Page 24 of Wild Child
Mark set his feet on the ground, pointed to his phone, and rolled his eyes. “I promise I won’t do anything stupid. Swear it. Okay, gotta go. I’ll tell him hi. Yeah, love you too. Bye.”
He hung up.
“Stella is visiting her grandma in Florida. She thinks I’m going to try to buy an old strip mall in Nebraska and renovate it into a gym while she’s gone.”
“Are you?”
He laughed as he stood. “Totally.”
Mark stepped around the desk, threw his arms wide, and enveloped me in a shameless, full-on hug. Then he gripped my shoulders and pulled me away.
“Dude, you look awesome.”
“Thanks.”
“Lifting?”
I shrugged. “When I could.”
“Must be hard in the sandbox.”
I chuckled as he sat back down.You have no idea,I thought. His chair groaned, but he ignored it. Despite the hurricane of paperwork on his desk—and was that a candle?—the rest of the cabin felt cozy and well-cared for. Coffee mugs hung from the wall over the sink. Pale drapes fluttered from an open window. Lizbeth definitely had a hand in all the changing decor when she first arrived, but Mark had a wife now. No doubt Stella kept up with it in Lizbeth’s place.
“Place looks better,” I said. “Bigger. Did you expand?”
“We did. Added a couple of rooms out back and on the side. Stella finally got a kitchen in here, too. It’s the only project we’ve ever agreed on.”
I laughed, “And it’s way less smelly.”
He grinned and ran a hand through his hair, then scrubbed his jaw. “We live upstairs most of the time. Stella won’t let me be a slob.”
“Stella likes it here?”
He nodded. “Loves it here.” His gaze roamed the rafters. “Imperfect or not, Adventura is home. I’m not running the summer camp anymore. Sione, one of my counselors, has swapped his love for the ocean to the mountains. He runs the camp, Stella runs the basic-admin and bookkeeping, and I do big-picture stuff with the investors. We’re working on getting a high-ropes course next summer. I can’t leave it, so we live here.”
“Seems great to me.”
Mark studied me a second, then leaned forward. If it came down to a weightlifting competition, I’d have no chance against a guy like him. He’d always been bulkier than JJ, who had the wiry power of a climber. Mark could wrestle a bear and take it down. And sometimes, when he let his hair go full shag and his beard grew out, helookedlike a bear.
But the sudden intensity in his expression told me he’d switched to business mode.
“What’s up?” he asked. “I know we’re friendsandbusiness partners now, but I have a feeling you didn’t drive out to Adventura to take me on a date. If you did, you suck at it. You didn’t even bring lunch.”
“Came to check on my investment.”
He grinned with one side of his lips. “Your Mom is a whiz, you know that? She didn’t really trust me and Maverick at first, but once I told her she should take it to her pastor and pray about it,” He snapped his thumb and forefinger, “—I had her.”
A chuckle escaped me. “She’s nothing if not devoted.”
“Hey, we all got something. Honestly, Dev, things look good. She has steady contractors right now, the revenue coming in is strong. She’s set aside some cash flow for hiccups in the future. I’ve stepped back. She mostly does this herself now. You’ve seen the investment dashboard Lizbeth put together for us. It’s looking strong. Solid profile. Some of my other contacts have discussed requesting that she expand into some other mountain towns, but I haven’t broached it yet. The time isn’t right because she isn’t bored yet.”
I nodded, expecting to feel more relief at his report, but he wasn’t saying anything that I didn’t know already. Nothing that we couldn’t have covered on a call.
So why was I here?
“That’s not why you came,” Mark said. He leaned back against the chair but stayed upright instead of lounging all the way back. “But you already knew that. So what’s up?”
My gaze met his. “Honestly?”
