Hook, Line, and Sinker Read online

  Hook, Line, and Sinker

  A Hart Brothers Story

  SHIRLEY HOLDER PLATT

  This is a work of fiction. Any resemblance to persons, living or dead, or actual events is purely coincidental.

  Text copyright © 2020 by

  Shirley Holder Platt

  All rights reserved.

  Cover Design: Fresh Design

  ISBN- 9798630707321

  No part of this book may be reproduced, or stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without express written permission of the publisher.

  Contents

  Chapter One

  Chapter Two

  Chapter Three

  Chapter Four

  Chapter Five

  Chapter Six

  Chapter Seven

  Chapter Eight

  Chapter Nine

  Chapter Ten

  Chapter Eleven

  Chapter Twelve

  Chapter Thirteen

  Chapter Fourteen

  Chapter Fifteen

  Chapter Sixteen

  Chapter Seventeen

  Chapter Eighteen

  Chapter Nineteen

  Chapter Twenty

  Chapter Twenty-One

  Chapter Twenty-Two

  Chapter Twenty-Three

  Chapter Twenty-Four

  Chapter Twenty-Five

  Chapter Twenty-Six

  Chapter Twenty-Seven

  Chapter Twenty-Eight

  Chapter Twenty-Nine

  Chapter Thirty

  Chapter Thirty-One

  Chapter Thirty-Two

  Epilogue

  BOOKS BY THE AUTHOR

  ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

  ABOUT THE AUTHOR

  Pro Bono Romance – Sneak Peek

  Chapter One

  Zeke stood in the parking lot, staring at the back of Darlene’s car. His brothers were on either side with their arms draped over his shoulder. The men remained silent until the car turned a corner, and they could no longer see the taillights. The neon sign for Rainy Daze Café buzzed in the humid, dawn air. Crickets called to one another. The sun’s light was filling the sky with early morning rays. Inside the café, patrons watched through the plate glass windows. Some shook their heads, others whispered to their companions, some continued eating breakfast. No one seemed surprised. Sophie, who’d remained at her booth after Darlene’s melt-down, wondered when Zeke would ever learn that he was running women off with his devil may care act. Women wanted more than a good time. Women wanted much more. She took a bite of her thick-cut bacon, savoring the treat she gave herself once a month. No amount of drama would drag her away from this meal.

  “Well, that’s that,” Zeke said. He began slapping at the dust from his pants left in Darlene’s wake.

  “Hell of a way to end it,” Gabe said.

  “Kinda like déjà vu, wouldn’t you say?” Nat leaned forward and smiled at Gabe.

  Zeke broke away and turned on his brothers.

  “Thanks for the support, guys. I can always count on you in times like this.” He stomped back into the café where they’d all been eating when Darlene made her scene, walked out without looking back, and threw the key to his house in the parking lot. His brothers had helped him retrieve it in the semi-darkness. Good old Gabe had a flashlight in his truck, so it didn’t take long. They went back inside together. A solid front the whole town was accustomed to seeing.

  “Eight months down the drain,” Zeke said. That was a record, he thought. Before Darlene, his record had been four months.

  “She hung in there a while,” Nat said as he slid into the booth beside Zeke.

  Gabe placed a ten-dollar bill in Nat’s outstretched hand.

  “You were betting on me failing?” Zeke asked.

  “Seemed like a sure thing to me.” Nat stood, removed his wallet, inserted the money, put the wallet away, and sat again. Zeke would have punched him, but Rainy had thrown him out of her café before, and he wasn’t ready to cook meals for himself now that Darlene was gone. She’d been a darned good cook, too. He knew he’d be missing her Sunday pot roast dinners a long time after he’d forgotten her voice.

  “What are you looking at?” Zeke asked Sophie. She was in the booth behind Gabe, staring at him as he sat brooding.

  “Nothing, nothing at all.” She took another bite of bacon and smiled.

  “She could’ve waited until I got home. Didn’t have to make a scene about it.” Zeke ran his hand through the dark brown hair that matched that of his brothers. His was on the longer side, with a slight flip at the back of his neck. Gabe, one year younger, had a buzz on the sides and waves on top. Zeke thought his brother looked like one of those metrosexual guys he’d read about in People magazine while waiting for his last dental appointment. Nat, the youngest, wore his short all over. He had no time for messing with hair when there were more important things in life.

  A person seeing the brothers for the first time might mistake them for triplets, they were so alike in build, facial structure, and eye color, a golden brown with hints of green when you got close. But the three men were as different as any brothers could be. The Hart brothers were known all over town, especially by the women, many of whom dreamed of being the next heartbreak. Because that’s what happened when you fell for one of the Harts. They weren’t known for commitment. Zeke was the worst offender.

  “She wanted a ring,” Zeke said.

  “What did you expect? She’d been living with you for eight months. Hell, that’s almost long enough to have a baby. The girl was probably hearing her biological clock ticking away while you lounged on the couch watching baseball.” Gabe waved his fork at his brother.

  “I never liked her,” Nat said.

  “You never told me that.”

  “Would you have listened?”

  “Hell, no.” Zeke never listened to his brothers when it came to women.

  “She was uppity, and I didn’t like watching her eat. She picked at her food. I could tell she wished she were eating at some upscale, swanky place instead of Rainy’s. It was like she thought down-home food was beneath her. Plus, she was always looking at the lipstick on her teeth in that little mirror she carried around.” Nat wrinkled his nose at the memory. Gabe nodded.

  “I think she must have had braces when she was a kid.” Zeke wondered why he was defending her. She’d laid down her ultimatum last week when he’d refused to turn the television off and have “a talk.” She’d said it was a ring or she was hitting the road. She must have believed he’d change. He’d told her he’d think about it, then promptly forgotten the conversation until she confronted him in the café moments ago.

  “You know,” he said, “I told her from the beginning that I wasn’t the marrying kind. Why do women always want to change men?”

  “Beats me,” Nat said as Gabe simply shrugged and kept eating.

  “You guys are hopeless.” Sophie had finished her meal and stood at the end of their booth. “You know what your problem is?”

  “No, and we don’t want to know,” Zeke said for himself and his brothers.

  “Well, I’m gonna tell you anyway.” She fisted her hand and placed it on her hip. The silk blouse she wore was all business while somehow appearing sexy as hell, as were the pencil skirt and stiletto shoes that made her legs look even more incredible than usual. She must have an appointment with a client during the day. Zeke hadn’t seen her in anything but business suits in years. She always looked great, but she was radiant this morning.

  He missed the old Sophie he remembered from childhood days. The one who wore scuffed tennis shoes and cut off shorts with a baseball cap turn
ed backward and a blond ponytail hanging down her back. She’d grown up in Hartford with the brothers and was prone to tell them whatever was on her mind. She was Sean Malloy’s little sister, so they’d put up with her to play with Sean. They’d learned to ignore her from an early age, although it was difficult for Zeke some days when her perfume drifted in the air. He spent more time thinking about the grown version of the girl next door than he cared to admit.

  “Tell us, oh wise woman,” Zeke said. He rolled his hand as if addressing a sheik from Arabia. He loved teasing her if only to see the spark in her green eyes.

  “None of you ever grew up,” she said. “I blame your mother. She always spoiled the lot of you. A broken window from one of your baseballs? No problem, she’d pay for the replacement. Johnny showed up at school with a black-eye from fighting with one of the Hart boys? Your momma knew it had to be Johnny’s fault, so why punish one of her sweet sons? Should I go on?”

  “Please, don’t.” They all said together.

  She huffed, turned away, and power-walked toward the door. Her best friend, Rainy, stood at the counter and gave a thumbs up that Sophie returned before she grabbed the door handle. If she could have slammed the door, she would have, but it was one of those with a spring so it would close itself, and you couldn’t rush it. She’d tried before. Oh yeah, she’d tried. It was a rare day that one of the Hart boys didn’t get under her skin.

  She saw Zeke and Gabe every day, and Nat was around the café most mornings. She worked for their family business, like it or not. The Harts had a market on almost all the companies in town, so there weren’t many options unless you wanted to leave. Sophie’s family was here. The Malloys had been in Hartford longer than the Harts. She wasn’t about to let them run her out of town. She walked the three blocks to the firm and fumbled with the key to the door with shaking hands. She hated letting those guys get to her. She threw her purse on the couch in her office before slamming into her chair. She spun in a circle, stopped, stared at the wall of bookshelves, and steamed.

  Zeke Hart was the biggest joke in the office. Sophie was Manager of Outside Sales, having held the position for the last five years. She’d been traveling and working her butt off at the job when Zeke breezed in a month ago on the coattails of his dad. Standing there like he owned the world in an Armani suit and Ferragamo shoes that probably cost most of her year’s salary, he smiled as his dad handed him the position of vice president over sales. A vice presidency that didn’t exist before that day.

  She remembered exactly how the announcement had felt. It was like a punch in the gut. She’d even lost her breath for a minute before turning on her heel and retreating to her office. They were lucky she hadn’t shattered the glass in the door when she slammed it. She wished she had. The sound of destruction would have been satisfying. That day, she sat and fumed in a chair that didn’t spin as well as the one in which she now sat. Then and now, she hated Zeke Hart.

  Janice, her assistant, had come in meekly on that fateful day, afraid of the backlash, and brought a cup of coffee with cream and sugar, just the way Sophie liked it. She’d advised her boss to play nice, and reminded her how much they both needed their jobs. So, Sophie had sucked it up and marched into Zeke’s new corner office, the one with the view over the river that Sophie had coveted for five years as it sat empty, and congratulated the man. She remembered his good-natured smile and how he’d nodded his acknowledgment. He’d even told her he would depend on her to show him the ropes. Like hell, she’d thought. Good luck with that.

  “Enough thinking about the past. You’re burning daylight,” Sophie said out loud as she turned a circle with her chair one last time. She loved her chair. She’d ordered the most expensive one she could find the same day Zeke started working across the hall. She booted her computer up and straightened her already tidy desk. She may not have a corner office with a terrific view, but she had work to do. She’d wasted a perfectly good afternoon yesterday with a potential client who would never use their firm. He’d been fishing for a date. Disgusting behavior.

  She checked her list of things to do, hoping she’d be in the field most of the week. She had better things to do than to get upset over something about which she could do nothing. She picked up the phone and dialed.

  “Cold calls,” she said out loud. “I hate cold calls.”

  Meanwhile, Zeke and his brothers finished their meals, clapped one another on the back, and headed to their various jobs. Nat to his dog training business a few blocks away; Gabe to his position as General Counsel a floor above Sophie’s office; and Zeke to the window office he’d been miserably inhabiting for the last and longest month of his life. How he’d let his father talk him into taking the job still irked him. He’d been drifting through life doing various manual jobs for years. He was good with his hands. Anything mechanical fascinated him, so he was a whiz at keeping his boat in excellent trim. He wished he was on the boat at that moment.

  As Zeke and Gabe walked into the well-appointed and ultra-modern building, Marta, the firm’s receptionist, greeted them with, “Hello, Mr. Harts.” The brothers had tried to convince her to drop the formalities and call them by their first names, but she reverted to her old ways about half the time. Gabe nodded and went up the stairs. Zeke smiled and kept walking behind Gabe to the second floor.

  “See you later,” Gabe said as he kept climbing. Zeke turned and walked down the hall, past framed pictures of his father shaking hands with prominent politicians; into his plush office with the view of the river he loved. It was like being in Folsom Prison with Johnny Cash and hearing that train rolling by without him. He could see the river. He could sometimes see the ripples as a big fish jumped, so close and yet so far away. He was sure life was punishing him for something he’d done in another life.

  No one wanted to hear about the poor little rich boy whose daddy gave him a job he didn’t want. No one felt sorry for him when they found out how much money he made for staring out that window and wishing he was on the river. It had only been one month, but he was slowly dying inside, and he didn’t know how to escape without making a final rift between his father and himself. Nothing in life had prepared him for such boredom. He tossed his coat on a chair, and sat in his padded cell, wishing life were different. He wished his father hadn’t convinced him to take this position. He wished he had followed his heart and started a fishing expedition company. Of all his regrets, the ones to do with Darlene were already fading. At least he hadn’t given his heart away.

  Chapter Two

  Sophie’s mind kept drifting back to the scene at the café she’d witnessed at breakfast and the fact that Zeke was free again. A condition he found himself in more often than not. She wished her heart would settle down, but figured it wouldn’t anytime soon. The rebellious organ sped up every time she saw Zeke Hart, and it had done the same thing since she was five and met him on the playground for the first time. He’d had that dimple in his left cheek back then, and the smile that had since melted many a woman’s heart. She’d had pigtails in plaits that her mother insisted she wear and those awful braces. She’d known she was a geek and would never be one of the pretty girls. He hadn’t noticed her then, and although they worked across the hall from one another for the last month, he never saw her now.

  She wondered what he was doing. Most likely nothing, when he should be updating the firm’s website, a task he’d taken on when it became evident that he wasn’t interested in sales. She shook her head to clear it. She had calls to make. Cold calls from the lead generation service. Her least favorite thing to do. She’d much rather meet a client in person wearing a tailored suit, spike heels, and saunter into a luncheon or social function at the local clubhouse sporting a new do and manicure. She hated being a disembodied voice on the telephone. It was easy to hang up when there was nothing at stake. She liked the in-person pitch much better.

  She called the number of a lead given to her two days earlier. She grimaced, remembering where she got the lead. I
t was at a follow-up dinner with the client whose building they’d built the year before. She shivered to think of his oily hair and roving eyes, but a client was a client, and a lead was a lead. She let a sigh slip past her lips. The prospective client picked up the phone, and Sophie went to work.

  She was good at what she did. Damned good and everyone knew it. She’d brought more business to Hart Construction than any other salesperson. She was willing to put up with sleazy clients all day long if it got her where she wanted to be. She glanced across the hall at Zeke’s office and frowned. That alone was enough to make her blood pressure spike.

  She couldn’t let herself dwell on being passed over for the vice president position. If she did, she might go across the hall and kill Zeke Hart, no matter how handsome he was. It didn’t matter that the guy was connected to everyone in the tri-county area. That was the luck of the gene pool. She’d been clawing her way up the ladder for more years than she wanted to recall. She made herself concentrate on the job and the day rolled along slowly.

  “Evening, Soph,” Zeke said as she closed her office door at the end of a long workday. She waited for a count of three before turning around, so the flush that arose on her face would subside. When she had her heart rate under control, she turned and waved.

  “Have a good one.” How original you are, she thought. She was sure her grimace went unnoticed. Zeke never looked up when she left. Saying something at the end of the day was simply a ritual many co-workers participated in by rote. She couldn’t get out of there fast enough. She wasn’t shy around anyone else and could only speak her mind to Zeke when she was angry. She’d thought about going to a hypnotist to get rid of this stupid childish crush but would have to go out of state to find someone who didn’t know the Harts. They were legends in Hartford and parts of the nearby Dallas/Fort Worth metroplex. She hurried away. The sound of her heels clicking on the marble tile mocked her.