His First Choice

That kind of thinking backfired eventually, as Mick knew—and knew that Jem knew, too. Tressa had come into a branch that was on the verge of closure due, in part, to the previous manager’s smooth tongue and inability to deliver the low interest rates and other terms he’d promised in order to close loans. After homes and cars had been purchased, sometimes even after a client was driving a new car, he’d call the client back with the bad news. If they wanted to keep the car, or have the house actually close, they’d have to agree to higher terms. Most often they did. But the bank had acquired enough of a clan of unhappy customers to do it measurable harm.

“Look, I appreciate what you did, Jem, delivering Tressa up to me at a time when I had no ready answer of my own. You hooking me up with her, that was decent. But I can’t...”

“Let me talk to her,” Jem interrupted before the man said something that would be difficult for him to take back. Mick had hired Tressa on Jem’s word because Jem’s company had built the half-million-dollar addition to the man’s Beverly Hills home. He had to hope that his word would be good enough a second time. “I’ll have her apologize, in writing, to the customer. And I’ll make sure she understands that the customer comes first and she has to treat every one of them with respect. Even when they’re rude.”

The man looked at him, his eyebrows drawn together against the bright sun. “You sure you aren’t making promises you can’t keep?”

Tressa might be unhappy at work, but she wasn’t stupid. Her alimony was up in the next month. And deep down, Tressa knew she didn’t have a slander case. She’d have to actually prove that someone else had overheard what the elderly customer had said, and then prove that the statement had somehow damaged her or the bank. She didn’t have a case.

As Amelia, her soul mate, and also a lawyer, had no doubt already told her.

“I’m sure. Just let me talk to her. You’ll have something in writing before Monday.”

Jem shot and made it to the green.

Not saying a word, Mick made the par three in two, watched while Jem made it in four and led the way to the next tee.

He never did actually agree to keep Tressa on, but Jem knew he’d won his ex-wife another chance. He just wished Tressa didn’t put him in positions where he had to hang his own reputation on her. Most particularly when it came to people he liked and respected.

He’d stuck his neck out for her, getting her this bank job after she’d walked out on the investment firm because an account she’d believed should have been hers had been given to someone else. The least she could do was see that his head didn’t get cut off.

* * *

LACEY WENT HOME to San Diego for the Memorial Day holiday. She’d had fantasies about getting out of the traditional family barbecue at the beach cottage her parents had purchased when the twins were little. But in the end she’d gone. As she always did.

As she’d also known would be, Kacey’s latest handsome guy was there, doting on her—as her sister certainly deserved. Kacey was beautiful, inside and out. More inside than out—which, looking at her, was hard to believe.

The guy this time, Dean Bates, didn’t deserve Kacey, though. They never did. Kacey was so sweet and had such a selection lined up out her door, that she never had a chance to find a real guy. One who’d love her even if she wasn’t Kacey Hamilton. The Kacey Hamilton. Of The Rich and Loyal.

Not that Kacey resembled her on-air heiress soap-opera character, Doria Endlin, all that much without the short blond wig and stage makeup.

Scrubbing at dishes they’d all left in the sink when they’d come in from a bonfire on the beach the night before, Lacey worried about her twin. Kacey was getting a little hard around the edges—with some brittleness seeping into her laugh.

“I was planning to help with that.” Recognizing the voice almost as though it had come from inside her own head, Lacey glanced over her shoulder to see the subject of her thoughts grabbing a dish towel off the oven door handle and coming toward her.

“I was awake,” Lacey said. “I’ve got to get back up north. I’ve got an appointment this afternoon.” Truth be known, she’d planned to leave the night before, but when her sister had asked her to stay for the bonfire, she’d had a beer and sealed her fate for the night.

“Can’t you just take one more day?” Kacey asked. If she’d been pouty, or whiny, Lacey wouldn’t have had as hard a time answering.

She shook her head. She could make a phone call. Her only appointment that day, the Tuesday after Memorial Day, was with a potential new service to clean the rented office used by Santa Raquel social services. They’d been given the governmental all clear to switch services, and Lacey had been elected spokesperson for the department on the project.

“We’ve hardly had a chance to talk all weekend.”

She finished with the small sauce dishes she’d washed first because they fit in the bottom of the drain board and she could stack other dishes on top of them. “What about Dean?” He’d been glued to her sister’s side and was mainly the reason they’d had no time to talk.

“He left last night,” Kacey said. “After everyone went to bed.”

Lacey didn’t just hear the things her sister wasn’t saying. She felt them. Physically. In her gut.

Picking up a dish to dry before Lacey could put another on top of it, Kacey rubbed thoroughly.

Their father, a truck driver who’d had his own fleet of trucks by the time the girls were ten, had never put a dishwasher in at the cottage.

She might not have liked Dean, but... “I’m sorry.” Because she knew Kacey was.

“Can’t you stay, Lacey? Just one more day? We can go up to my place and you’d already be partway home.”

Kacey owned a condo in Beverly Hills, the kind with a doorman and a half-acre all-adult pool with mountain views.