Read Online The Firefly Cafe by Lily Everett - Free Book Online Page B

you deserve to know that wherever you’re off to next, wherever life
     takes you, there are people here on Sanctuary Island who love you.”
    His eyes pinched shut as if she’d slid a steak knife between his ribs, his whole body
     jerking with the wound, and Penny’s heart shriveled in her chest.
    “You shouldn’t,” he said, the words harsh as gravel in a blender.
    This wasn’t going at all the way she’d imagined.
    Dylan was so stoic—not much of a talker, more of a doer. But Penny saw beneath the
     cocky grin and the hard-clenched jaw. She saw a man with a past like a wound that
     kept breaking open, never healing right. She saw a man who understood what it meant
     to be lonely, and she’d wanted to give him something to take with him and keep him
     warm the next time he found himself all alone in the wide world.
    Instead, she seemed to have broken him.
    “Listen, Penny,” he began, voice hoarse and eyes shadowed.
    What was he going to say? Fear momentarily cut off the flow of oxygen to her brain—all
     she could do was sit there and stare at him, naked in her bed, with her grandmother’s
     quilt pooled around lean hips still imprinted with the shape of her clutching fingers.
    The sound of her cell phone blaring out Diana Ross’s “The Boss” cut him off. Scrambling
     for the phone buried under the pile of clothes they’d shed earlier, Penny held it
     up with an undeniable sense of relief, even as she frowned apologetically.
    “Sorry, I have to take this. It’s Harrington family business, I’m always supposed
     to be on call. I wonder what they need.”
    *   *   *
    The tensing of every muscle in Dylan’s body was all the more painful after being so
     recently melted into a puddle of happy goo.
    Penny loved him. Or, more accurately, she loved Dylan Workman, the Sanctuary Island
     version of Dylan—who was nothing like the man he’d been back in New York.
    He had to tell her. Now.
    Tuning back in to the one side of Penny’s call that he could hear, Dylan drummed impatient
     fingers on his raised knee and waited for her to be done.
    “Jessica, hi! No, it’s fine, I can talk.”
    Penny’s gaze lifted to his for a moment, her brow furrowing as she listened to Jessica
     Bell, his brother Logan’s assistant. “You are? That’s—well, that’s great! I’ll look
     forward to finally meeting you in person.”
    Horror crawled down Dylan’s spine. Crap. Jessica was coming here. He was about to
     be outed as part of the wealthy family who paid Penny’s salary.
    “Alrighty then,” Penny said, determinedly cheerful even though Dylan could read the
     panic in her white-knuckled grip on the phone. “When should we expect you?”
    The words were no sooner out of her mouth than the doorbell chimed its deep, mellow
     tones through the house.
    Dylan’s lungs seized. No. This couldn’t be happening.
    Beside him on the bed, Penny turned around, panicked eyes on Dylan. “Oh,” she said
     faintly. “I see.”
    The phone fell away from her ear.
    “The door,” Dylan said through numb lips.
    It wasn’t a question, but Penny nodded, still shell-shocked. The doorbell chimed again,
     insistently, and Dylan experienced a moment of intense irrational rage at himself
     for fixing the damn thing five days ago.
    The second bell catapulted Penny into action. She leapt off the bed and into her clothes,
     hair flying behind her like an unfurling flag. “Get dressed! Where are my socks? Who
     cares—I don’t need socks. I do need a bra, though, oh thank goodness…”
    Any chance Dylan had to tell Penny the truth was draining away like sands through
     an hourglass. He stood up and tried to catch her shoulders and make her stand still
     for a second, but it was like trying to catch a sunbeam. She slipped through his fingers,
     a constant whirl of frantic motion as she rushed over to the mirror and moaned at
     the sex-tousled state of her curls.
    “Penny, please,” he said, hating the desperation so naked in