CEO’s Dirty Vacation

Chapter6

Charlotte POV

Los Angeles had a way of getting into your blood whether you planned it or not. I hadn’t planned it. I’d followed Owen here three years ago, packed my truck, told myself it was the logical next step, and then Owen had done what Owen did and left me standing in a city I hadn’t chosen with a lease and a broken engagement and no particular plan.

And then the city went ahead and became mine anyway.

I loved the particular madness of it: the mountains sitting at the edge of everything like they were keeping watch, the way the neighborhoods shifted character every ten minutes, the stretch of coastline that made even a bad day feel provisional. LA did not care about your bad day. LA had eighteen million people and a sunset that looked staged, and it was completely indifferent to your emotional state, which was oddly comforting. I’d build something here on my own terms. The city had let me.

What LA did not do was look after your parking situation.

The street beside my bungalow had three streetlamps, two of which had been broken since before I moved in. The city had been informed. The city had not acted. On Monday morning, I walked out at six-fifteen, travel mug in hand, and found my Chevy truck with its windshield punched through a clean, deliberate hole slightly left of center that sent cracks spider-webbing all the way to the corners. Someone had taken something blunt and heavy to it sometime in the night, and the driver’s seat was glittering with glass.

I stood there for a moment drinking my coffee, assessed the situation, and drove to the mechanic’s on Pico with one hand on the wheel and the window down because sitting in a car full of glass dust was its own form of punishment.

The mechanic at the shop was a compact man with strong opinions about his loaner inventory. He pointed me toward a white Prius hatchback with a bumper sticker that said ‘Namaste’ and looked at me with the expression of someone who considered the matter settled.

I considered the matter nowhere near settled.

“I run a landscaping business,” I told him. “I have timber poles, a soil auger, two wheelbarrows, and approximately forty pounds of hand tools that need to be somewhere on any given workday. That Prius is not going to get it done.”

We went back and forth for four minutes. I had a project to get to and no interest in losing the argument, so I held my position, and eventually he walked me around back to where a battered Ford F-150 with a suspect transmission and a side mirror held on with electrical tape was parked behind a dumpster. It was not glamorous. It got my tools from point A to point B. I took them.

Sei and Jacob were already on the slope when I pulled up to Briar’s forty minutes past my usual time. They’d started on the first terrace level without me, which was the kind of initiative that made me want to give them both a raise I couldn’t quite afford yet. I hired them project by project, which was not ideal and I knew it. Full-time employees meant insurance, consistency, and the ability to take on bigger jobs simultaneously. What it also meant was a payroll I couldn’t sustain right now without raiding Grace’s tuition fund, which was not an option I was entertaining under any circumstances.

Grace was two years from finishing law school. Every surplus dollar I made went toward keeping her from graduating into the kind of debt that reshaped her twenties. The plan was eighteen months, maybe less, if I landed the West Side residential contract I’d been pitching for, and then I could staff up properly and stop holding my breath every time someone called in sick.

It was a reasonable plan. I’d built my whole business on reasonable plans executed with unreasonable stubbornness, and it had gotten me two back-to-back Best Garden awards from one of the city’s most read design publications and more referral work than I could sometimes handle. I was not complaining. I was just also not sleeping as much as the doctors recommended.

I waved at the boys, grabbed my backpack, and headed up toward the house to drop it in the foyer.

Christian was coming out of the front door at the same moment I was going in.

He was in running gear, dark joggers, a grey shirt that was doing very specific things against his chest and shoulders, a light sheen of sweat on his skin that meant he’d been out for a while already. His hair was pushed back off his forehead and he looked annoyingly well-rested for someone who had just exercised before most people had finished their first coffee.

I stopped. He stopped.

“Ankle okay?” he said.

“Perfect,” I said. “Good morning.”

He studied me for half a second longer than the question required. “You’re late.”

“Someone vandalized my truck. I had to go to the mechanic first thing.”

Something moved across his face, not the alarm exactly, but the focused attention of a man who had just filed a piece of information under problems to address. “The windshield?”

“The windshield,” I confirmed.

“, we can look into it. He’s a detective, this is exactly the kind of thing he handles.”

“I appreciate that. And no.”

“Charlotte.”

“Christian,” I kept my voice easy. “I’ve lived in this city long enough to know how these things go. It takes time I don’t have, leads nowhere, it turns out, and in three days I’ve forgotten about it. Your brother has actual crimes to work on.”

He looked like he disagreed with every part of that assessment but recognized he was not going to win it. There was something slightly satisfying about watching Christian Hendrick accept a no. Not because I enjoyed being contrary, but because the look on his face said it didn’t happen to him often, and that was its own kind of interest.

“I’m going to shower,” he said finally.

“I’m going to be useful,” I said.

We parted ways. I made it outside and got about fifteen feet down the slope before I remembered to breathe normally.

The morning moved the way good work mornings did, fast and physically, the kind that emptied your head of everything except the task immediately in front of you. I was leveling the base of the second terrace platform when Lori arrived with Milo just before ten, the boy trailing behind her with a soccer ball tucked under one arm and the focused air of someone who had been given a very important assignment.

They disappeared around the side of the house. A little while later, I could hear the distant sound of Milo’s voice carrying from the backyard, high and insistent, punctuated by Christian’s lower responses.

I worked. I didn’t think about it.

I was three-quarters done with the wooden path, the temporary trail that would keep people from sliding face-first down the slope while the terracing was in progress when a sound split the afternoon air from the back of the property. High, sharp, unmistakably Milo.

I dropped my tools and ran.

By the time I reached the corner of the house, I was burning in both quads, and I nearly collided with Christian coming out of the back door, his expression tight.

“First-aid kit?” he said.

“My car. What happened?”

“Minor cut. He’s in the hammock. Go wash your hands, I'll keep him calm.”

I was back in ninety seconds.