The Heir's Rival

They are going to tear down the gazebo. Curtis Mayfield says it out loud to nobody, standing on the veranda of the Bellhaven Inn with his phone against his ear. His mother danced with him on her hip in that gazebo at the Summer Solstice Gala. He was four. He remembers the sequins and the jasmine and being spun until he was dizzy. So he films his bid video right there, on a sagging porch under white columns and peeling paint, with an egret watching him from the marsh like a judge. Two point four million. Full historic preservation. A closing date in August. Then a voice behind him says that's a pretty speech. Rafael DeLuca is leaning on one of the columns like he belongs there, linen suit the colour of sand, a scar through his left eyebrow, calluses on his palm that don't match the suit. He opens a folder and produces a rendering of the Bellhaven ballroom restored: chandeliers, moldings, a dance floor polished to a mirror. The kind of work that costs a fortune, commissioned before Curtis ever showed up. Rafe tells him, not unkindly, that he can't afford it. He is right. Curtis's bid was leveraged against three properties, and his stepmother had told him to be conservative and prove himself first. Ingrid Mayfield, silver hair and pearls and a smile that never reaches her eyes, knew he would be outbid. Her own son Leo is the one she keeps calling the natural competitor. Rafe wins the inn. Fairly, with his own money, on a loan he secured himself. Then he makes Curtis an offer nobody in the Mayfield family would ever make. *"Then stop fighting. Start working with me."* What follows is a restoration, a leaked story about a fight between stepbrothers, a press conference Curtis has to stand up at with his palm sweating on the podium, and a paper trail leading back through Mayfield Hotels to money that was moved after his mother died. Also a small girl named Maya, a crayon drawing taped above a bed, and a man who keeps showing up with a paintbrush instead of a talking point. A small-town coastal romance between two men on opposite sides of a property bid, about the difference between inheriting a name and earning one. The romance is closed-door.