finn muttered, “Hasn’t sold yet.”
“Probably because you’re up in there sending me bad vibes.”
“If anyone’s capable of that level of voodoo, it’s Simone Blake.” Shoot. He hadn’t meant to bring up that she-devil again. That wolf-in-sexy-farmhand clothing. That—
Darius frowned at him. “It can’t have been that bad.”
“It was.” Finn gave up on the salads, his concentration shot. “She basically summoned a tornado of destruction. I left to grab something from the car, and when I came back, a rowdy bunch of knitters had taken over half my booth.”
“Hold up, did you say ‘knitters’?” Darius asked. “Rowdyknitters?”
“Yes, dude.” He hadn’t given Darius the details for precisely this reason. The whole situation was laughable. And he was the butt of the joke. “Noisy, heckling, rowdy knitters.”
He stopped short of calling them abrasive, because they hadn’t been, not really. Once you got used to their unorthodox recruitment techniques, he’d found them charming. Like most people, once you saw past whatever front they put on for the world.
Somehow he didn’t think that would be the case with Simone. He’d given her the chance to fess up, to start again, and she’d laughed in his face.
“They were holding some sort of membership drive. Scared off all my customers. And one of them told me that Simone had tipped them off to the booth being open, so I confronted her, and she denied it to my face.”
“Maybe it was a misunderstanding.”
The same thing Simone had said, but he wasn’t buying it. “A coincidence that, after I told her I was there to sell barbecue sauce, a bunch of her cronies show up? I don’t think so.”
Darius took his phone out of his pocket and scrolled through it. “I gotta say, I kind of admire this woman.” Of course he did. “To pull a stunt like that in only a few minutes? Impressive. You’re saying she conjured those interfering knitters out of thin air?”
