There was the stack on the table in front of him that had to do with Stouder Lumber, all of which he needed to pay close attention to because he was in the middle of converting everything from paper to computer at long last, and his lumber shipping business was often full of rough roads, both literal and metaphorical. He had a lot of responsibility on his shoulders since taking over the family business—and he’d had to learn it all incredibly fast after his Grandpa Roger’s death just a few months after Neil’s.
Sure, Grandpa Roger had generally reliable people installed when Joshua took over, a lot of them from the local Mennonite sect, but the business itself had spent the last six years stuck in the past. Admittedly, that’d been appealing to his horse-and-buggy-driving employees, but things had to change if they were going to stay profitable. It was time Joshua got a grip on all the paper his Grandpa had used to track everything and converted it to digital programs and processes. That included dealing with tons of old contracts covered in legalese about trucking and transportation all of which made his brain want to run out of his ears in an effort to escape the boredom.
Then there was the stack on his left knee. That had to do with the Neil Russell Foundation for Advanced Nanite Research, including the latest applications for grants and funding. The massive amount of money that had been left behind for Joshua to handle after Neil’s death wasn’t something he’d ever expected for several reasons.
First and foremost, he hadn’t known Neil had changed his will to make Joshua the beneficiary of his estate. They’d only been together as a couple for nine months when Neil died. They hadn’t even made their relationship physical yet—what with Joshua being a skittish country boy stewing in internalized homophobia, and Neil being a very busy research scientist with a healthy commitment to waiting until Joshua was ‘ready.’
Joshua had known they were in love, believed it with his whole heart and felt it in his bones, but he’d committed the folly of youth: he’d also believed they had time. It wasn’t until after Neil’s death that he’d fully understood, though, just how devoted Neil had been to him. The inheritance had come as quite a shock.
Second, Neil had always lived frugally. His apartment in Nashville had been unremarkable—obviously, since he’d been Joshua’s next-door neighbor—and his clothes had been a uniform of black jeans and black button-up shirts that looked like they could have been purchased at JCPenney or even Walmart. Neil had once told Joshua that his parents, before their deaths, had been upper-crust society types, and that he’d attended prestigious private schools growing up. But he’d never really spelled out what that meant in numbers. So Joshua had always assumed the money was long gone, used up to pay for Neil’s college and PhD, most likely.
It wasn’t until Neil’s estate went through probate that it became clear just how truly wealthy Neil had been. Nearly a hundred million dollars in old family money inherited from his parents, plus Neil’s own investments in experimental medical technology that had paid off over the years, had all been left in a trust for medical nanite research after his tragic death, along with strict instructions that Joshua should be in charge of running it and be given quite a hefty salary for doing so.
That had been almost as shocking as Neil’s death itself.
But Joshua took his position as head of the board seriously and personally. In fact, he’d been accused of beingtooinvolved recently, which made him laugh because of course he was ‘too involved.’ The foundation and its funds were all he had left of Neil, weren’t they? He’d do whatever it took to make sure Neil’s contribution to medical science would never be forgotten.
Immediately after Neil and his grandpa’s deaths, Joshua had discovered the only way to survive his grief was to work his butt off, and then he’d just never stopped. In the stack on his right knee, there were applications for grant money from medical nanite research organizations as far away as Hong Kong and India, and he intended to examine them all thoroughly before meeting with the rest of the board to discuss them the next week.
Yet he was being encouraged bycertain peopleto loosen his grip, to hand everything over to someone ‘more qualified’ and start moving on. But Joshua had no intention of doing that. Even if Paul, his former roommate and best friend, thought he was losing himself in it all.
Paul had thought Joshua was losing himself in Neil when he was alive, too. But if he’d truly lost himself in Neil back then, things would have been different between them.
Very different. Regret tasted bitter as hell.
Taking a sip of his cold coffee and blocking out theka-chingof the old-fashioned cash register by the door, Joshua shuffled through some of the Stouder Lumber paperwork on his lap. He barely noticed a stranger who walked into the diner and spoke to Earl behind the counter. It was only when the man came to stand directly by Joshua’s table that Joshua looked up.
“Mr. Stouder? I’m sorry to interrupt. A man at your lumber company said you’d be here. Uh…do you have a minute?”
Joshua looked up into dark brown, soulful eyes beneath a shaggy mane of brown, wavy hair and couldn’t bring himself to say he was busy. After a formal introduction, Joshua insisted on moving to the clean table beside them, one not stacked with papers, so that they could talk on more equal terms.
Lee Fargo moved with grace despite the scarified evidence of former burns. They climbed over his exposed forearms and under his shirt, then up the right side of his neck, stopping just beneath his chin, as though some kind of mercy had spared his face.
Joshua swallowed hard as Lee told his story. It wasn’t the first time a donor recipient had sought him out. A woman who’d received one of Neil’s kidneys had contacted him by email, and they’d had a long correspondence about the hope afforded to her, especially given anticipated upcoming medical breakthroughs in nanite nephrology. He’d received letters of thanks from a number of people: parents of a few children who had received some of Neil’s skin, a woman who’d had her sight restored with one of Neil’s retinas, and a young man who’d received Neil’s surviving lung. It was always overwhelming. But this was the first recipient who had sought him out in person, and Joshua didn’t know what to say.
So he simply listened.
Lee had been in a fire while he was in his sister’s house. He’d been burned on over sixty percent of his body after going back inside to save his nephew, who was trapped in the upstairs bedroom. His nephew hadn’t lived, and Lee had barely made it himself.
“Thank you,” Lee said, reaching out and putting his hand over Joshua’s fingers clutching the handle of his coffee cup. “I can only imagine how difficult it was for you to lose your partner. Someone like Dr. Russell must have been really special.”
“He was unique, all right,” Joshua said, swallowing the sadness and going with a smile.
“Oh yeah? Tell me about him,” Lee said, leaning back again. “I’d love to know more about the man I have to thank for my skin.”
Neil’s skin. Joshua wanted to reach out and touch, even though he knew that given the rate of cellular overturn, the amount of skin on Lee’s body that would have still been Neil’s was negligible.
“Well, he was sometimes a jerk,” Joshua said honestly. “He was intense, arrogant, and too Northern for most of us Southern good ol’ boys to handle.” He wrinkled his nose, trying to seem playful, but he knew his grief was showing through.
“Yeah? But you loved him, right?” Lee’s brown eyes were dark and earnest. Joshua couldn’t help but think he was handsome, even with the scars marring his neck. “So, he must have had some winning qualities.”
“Winning,” Joshua said softly. “Yeah, he liked winning.”
“Competitive, then?”
“Competitive doesn’t cover it. He usually won.” Joshua went silent and felt a darkness swell.
“At?”
