“Literally,” I smirk.
I loop my arms through each of theirs. Samantha is right, we can figure everything else out when we get back home. For now, we need to go out and live our best life.
Chapter One
Kate
“There’s no way we’re going to make all this happen.” Samantha, Emily, and Caroline are hovering over my shoulder while we look over the calendar for the next month. “How are we supposed to get all these flowers to where they need to be? Get the staging set up for the weddings on the schedule? And keep the shop open?”
This is something we’ve always wanted to do. A dream since high school and we took flower arrangement classes. We only took it because we thought it would be a blowoff class. Little did we know how much we’d enjoy it. Now…we can barely keep up with arrangement orders.
“We may have to start saying no to some jobs,” Caroline sighs before walking around the desk to sit in one of the chairs in front of it. “If we can’t keep up, we’ll eventually screw up an order and lose business. Your brother taking care of deliveries helps, but it’s not enough.”
“Thanks for the support,” Kai, my brother comes into the office, “you‘re not wrong, though.”
“This is what happens when the friends of one of the biggest indie rock groups says they want to use you for their arrangements,” Sam laughs. “We haven’t even done the wedding and people have been emailing nonstop wanting to get on our schedule.”
“Maybe you should know less influential people.” Kai leans against the door with his arms across his chest. Why is my brother so freaking annoying?
“That would defeat the purpose of business growth,” Emily argues. “I figured you would know that since you come from the business world.”
“Yes, but you have to be able to sustain it.”
“That’s not possible right now.” I bury my face in my hands. Never in my wildest dreams did I think we’d have this level of success in our tiny hometown, especially when we’re fairly close to Dallas.
“Hiring more people would be a start,” Caroline chimes in. “We’ll need delivery drivers, folks to run the shop when we have appointments with clients, and an office manager.”
“Why an office manager?” I lift my head up waiting for her to respond.
“So, we don’t have so much on our plates.” Her phone lights up and she glances it. No doubt it’s her son or boyfriend wondering where she is. “We can’t do all the things all the time. It’ll give us more time to focus on what we do best. Making the arrangements and making sure our customers are happy.”
“She has a point, Sis,” Kai grins and raises his hand, “I call dibs on office manager.”
All four of us whip our heads toward him. “Why do you think you’ll automatically get the position? This isn’t a board game where you can call what piece you’re going to use.” Emily lifts an eyebrow.
“Come on,” he groans, “I’ve been doing the deliveries for over a month. Besides, this is literally what I did before I moved home. It only makes sense I should be in the hat for the job.”
“We’ll see.” I’m quick to answer otherwise it’ll turn into a huge debate, and I know Caroline wants to get home to her family.
“That’s better than no.” Kai grins and leaves the office. I swear he comes in here to disrupt everything just like he did when we were kids. He’s always been the golden child, though. He also usually gets what he wants. A part of me wants to tell him no on that basis alone.
“He’s so annoying. Can someone tell me why we thought it was a good idea to hire him?” Sam leans against the wall.
“Because we needed his help at the time. Then he just kind of stuck around.” It’s not like I asked them their thoughts when I offered the job to him. I just know we had to get out of the bind we were in with scheduling. He wasn’t doing anything, and it made sense at the time.
“Yeah, kind of like mold,” Emily scrunches her nose. “I swear he always does things to drive us bananas.”
“That’s kind of what little brothers do,” Caroline laughs, “and I have two of them. It’s never-ending.”
“I don’t know how you survived it. Most days I want to strangle Kai.” I shake my head at all the times he’s done something to purposely be a jerk, “especially when he was sleeping on my couch because he didn’t want our mom to know he was home yet.”
“At least y’all have that in common.” Sam shifts against the wall.
“What?”
“Not wanting to deal with your overbearing mom.”
“She’s not as bad as she used to be.” It’s partially true. She still tries to dig her nails into anything and everything she can when it comes to me, but she’s happy that I’ve ended up successful. She had her doubts about our business plans to say the least.
