“You are girl crazy, Lucas Bennet,” Mom said with a tsk and a smile.

“I can’t help it. I got all your charm and good looks. I was doomed from the start.” I jerked my chin at Laney, who sat next to me. “When’d you get in?”

“Yesterday. God, I missed New York.”

“What, Dallas wasn’t kicking it for you anymore?”

“Oh, it was kicking something. More shit than anything, judging by the percentage of cowboy boots worn in that city.” She chuckled at her own joke along with the chorus of our laughter. “Honestly, I was looking for a reason to get out of there. I missed the city.”

“You say that like there aren’t a couple million people there,” Marcus argued.

“But it’s not New York,” she said, as if that explained everything. “It wasn’t hard to walk away from my corporate job, not even a little.”

“What, you didn’t get turned on doing social media for a computer company?” Kash asked with a brow up.

“Nope,” Laney said. “Now, if it’d been Apple, you’d have had to drag me back kicking and screaming.”

Mom laughed a little too loud. “You didn’t all have to come home. Really, we were doing okay, weren’t we, dear?”

Dad cleared his throat. “Okay being a relative term? Sure.”

“See?” Mom said, gesturing to Dad in confirmation.

Marcus’s face flattened.

But when he opened his mouth to speak, Mom cut him off. “Now, we appreciate you kids coming home to help out, but don’t you dare feel obligated. Your father and I will be just fine. Don’t you worry about us.”

Jett cast a glance around the table at us before covering Mom’s hand with his. “We’re happy to help out, Mom. Anyway, it’s not like we had anything else going on, did we?”

We echoed our affirmatives in solidarity, which were, of course, lies.

Laney had a great job with a stable, growing company. Jett managed a bookstore on the Upper West but had taken a leave of absence to come home. I’d been living on the other side of the country, not that I had any real roots there or any long-term prospects to speak of. Not that I did long-term either. But if I did, I still would have dropped it all to come home.

Kash had never left though. Instead, he took to the greenhouses to help Dad, who wasn’t getting any younger. If anyone was going to take over the shop that’d been in our family for generations, it’d be Kash.

And Marcus … well, after making a relative fortune in hedge funds, he’d bailed to day trade. And then to buy the shop—and its substantial debt—with the sole intention of turning the business around.

The honest truth? Mom was perfectly content making pretty things and ignoring ugly ones, and Dad was happier in the dirt than the paperwork. When business was booming, Longbourn had taken care of itself. But when times got tough, no one possessed the acumen to patch up the holes in the boat. And it had almost sunk.