Chapter 3

CHAPTER THREE

ROWAN

This isn’t going according to plan.

Then again, I don’t have a specific plan. I only know that I can’t let this travesty masquerading as a TV show get renewed.

One season? Sure, it’s embarrassing to have our family name dragged through mud again—the way it was the last time someone had the dumbass idea of giving my grandmother a power trip and a platform for her bullshit. But if it’s a one-season wonder, it’ll go away . Any longer than that, and my mother will come running back to Highland Hills for her chance at a sliver of the spotlight.

No fucking thanks. Our family doesn’t need any more spotlights on it, picking up all the dirt and dust that is very much there. And if you ask me, our town doesn’t need more tourists barreling through it, looking for small-town charm like it’s something they can package and bring home in their suitcases. My friend Oliver’s always quick to let out a world-weary sigh when I say things like that. “You don’t complain when a new bar opens, Rowan, or when there’s a new restaurant. Not all change is bad.”

Of course, we both know that’s bullshit. I do complain when new bars and restaurants open. My sisters call me Old Man Rowan, and maybe they have a point, but even so. Highland Hills needs a hit dating show as much as I need to go antiquing with my twin sisters, Holly and Bryn, this weekend. (Yes, they actually invited me, but I’m reasonably sure it’s a joke. Holly’s been pulling at least one practical joke a week on me ever since she moved in with me last summer.)

So I take my time going downstairs to look at the breaker that I tripped. I don’t want them to finish filming tonight. The longer it takes to film the show, the more expensive it will be. The more expensive it is, the less likely the producers will want to throw more money at my grandmother.

When I come back upstairs, the camera guys have their cellphones out, using them as flashlights—none of the bachelors are doing this, of course. Or Kennedy. They’re not allowed to have their phones during filming. Actually, based on what Harry told me, their devices are literally under lock and key, which sounds fucking brutal. Not that I’m the kind of guy who’s always texting or calling people—no thank you. But what if they want to sneak out for a night? What if they want to watch YouTube to figure out how to break a heating system—or fix one? There are plenty of TVs in the house, but Harry says those are cut off from the internet, and although the Labelles do have some dusty DVDs stashed in the basement, there’s nothing but a box set of the show Dallas and several Mary-Kate and Ashley Olsen movies. No need to mess with those. If anyone tries to have a movie night, the DVDs themselves will do the tormenting.

I doubt these guys will be jonesing for YouTube fix-it videos, anyway. That one guy, Jonah, had clearly never used a broom in his life. They’re not the fix-it-up types.

My gaze sticks on Kennedy, who looks fine as hell despite the tanner mishap.

I don’t like that Number Six put his jacket on her.

Because I’m as capable of hypocrisy as the next asshole, I also don’t like that it took six guys to pony up a single jacket.

Of course, I’m not allowed to have an opinion on that, being that I’m also the one who messed with the thermostat.

My grandmother sees me in the low lighting and bustles over. She’s in her eighties, but there’s nothing frail about her tonight. Her ego certainly hasn’t taken any hits. Still, she’s getting old. That’s why I answer her calls for help, even though she’s not the kind of grandmother who’d knit me a blanket or send me a birthday card. Or do anything for me. The fact is, she’s family—and if I’m not the one answering her calls, those calls will be made to my sisters, who are not as immune to her bullshit as I am.

“Rowan, why aren’t the lights on?”

“I’m a handyman, Nana, not an electrician. I’ll have to call one of my buddies to come take a look in the morning.”

“But we’re filming tonight ,” she hisses. Her hair is still perfectly contained by her bun, and if she’s agitated by the shitty bent the night has taken, it doesn’t show in the glow of the phone flashlights. Then again, she’s never been one to show emotion—or feel it. When she gathered us kids together to tell us our mother was leaving because she’d decided to get married to her fourth husband, who wasn’t keen on taking in her five kids from three different men, she said, and I quote, “I’m in the unfortunate position of being stuck with your mother’s mistakes, but you will be allowed to stay here, so long as you do your duty.”

That’s not the kind of thing a teenager forgets.

My sister Bryn took it to mean she was in charge of us, but I’ve always felt the gut-deep need to look after my sisters. Call it sexist if you’d like. They probably would. But it’s my duty to take care of them, and I go about it in my own way. This is part of that. I’m going to do my damnedest to protect them from this TV show.

“Not anymore, you’re not,” I tell Nana. “You need someone to come in and look at the heating system too. That’s above my paygrade.”

Not true. I live in a hundred-year-old house. I’ve basically rebuilt the heating and cooling system.

“What good are you?” she asks with a scowl.

“Not very,” I say. “But I can give my other buddy a call in the morning, have them both swing by. They’re much more useful.”

It’s a bit of a gamble, because one of the guys in this room could offer to go down and take a look, but I’m pretty sure none of the bachelors know which end of a screwdriver is the business half. The PAs probably just want to go to bed.

I’m not fool enough to think this little hiccup will cause much of a delay, but if enough problems and incidents crop up, surely these rich assholes will decide the show’s not worth their while—it’s them and the producers I’m counting on, not my grandmother. She isn’t the kind of person who’ll ever give up. It’s one of the things I reluctantly admire about her.

It’s probably the only thing I admire about her.

She heaves a sigh and waves me off, then announces to everyone else that it’s a wrap for the night.

I’ll have to sneak back downstairs in the middle of the night to fix the shit I messed up, but lucky me, I have a key. My grandmother has appointed me the official fix-it man for the show, mostly because she likes that she can pay me minimum wage.

If my gaze skates to Kennedy again before I take off, then my only explanation is that she’s a beautiful woman. Even orange. And there’s no harm in looking. Seeing her in her room earlier, her dress undone, showing a stretch of skin leading down the slope of her back to her magnificent ass is up there with the best things that have happened to me this year, even if it wasn’t my sight to see. If that’s pathetic, then so be it.

My breath catches when I realize she’s looking straight back at me. I make the kind of bow that would do any court jester proud.

“You did what?” my sister Holly asks, hitting me with a hard look.

“You heard me.”

She throws a french fry at me. I try to catch it in my mouth, and when it hits me in the nose, I scowl at her.

“You deserve it,” she says. “You deserve a dozen french fries to the face. That was a crap thing you did.”

“The heating system, the electricity, or the self-tanner?”

“The self-tanner, obviously. I couldn’t give a shit about Labelle Manor or whatever they’re calling it. In fact, if you want to throw a good haunting their way, I’d encourage it.”

She has plenty of reasons to dislike the Labelles. Her boyfriend Cole’s wife was a Labelle. Okay, that came out wrong. Holly’s boyfriend is a widower, and his late wife was Millie Labelle. The Labelles were shitty to him and his wife, and they’ve continued their trend of being garbage human beings.

Holly and I are currently having a late dinner in a booth at Cole’s brewery, which is basically the only place she likes to go now. I’d bitch about it more, except the food is not only pretty good but always free, and so is the beer. Besides, neither of us are much for cooking, so if we weren’t here, we’d be at the house we share with Harry, microwaving frozen dinners.

The brewery is already partially decked out for the holidays, and there’s holly lining each of the windows. I accused Holly of being responsible for that, but she said Cole did it as a joke. The rest is Cole’s daughter Jane’s handiwork, although Holly played elf.

My sister shakes another fry at me. “Tina and Zach are our friends, and so is Harry. If you fuck up our rooming situation with Harry, I’ll go red on you, so help me God.”

The fry breaks in half, the top falling limply. She bites it off.

“You’re a savage. But you’re also correct. He’s hardly ever there, but the house has never looked better.” I twist my mouth to the side. “You’re never around anymore either, but whenever you are, it immediately gets messier.”

“Takes one to know.”

I shrug because she’s right. About everything. “Yeah, the self-tanner was a dick move. It’s just…”

Her lips tip into a sly smile, and her eyes sparkle with it. “Kennedy’s too pretty, and you’re convinced those rich assholes would never willingly leave unless you turned her orange.”

Dammit. Holly’s become much too good at reading me. She’d probably phrase it differently and say she’s gotten good at slicing through my bullshit.

“Something like that,” I mutter, pushing my plate away. I barely mauled half my burger, which is unusual, but my appetite’s taken a hit. Everything’s taken a hit lately.

I hate that everyone around town is giving me shit about the show. I hate that my last name is synonymous with little cartoon hearts and fat babies carrying bows and arrows. It’s always been like that, to be honest—it’s your lot in life when your family business is matchmaking—but it’s much worse now that my sisters are launching a dating app and my grandmother is the cohost and creator of Matchmaking the Rich. Try escaping that claim to fame.

My nickname since the first grade has been Cupid, for fuck’s sake. The guys at the firehouse where I’m a part-time firefighter still call me that.

“You like her,” Holly says, waggling her eyebrows.

I grunt. “You think everyone else is obsessed with love just because you took an arrow.”

She throws another fry at me. This one I do manage to catch in my mouth. “Love’s not a death sentence, Rowan. I’m still very much alive. So is Bryn. And Willow.”

Willow’s my little sister, and the first of us Mayberrys to fall prey to the family curse. She doesn’t seem to mind much, I guess. She lives in Asheville with her fiancé, Alex.

Maybe it seems dramatic to call falling in love a family curse, but that’s the way it seems from the outside looking in. I’ve seen three of my strong, independent sisters go gooey over a few guys. And yeah, they’re pretty solid guys at the end of the day, but they’re hardly worth the trouble, if you ask me. It’s much better to be alone, to rely on no one but yourself. The only two single Mayberrys left standing are me and our baby sister, Ivy.

I’m not annoyed that my sisters have found partners, obviously, but I like having them to myself every now and then. It’s been nice, getting closer to Holly and Bryn over the past year. Growing up, most of the time it didn’t feel like I had much of anyone besides Willow. Now, Willow’s gone, thank God, because even though I won’t quit Highland Hills, it’s the kind of trap that has teeth. It’s better that she’s somewhere else. Even if she’s fallen into a different kind of trap.

“I want more from life than just being alive,” I say pointedly. “I definitely want more than a legal contract binding me to another person.”

She breaks into a song about wanting adventure, which I’m pretty sure is from Beauty and the Beast —mock me if you will, but I do have four sisters. Her boyfriend, Cole, pauses on his way back to the bar with a tray of empty glasses and leans down to kiss her mid-verse. My scowl deepens, although I can’t deny that I’m impressed he hasn’t dropped the tray.

“How’s the sabotage going?” he asks me, grinning as he pulls back.

I glance around, annoyed. “Be careful, man,” I say in an undertone. “This needs to stay quiet.”

He waves his free hand carelessly. “Those guys can’t come in here anymore. After last night, they’re confined to the house. Trust me, that Jonah the Fifty-Eighth or whatever told everyone that at least five times.”

“Was that before or after your brother punched Meathead?” I ask.

Cole laughs. “Before and after. Shit, that was a scene. But if he hadn’t punched him, I would have needed to step up.”

Holly reaches up to touch his face. “And I owe your brother a cold one for taking one for the team. Your face is too annoyingly perfect to be punched by a Meathead fist.”

Apparently, the guys all made a nuisance of themselves at the brewery last night, further proof that I need to do my part to make this go away. Meathead kept aggressively flirting with Brittney, Cole’s second-in-command, despite her making it very clear that she was both disinterested and annoyed. When he leaned forward and tried to lay a kiss on her over the bar, Cole’s brother took a fist to him. It had led to a short brawl, broken up by Cole and a couple of other guys.

“The sooner those assholes get out of town, the better,” I say.

Holly belts out a laugh. “So his solution was to turn Kennedy orange and freeze everyone to death.”

Well, when she puts it that way.

I groan. “You’re right. Maybe I’m not cut out to be a supervillain.”

“Yeah, you’re definitely not,” Holly says. “You’re too much of a closet softy.”

“Am not,” I say, instantly annoyed at myself for sounding like I’m five.

“You teared up when you saw Bryn’s sonogram photos the other day.”

“Did not.”

But I did. So sue me. It’s not every day a man gets to see his niece for the first time.

“Men can cry, Holly,” Cole says, surprising the shit out of me by taking my side.

“Well, of course they can, dum-dum,” she says, clearly unmoved. “But the ones who do are softies.” She lifts her eyebrows at both of us. “I’m not the one acting like that’s a bad thing.”

“ You’re not a softy,” I interject.

“Oh, hell no.” She points a finger at me. “But I did cry when I saw those pictures.” She gives me a pointed look. “I’d also cry if someone turned me orange and locked me in the Labelles’ house with a bunch of rich assholes.”

I huff out a laugh. “Princess volunteered for the role. You’ve got no reason to feel bad for her.”

Still, even as I say it, I can acknowledge to myself that I do sort of feel bad for her. She’s a bit untouchable, like a princess, but there’s a certain naive optimism about her, as if she really does believe the shit my grandmother is peddling, or at least wants to.

Tilting her head, Holly says, “So why don’t you give her a reason to unvolunteer?”

“For one thing, she’s on a dating show called Matchmaking the Rich ,” I say, annoyed, although I’m not sure who’s done the annoying. “She’s hardly going to throw her panties at a handyman who moonlights as a fireman.”

“This is your problem,” Holly says. “You expect women to up and throw their panties at you.” She eats a fry. “Sometimes you need to work for the good things, bub. They’re not just going to climb onto your lap like that one woman I walked in on you with.”

“Christ, are you ever going to let that go?” I ask. I’ve only brought one woman home since she moved in. One. And she’s never let me forget it. We were making out on the couch when Holly crept into the room with a baseball bat, thinking I was an intruder. “Besides, what would be the polite way to acquire a woman’s panties? Go through her drawers and steal them? Ask nicely to borrow them? Because I’m pretty sure either of those things would make me a sexual predator.”

She gives me her you’re impossible look. Cole watches with us with amusement, then kisses her again—I look away—and takes off toward the bar with the tray.

“I mean it,” Holly tells me, and I don’t doubt she does. “I’m starting to think you should pillage the show and save the princess.”

“You play too many video games.”

“Accurate.”

My friend Oliver, whom I texted after leaving the Labelles’ place, enters through the front and approaches our table. He’s wearing a scarf his mother knitted for him and a beanie hat over his dark hair, but he pulls it off as he approaches us. It’s a Thursday night, and there’s a pretty decent crowd.

Oliver would have been better off if he hadn’t come back to town, but now that he’s here, he’s stuck. His father is sick, and he’s not the kind of guy to stay away and watch him die from a distance, even if his dad has made it clear that he’ll never approve of him. No, he’s the kind of guy who’ll chuck his whole life just to support the people he cares about. Lucky for him—or not, depending on your perspective—he works in marketing, and he’s talented enough that his boss agreed to let him work remotely. He’s staying indefinitely, and that means I’m determined to make things as good for him as possible.

“Hey, man,” I say, standing and giving him a backslap when he reaches our table.

“Cupid!”

I make a face. I’m less than fond of my nickname, but what can you do?

“How’s the sabotage going?” Oliver continues, grinning as he loosens his scarf.

Goddammit. I take a glance around again, but there’s still no one paying attention to us.

“We can’t just openly talk about this,” I say, as he sits down next to Holly, who scooted aside to make room. “Some people think the show is a good thing for this town.” Namely, the people who stand to make money off it.

He shrugs without much concern. “So what do you want to talk about? My mother wants me to chop down a Christmas tree at Ralph’s for her this weekend. So that’ll be a whole thing.” He gives me a pointed look. “You want to come?”

“To chop your tree? No, thanks.”

“To chop your own, asshole. I figured you could get one for your house.”

“Yes, please,” Holly says. “I’m really feeling the Christmas spirit this year. And maybe you can sneak a contraband pine bough over to the Labelles’ house so Kennedy isn’t completely cut off from Christmas. Tina says she’s bummed by the lack of Christmassy things.”

“Then she shouldn’t have volunteered for the show,” I say, trying to sound more severe than I feel. My mind supplies an image of her wistful expression as she talked about Christmas and the way the holiday was completely absent from the Labelles’ house. Still, it occurs to me that the tree outing is a potential opportunity.

Oliver has been lonely since returning to Highland Hills. There’s not much of a dating scene here for anyone, and there’s probably only five or six openly gay men Oliver’s age, tops. We met Harry in Asheville earlier this year, while paying a visit to my sister Willow. There were some sparks between them, I thought. Or at least I caught Oliver looking at him appreciatively a few times.

I’m not playing matchmaker. Obviously. I’m not a matchmaker.

But Oliver could use some more friends, is all. He just moved back to town a year and a half ago, and his dad has been steadily getting worse. The situation at home isn’t easy, and whenever you’re in the thick of something not easy, it’s better to share it.

“Let’s go on Sunday,” I say, knowing it’s a day off for the people on the production. I’m fairly sure my grandmother wouldn’t give anyone a day off if she had her way, but in this one thing, she doesn’t. It’s in the cameramen’s contracts. Harry will be free to join us.

“You got it,” Oliver says, although he’s giving me a look that suggests he knows I’m up to something, even if he’s not quite sure what. That look is mirrored on Holly’s face.

“You’re really going to chop down a Christmas tree for us?” she asks wistfully. “Isn’t that something.”

“Let’s not make a big deal about it,” I grump. “It’s not like I’m a total grinch. I go to Ralph’s all the time.”

Oliver and Holly exchange a look and have a good laugh at my expense.