Dirty Sexy Alphas (Twenty Book Box Set) - Hannah Ford Page 0,11

of my Dad’s house. “I guess I’m done with my degree. I’m working in a lab somewhere.”

“Now open your eyes.”

I opened them. He said nothing else.

I scrunched up my eyebrows. “How was that supposed to help?”

“It’s fine to be a dreamer, Taryn. We all have dreams. But when you want something, you need to go out and take it. This,” he said, gesturing around us. “Is reality.”

“Wow, thanks for the inspirational speech,” I said drily, taken aback by his reality check.

He tightened his grip on the steering wheel. The world streamed by outside, but it was like the space in the car got smaller, more intimate. “I realized a long time ago that if you don’t like the world you live in, you have to change it yourself. No one else is going to do that for you.”

“Your motivational speaking skills need some work, ” I said.

He chuckled. “Or maybe you need to open your mind.”

“No, the first one.” I grinned a little, though. But what I really wanted to asked was, is that why you left? Because you had to change your world?

His parents hadn’t exactly been kind. If they weren’t going at it with each other, they were fighting with him.

And not always with words.

It’s why Landon and my brother were so close. As kids, Landon would stay over more often than not. My mom would set his place at the table without even asking if he’d be staying for dinner, because we all knew he would. My mom was too kind—too perceptive—to send him home.

And then he got his license, and things shifted again. I didn’t know where he went on his long drives, or if he just finally got big enough that his dad quit picking on him. He was distant for a couple of years, and somewhere in there, I stopped seeing him as my bonus brother and started seeing him as something so much more.

He stopped at a red light, looking over at me. “I drove away from this town in a dented-up car, with four hundred bucks to my name. And I came back to open up a multi-million dollar sports facility. Dreaming doesn’t actually get you your dreams, it gets you a mirage. Until you put in the work, nothing is going to materialize.”

I raked in a shallow breath and turned away from him, the truth needling away at me. He’d walked away from this town as just another one of us. And he came back as a billionaire, an air of confidence and a Range Rover to go with it.

His words hurt, but sometimes the truth did too. Because he was right. Unlike him, I’d just stalled out and stayed where I was.

Twenty minutes later, we were winding up into the hills, and a panoramic view of town unfolded below us. Landon took a left, pulling up in front of a glass and concrete house. I stared at it in awe. It bared not an ounce of resemblance to his crumbling childhood home.

“Come on,” he said. “We can see what’s in the boxes and then I’ll make you lunch.”

It wasn’t until he went to unbuckle his seatbelt that he finally let go of my leg. I swallowed and followed him, past the manicured shrubs and curved retaining walls.

At the front porch, the railing was made of steel and cable, all hard angles. The walls were enormous sheets of glass, reflecting the sun and the clouds.

We must’ve been outside Orting city limits, because this house was too good for our little valley town. Instead, it was perched up here looking down on everything, the farms and little housing developments dotting the view below.

“How long have you lived here?”

“Just a few days.”

I chewed on my lip. He must’ve come into town at least a few times before closing on the house. He was here, and I didn’t know it.

But I bet my brother did.

“So you’re back for good?”

“I still have a house in LA, and a townhome in Phoenix. The Phoenix facility is a pilot project. It’s essentially an inpatient rehab clinic, made to feel as much like a vacation as it is work. One part clinic, one part retreat, so it operates on a different model than the other facilities. I check in on all of my centers regularly, so I live out of a suitcase half the time.”

He unlocked the front door, punching in a code on the keypad. “But this is home now, if that’s what you’re asking.”

I didn’t know