Power (The Keatyn Chronicles Book 9) (15 page)

“Hadn’t gotten that far,” she replies. “Figured I’d just crash somewhere.”

“Why don’t
I
make sure she gets back to the hotel,” Braxton offers. “You at the usual place?”
 

“Yeah, except we have a suite this time,” I reply.

“Penthouse?” Braxton asks. “Change of plans, kids. Party at the Penthouse.”

Both Baylor and Gracie look excited until Keatyn says, “No party at the penthouse. Just sleep.”

“Do you have room for all of us?” Gracie asks.

“We have room for you,
Gracie
,” I stress.

“Not your bro?” Braxton asks. “I’m crushed.”

“You can have the couch. And if you’re so inclined, you and Baylor can share.”

“Uh, sorry, man,” Braxton says to Baylor. “Alright, old people. See you in the a.m.”

We hang out for a bit after the game to chat with old friends, many of whom are genuinely happy to see me.
 

Finally, Dallas says to me, “I promised Aiden I’d make sure Keatyn got enough rest. If you want to stay, I can take her now and you can come back whenever you’re ready. You put her through a lot this week and she looks exhausted.”

I study her. She’s smiling and speaking animatedly, but there are dark circles under her eyes and she keeps covering her mouth, trying to stifle her yawns. I feel bad for all I put them both through this week. “Yeah, she does. I’ll go get her.”

I interrupt her conversation. “Dallas is being a party pooper and wants to head to the hotel. You okay with that?”

She gives me a wide, happy smile. “Yes. I am.”

Once we’re in the car, she says, “Don’t you think it’s a strange twist of fate that the boy who I was supposed to babysit at The Cave when he came for Prospective Student Weekend is now watching my baby sister? Are you sure we shouldn’t stay? Looking back, I did a really bad job of watching Braxton.”

“Did he make it back to Dawson’s dorm room that night?” I ask her.

“Yes.”

“Then you did fine.”

“He was shit-faced and puked all over a girl!”

“She puked on him back. It was even.”

“I don’t want Gracie drinking. She’s too young.”

“Ah, don’t worry about it, Keatyn,” Dallas says with a grin. “They’ll probably sneak back to his dorm room to make out.”

“Oh, that’s even worse. Let’s have the driver turn around. Dallas, are you really that tired?”

“No, but you are,” he says.

“You guys tricked me?”
 

“Aiden said we’d probably have to,” Dallas says. “And he was right.”

“Just text Braxton,” I suggest. “You know, if Braxton can handle Gracie, I might just give him a job. I could use someone to babysit some of our movie sets.”

“Speaking of movie sets, did you know that Knox sees Jennifer as a very short term thing?”

“Really? That surprises me.”

“Doesn’t surprise me,” Dallas says. “Knox liked that she crushed on him. He has a huge ego.”

“It might even be bigger than yours,” Keatyn says, teasing me.

“No way he’s bigger than me,” I tease back.
 

Keatyn’s phone buzzes and she looks down at it.
 

“Shit. Your brother texted me back. He said
All’s good
. Isn’t that Johnson code for it’s out of control but no one got arrested? Yet.”

“Pretty much,” Dallas laughs.
 

Keatyn falls asleep on the couch while Dallas and I are flipping through TV channels.
 

“What do you think I should do about Ariela?” I ask him for the first time.

“What do you want to do?”

“I really don’t know.”

“How was being back?”

“Hard. At first, anyway.”

“How so?” Dallas is like a shrink. He asks a whole lot of questions and never offers an opinion unless you force him to. And, to be honest, I probably don’t want his opinion right now.
 

I slump down in my chair.

“We have a big balcony,” he says, pulling a joint out of his pocket.
 

I set my scotch down. “Heck, yeah, we do. Shh. Be quiet. We don’t want Keatyn to wake up.”

“I’m still awake,” she says. “Just resting my eyes. It seems wrong that I’m not going out to smoke with you. Especially here.”

“We don’t have to,” I say, not wanting her to feel left out.

“Close the door, call me, and put me on speaker. That way I’ll feel like I’m out there.”

Dallas and I go out on the deck, light up, and do as we’re told.
 

“Remember the morning when you called me and asked me how to get un-high fast?” Dallas says to Keatyn into the phone.

“Ohmigawd,” Keatyn replies. “That was the morning I accidentally ate one of Jake’s brownies before school. What about senior year when you tried to turn a hollowed out log into a party bong?”

“Aw, that’s just a Southern boy trick.”

“Nothing I’d ever seen, that’s for sure.” I add, laughing. “Remember after Prom, Ariela—”

“Uh, yeah,” Dallas says. “Back to Ariela. How did being back here feel?”

“I could see her face everywhere. It made me really sad until about the middle of the game.”

“What happened at the game?”

“You two. Coming back became more about all the fun times. Remember our Sunday morning powwows? Always just the three of us.”

“We need to do that more often, I think,” Dallas says. “Captive was always about the three of us. It’s gotten so big. I know it makes the stockholders happy, made us all wealthy, but . . .”

“What are you thinking?”

“What if we sold off pieces of the business? We had a really lucrative offer come in today from a major player.”

“We’ve had offers before. We always turn them down,” I say.
 

“Not like this one. And they want to absorb us completely. I did a little digging and found out what they really need is our revenue stream. What if we carved out a few projects and employees we want to keep, negotiate to keep the name, and go back to being a boutique studio?”

I take another hit and pass him back the joint. “We always seem to make our life decisions this way, don’t we? Smoking and talking.”

“How would
you
feel about it, Riley?” Keatyn asks gently.
 

And I know what’s she’s thinking. She just offered me the chairman job. Something I’ve worked hard for. “Could I still be Chairman of Captive?” I ask playfully.

“Of course,” Dallas says. “We’d still have our same roles, just have a whole lot less on our plates. More time to golf. And a much fatter bank.”

“I’d want to take
Daddy’s Angel
and my undeveloped scripts with me,” Keatyn says. “And I have an idea.”

She tells us about Knox’s script and how they want to buy a neighboring farm to build a set.

“If we haven’t signed anything with him yet, we won’t need to address it in the deal. I think that sounds like a really cool project,” Dallas says. “But back to Ariela. We keep getting off track.”

“When we go back home, I’m going to call her,” I say, surprising myself.

“I think that’s a good idea,” Dallas says. “What are you going to talk to her about?”

“Well, why her husband was kissing her, for starters. Then about being here. And probably about what’s next. How do we move forward? How do we move past it?”

“Shit!” Keatyn says. “I just got a text from your brother. I knew we shouldn’t have left!”

“What happened?” Dallas asks calmly as he takes another hit.
 

“I don’t know. I think maybe he’s drunk.”

“He probably is!” I laugh. “What did he say?”

“He just said
cat fight
and
MEOW
. You don’t think Gracie got in a fight, do you? Should we go back?”

A few minutes later, there’s a knock on our hotel room door.
 

Dallas quickly puts out the joint, while I wave my hands to dissipate the smoke.
 

“It’s Braxton,” he says, looking through the window. We go inside to see what’s going on.

Braxton is coming through the door with Gracie and Baylor in tow. Gracie’s holding a towel to her cheek.

“What happened!?” Keatyn shrills.

Braxton sniffs the air. “I see you’ve all been having fun while I was babysitting the kids.”

“You weren’t babysitting me,” Gracie says, then she looks directly at Keatyn. “
Was he?
”

“Do you really think if I thought you needed babysitting I’d leave you with Braxton?”

“Hey!” he says.

Keatyn just grins at him.
 

“I’m really sorry, baby,” Baylor says to Gracie, causing me to immediately hate him. Because
baby?

Dallas must not like it either because he grabs the little piss ant Hawthorne boy by the neck.
 

“I think we should have a chat,” he says, pulling him out on the deck and telling him to sit.
 

I follow.

Towering above him, Dallas says, “What the fuck is your deal, son?”

His voice is so authoritative I almost tell him what my deal is.
 

“I don’t have a deal, sir,” Baylor replies. “I’m sorry Krissy hit Gracie. She was mad at me.”

“Are you fucking her?” Dallas asks him.

“Gracie? What?! No!”

“He means the cheerleader,” I say.
 

“Oh. Uh, Kinda.”

“Kinda?” Dallas asks, still using his intimidating voice and reminding me of the teachers I had at military school. “Either you are or you aren’t. Or else you just ain’t very good at it. Which is it, boy?”

“Yes, I’ve slept with her. She’s a junior. Pretty. I mean . . .”

“Does Gracie know this?”

He lowers his head and shakes it.

“Why did you ask Gracie to Homecoming? Or was that just bullshit talk that you got caught on?”

He looks up, surprise on his face. “No, sir. I was serious when I asked her. She’s amazing. And she gets me. Gets the pressure of having a last name everyone knows.”

“I see,” Dallas says. “Very well, then. Why don’t you get back inside.”

The second he’s gone through the door, Dallas lies across the couch and giggles. “It’s hard being a hard ass when you’re high.”

“You did good. Reminded me of military school.”

“Do you think he’s telling the truth or do you think he knew we were high and could lie to us?”

I pull the door open and holler for my brother. “Braxton, get out here.”

Keatyn follows him onto the deck, waving her hand in front of her face to make sure the smoke is gone.
 

“Tell us what really happened,” Dallas says, sitting back up on the couch.
 

“Well, Gracie and Baylor—cool kid, by the way—were sitting by the fire. Chilling. Snuggling. Then Gracie went to get a beer—”

“Did you stop her?” Keatyn asks. “She’s fourteen!”

Braxton slings his arm around her. “Keatyn, baby, if she’s going to Eastbrooke, she’s gonna have a beer occasionally. You did.”

“I know, but . . .”

“Anyway,” Braxton continues. “That’s when the girl walked up and said something bitchy to her and Gracie said something back and the girl punched her.”

“What did she say?”

“That she’d been sleeping with Baylor.”

“Oh,” Keatyn says, holding her stomach. “I should be easier on her. I know how that hurts.”

“Gracie’s a good kid, Keatyn. And she didn’t take her shit. She told her that she didn’t have to sleep with him to get a date. That’s when she got pissed and hit her. But, it was Braxton to the rescue! I grabbed Gracie and pulled her away. And now we are here.”

“What did Baylor do?”

“He was mortified. Which should say something about his character, because I would have been fucking thrilled if two chicks were fighting over me.”

“I just don’t want her to lose herself in a boy,” Keatyn says.

Something inside me clicks.

“Did I do that?” I ask them. “With Ariela?”

“Um, well, uh . . .” Keatyn stammers. “You two
were
attached at the hip.”

“More like the dick,” Dallas chuckles. “I used to say she had your dick on a leash.”

Keatyn swats Dallas. “Be nice.”

Dallas giggles. “Hey, just being honest.”

She turns to me. “But if we’re being honest, we did call you Rileyella as if you were one person. Other than our Sunday morning powwows, you were rarely apart.”

“Isn’t that what monogamy is all about?” I ask.

“Consumed and monogamy aren’t the same thing. But everyone thought you were the perfect couple. Everyone was so excited when you won Prom King and Queen.”

“You can’t really talk,” I say to Keatyn. “You and Aiden are the perfect couple.”