That Friendzone Feeling (The Dashwood Billionaires), page 1
THAT FRIENDZONE FEELING
THE DASHWOOD BILLIONAIRES
NICKY REDFORD
Copyright © 2023 by Nicky Redford
All rights reserved.
No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means, including information storage and retrieval systems, without written permission from the author, except for the use of brief quotations in a book review.
This book is a work of fiction. The characters, events and businesses are either products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any similarity to real persons, living or dead, business entities, events or locales is purely coincidental and not intended by the author.
Editor: Jessica Snyder
Copy Editor: Dayna Reidenouer
Proofreader: Chris Hoskins
Cover Design: Najla Qamber of Qamber Designs
ISBN: 978-1-7388756-6-5 (ebook)
ISBN: 978-1-7388756-7-2 (paperback)
CONTENTS
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Chapter 8
Chapter 9
Chapter 10
Chapter 11
Chapter 12
Chapter 13
Chapter 14
Chapter 15
Chapter 16
Chapter 17
Chapter 18
Chapter 19
Chapter 20
Chapter 21
Chapter 22
Chapter 23
Chapter 24
Chapter 25
Chapter 26
Chapter 27
Chapter 28
Chapter 29
Chapter 30
Chapter 31
Epilogue
About the Author
Other Rom-Coms By Nicky Redford
For everyone who couldn’t see the thing that was right under their nose the whole time.
1
WALKER
So that’s why she didn’t hear me call to her as I came up the back stairs.
A smile creeps across my face as I lean against the doorway to the office above our Manhattan pub.
Emily is half turned away from me, toward the window that frames the cold, night sky, her eyes closed, headphones on, the sound of The Dreamtown Boys rattling out of them. How the hell can her eardrums bear it? Not just the extreme volume, but The Dreamtown Boys themselves.
One arm waves over her head as she silently mouths the words into a sample bottle for our new range of fruit-infused ales.
Her hips swing in time with her arm, silver heels clacking back and forth on the restored factory wood floor, and her blue-green velvet dress clings to her backside, riding up to reveal a good stretch of thigh.
Emily’s been using The Boys, as she calls them, as her “cheer up” music for years. So, listening to them alone, amid the first New Year’s Eve party at the newly opened flagship of our Toasted Tomato craft brewpub chain, when she should be at her happiest and require no cheering up at all, can’t mean anything good.
My eyes are drawn from her gyrating ass to a pile of suitcases and bags behind her desk.
Ah. There we have it.
Here we go again.
“Hey, Lombardo,” I shout at what I hope is above Dreamtown Boys level. “Coffee.”
I look at her drink in my hand. “Or whatever the hell this is,” I say to myself.
Still The Boys wail around her ears, still her arm and hips swing in time. She’s in a whole other world over there.
Oh, sweet Jesus. Now she’s actually singing. That din could raise people from the dead just so they can plead with her to stop.
I put my cup of pure, unadulterated black coffee on my desk, along with a fallen sparkly snowman I’d picked up off the stairs on my way up—a casualty of the Christmas decorations being taken down.
There’s no way for me not to make her jump. All I can do is try to minimize how high.
I move toward her just as she screeches “I want yoooou” like a tone-deaf cat being stepped on, while screwing her eyes even tighter shut and pointing toward her reflection in the dark window.
I can’t help but chuckle.
In an effort to not startle her too much, I rest my hand gently on her back, just below where her dress dips between her shoulder blades.
Her feet leave the floor at the same time as she spins around to face me, her eyes now wide open, her waving hand now clutching her heart.
“What the fuck, Walker? Seriously, what the fu—”
Her red-rimmed eyes scan my face, her brow creased. “Walker?”
There’s no point in replying. She’ll never hear me over The Dreamtown Boys still doing their thing in her ears. I hold out her drink and nod at it. She takes it, her sore eyes not leaving my face.
I take hold of both sides of her headphones and unclasp them from her head. Inevitably, The Boys get louder, and nobody needs that. “Where’s your phone? I need to turn off this bunch of tuneless fools.”
“What have you done to your face?” she says. “What the hell’s happened to the furry animal that crawled onto your chin and died years ago?”
I rummage on her desk for her phone. “Shaved it off last night.”
“Not sure what shocked me more—you appearing out of nowhere or the lack of facial hair. Thought I was about to be mugged by a handsome intruder for a second.”
“Handsome?” There it is. I hit stop on the screen, silencing The Boys, and drop her headphones next to the phone. “If I’d known I’d get a ‘handsome,’ I might have dumped the beard years ago.”
She puts down the sweetest coffee concoction known to man and the beer bottle microphone and grabs my still slightly chilly face with both of her warm, soft, purple-finger-nailed hands. “I can’t believe it. Look at you.” She smells of that musky perfume she wears only on special occasions.
Her usually perfectly applied makeup is smudged at the corners of both eyes, which are underlined by darker-than-usual circles. I bet she barely slept last night.
“Look at all this skin that was under there.” Her fingers glide over my cheeks and jawline. “And it’s so smooth,” she says, as if she expected it to be more like sandpaper.
I’ve been going back and forth for months as to whether to lose the beard. If it’s making her smile when she’s obviously upset, then I made the right decision. And the chin groping doesn’t exactly suck, either.
“I guess it’s all baby soft because it’s been protected from the harsh elements by that giant bushy thing,” she says.
She lets go of me and flips her long dark hair, styled into glossy waves, over one shoulder. “How does it feel?”
“Cold. It feels cold.”
“When is it ever warm on New Year’s Eve in New York City?” She picks up her drink.
“That’s a white chocolate mocha. But they only had sugar-free vanilla,” I say, and she drops her mouth open in exaggerated horror. “Got you a shot of butterscotch instead. And the guy drizzled some caramel on top of the whipped cream, in case it still wasn’t sweet enough for you.”
She takes a slurp and gives it a nod of approval. “Hmm. Nice work.”
I pull a face. “My teeth are rotting just from the smell of it.” I move to my own desk and grab my untainted black coffee. “If the people you do our multimillion-dollar deals with knew you had the palate and musical tastes of a thirteen-year-old, they’d never take you seriously again.”
She pushes a wire basket full of paperwork to one side and perches on the corner of her desk, her dress riding up and doing that thigh-flashing thing again.
“I’d still kick their asses,” she says over the rim of her cup.
“Oh, I don’t doubt that.”
And I don’t. Not for a second.
I might have the skills to brew the finest beer this side of the Rockies—actually, both sides of the Rockies—but without Emily, it would never have gotten out of my college apartment. I certainly wouldn’t be sitting here, eight years after grad school, on a growing chain of the coolest craft brewpubs in the country, with a one-of-a-kind brewery resort under construction off Cape Cod.
“Speaking of which,” she says, “Marcus’s next installment was due this week, and we haven’t received it.” Marcus St. Clair is the multibillionaire investor whose backing makes the resort possible. “I’ve been trying to get hold of him all week. He hasn’t replied to voicemails, emails or texts.”
“It’s the holidays. No one replies to anything.” I take a drink of the hot, earthy, Nicaraguan nectar that will help me get through this long night at the party. “I’m sure he’ll get back to you next week.”
“Yeah. Probably. It’s just that Harry’s been chasing me for cash so he can order all the siding and get the drywallers in.” Harry’s the project manager on the construction site.
“Harry needs to enjoy his vacation,” I tell her. “He said just a couple of weeks ago that everything’s perfectly on course for the summer opening, so everything’s fine.”
“Maybe. It’s out of character for Marcus, though.” A screwed-up tissue I hadn’t realized she was hiding in her hand, drops to the floor. “Anyway, what have you been up to today?” She picks up the tissue. “I imagine bushwhacking your way through your chin was a big job, but it couldn’t have taken the whole day.”
“Research. I had an inspired idea to make a special beer to coincide with the resort opening. Made with an ingredient specific to the Cape Cod-ish area.”
But if I’d had any idea how upset she is, I would never have hunkered down at home all day looking into it.
“What ingredient’s that?”
“No idea yet. But it will be spec-fucking-tacular.”
I put my feet up on my desk. “Anyway. Going to tell me about that?” I point at the pile of all her worldly goods.
She shrugs like it’s nothing, as though her eyes aren’t really screaming that they’ve been crying for most of the day. “I’m moving out.”
“I might not be Sherlock Holmes, but I did pick up on that.”
She takes another sip of her tooth enamel-stripping drink. “I can’t believe how different you look without the beard. It’ll take some getting used to. What made you suddenly do that without even mentioning it?”
Let’s not get into that right now. Or possibly ever. “Don’t change the subject. What happened? Thought you guys made up after your Christmas fight.”
Emily and The Asshole—whose actual name is Anthony pronounced with a th sound, he was always very clear about that—had a big argument on Christmas Eve.
Since her appalling parents are away in Paris to see her classical music-star sister perform at the French president’s private holiday party, Emily came with me to spend Christmas with my Dashwood clan.
“We did,” she says. “Then it blew up again last night. And he’s right, we’re not a match.” She’s pretty good at the brave face thing, but even from here I can see her eyes well up.
“Okay, the clean sheets in my guest room await you. I think we all know the drill at this point.”
“Stop it. It doesn’t happen that often.” She grabs the beer barrel-shaped stress reliever off her desk and throws it at me. There’s no point even flinching. It lands two feet away.
“How many guys have you moved in with after five minutes then had to move out six months later and stay with me till the next one comes along?” She stares at me. “Go on.” I pick up my phone. “I’ll just read the New York Times from cover to cover while you count them up.”
“I might have been a bit hasty a few times.” She jumps off the desk and parks herself in her chair. “But that’s it now. Never again.”
“Ha, sure. That’s about as likely as—”
“You shaving off your beard?” she asks, her head cocked to one side. “All these years of the guys giving you a hard time about how ugly it is, but I never thought you’d give in.” My brother and three cousins have harped on me about it for years just like she has. “So maybe I can do something new too. It’s New Year’s Eve after all. And I’m making a resolution for once.”
“What’s brought this on?”
She points at the laminated scrap of paper hanging from the corkboard next to her desk. “The fortune cookie.”
Ah.
When we were at Northwestern for our MBAs, we both knew we never wanted to work for anyone else, but we weren’t sure what to do. Then one night at the start of our second year, we were eating Chinese takeout at my place. Emily cracked open a fortune cookie and read the message, What you need is right in front of you. She looked at the home brew going on in my kitchen that I’d been obsessively trying to perfect, and said, “That! That’s it. That’s what we should do. Go into business together and start a brewery.”
After she left that night, I fished the cookie message out of the trash.
We finished the program, and eight years later here we are, sitting in our office above our fifth pub that sells only our own craft beers. We’re working on three more locations, and my dream brewery resort, where we’ll make beer, run brewing classes, and hold beer events, concerts, weddings, and whatever else people want to book the property for. It’s already more than half-built in the perfect spot at one end of Hornby Island.
We’ve come a long way since that night in a cold industrial unit outside Chicago where we cracked open the first bottle of Toasted Tomato beer to roll off the production line.
That’s when I gave Emily the fortune cookie message, which I’d laminated for safe keeping, to celebrate the start of our empire-building. She’s had it pinned up close to her desk ever since, wherever that desk has been—first in her bedroom, then on the construction site of our first pub in Chicago, and in the home offices of places she’s shared with a catalog of dickish boyfriends who treated her badly but fulfilled her only important selection criterion of impressing her consistently intolerable parents. Now, finally, it’s here in our permanent HQ above the freshly opened East Village pub.
“How’s the fortune cookie helping this time?”
“What I need is right in front of me.” She sweeps her arms wide, gesturing to the room. “The business. The only thing I’m always good at. The only thing that’s always there for me.”
“Erm?” I cough loudly.
“Well, yes, of course, you’re always there for me. But you don’t count.”
“You’re such a charmer. No wonder your relationships are always so successful.”
“Hey.” She picks up a bright red plush tomato bearing our logo and throws it at me.
I follow its trajectory until it lands on the other side of my desk.
“You can’t talk,” she says. “You might be Mr. P, but you haven’t been on more than two dates with the same person since we started the business.”
She’s called me Mr. P—short for Mr. Perfect—since a couple of months after we met. Because, as hard as she tries, she can’t ever find fault with me. And it irritates the living crap out of her.
“Three.” I hold up the appropriate number of fingers. “I went on three dates with your cousin’s friend.”
“Only because she had tickets for a Nets game you couldn’t get into no matter how many strings you pulled.”
“A man’s gotta do what a man’s gotta do.” I shrug and sip my coffee.
“And”—she raises a finger in the air to emphasize her point—“you haven’t had anything resembling an actual girlfriend since the first year of grad school. And she said you were controlling.” She makes air quotes around “controlling.”
I’m not going to have this conversation for the bajillionth time.
“I wasn’t controlling. She was perpetually late, so I always worried something had happened to her. That’s care and concern, not control.”
I down the rest of my coffee. “And I’ve told you. I don’t have time to mess with pointless dating. If there aren’t sparks in the first thirty seconds, there’ll never be sparks.” I drop the cup into the recycle bin. “And there are never sparks.”
My feet hit the ground firmly after I pull them off the desk. “Anyway, these drinks are supposed to give us the energy we need to get through the night.” I nod toward the stairs. “Hear that music and the sound of joyous customers down there?”
She nods and half smiles, but her chin wobbles.
“Well, knock back that cup of sugary sludge. We have a New Year’s Eve party to host.”
Instead of picking up her drink, she conjures the wadded tissue from the palm of her hand and blows her nose.
My heart twinges for her. “You’re not in a party mood, are you?”
“I’m fine.” She sniffs and drops the soggy mess into the waste basket.
“You don’t look fine.”
“Gee, you know how to make a girl feel good. Maybe that’s why you’re so un-datable.”
“I didn’t mean you don’t look good. You look amazing. Of course you do. But underneath all the stuff.” I gesture from her made-up face to her sparkly feet. “You’re not fine, are you?”
She fixes her eyes on mine as they fill up again. And there’s another heart twinge.
“I will be.” Her voice cracks a little.
If she hadn’t obviously spent so long forming perfect waves in her hair, I’d ruffle it about now.
“Anyway.” She stands and smooths her dress down over her thighs. “None of that matters.” She thrusts her shoulders back. “From now on, it’s one hundred percent business, zero percent men.”
Credit where credit’s due, that’s a damn good effort at a game face.
She checks her phone. “Still nothing from Marcus.”
