by Joanne Rock
That she had been almost eager to take any attention she could, the idea of belonging to someone, feeling special, was so intoxicating she had ignored reality, ignored so many things, to try and spin a web of lies to make herself feel better.
That had been some kind of rock bottom. Truly terrifying.
It was one thing to let yourself get swept away in a tide of years that passed without you noticing, as things around you changed and you were there, inevitably the same.
It was quite another to be complicit in your own underwhelming life. To have willingly decided to be grateful for something she hadn’t even wanted.
But as horrifying as that was, it was also what brought her down to the vacant shop where the Sugarplum Fairy bakery had once been.
She had been turning over the idea of leasing the building for months now.
And she had finally developed her plan enough that she was ready to dive right in. She had projections and products, had found out what permits she would need. She already had a food handler’s card. She had a whole business plan. The only thing she didn’t have was the building, and a business name.
One thing at a time.
There was a number posted on the sign on the window for a property management company. She took a deep breath, and dialed it.
“Hi,” she said when the woman on the other end answered. “My name is Iris Daniels, and I’m interested in renting out the building at 322 Grape Street.”
“Of course, Ms. Daniels. If you want, I can send over the information packet that I have here.”
“I would like that.”
A couple hours later, Iris was sitting at Sugar Cup Coffee House feeling morose. The email that the management company had sent to her was comprehensive, and included all of the information that Iris could’ve wanted. As well as the astronomical sum of money it would cost to rent the space.
She did know that it would be expensive. Any place in this part of town was bound to be. It was just that Gold Valley was a tourist attraction, and the historic buildings in town got heavy foot traffic. So many people came from California, dreaming of a simpler life, and they brought California money with them. The kind of money that was rare for people in Gold Valley to have.
In fact, she imagined the building itself was owned by a Californian and managed by a local company.
She felt a sense of impotent regional rage. Californians and their lack of turn signals and deep pockets…
She hadn’t had a dream in so long. The idea of giving up on this one was… It was crushing. Crushing in ways that she didn’t really want to think about.
She closed the laptop, and stared into her coffee.
Sugar Cup was the most adorable red brick coffee place, with wide pastry cases overflowing with cookies, scones and cakes. The floor was all scarred barn wood, and from the ceiling hung a massive chandelier, all glittery and proud in the middle of the rustic flare.
Iris couldn’t even enjoy it right now.
“Hi.”
She turned and saw her sister Rose standing at the counter with her now fiancé, Logan.
Rose patted Logan on the shoulder, then scampered over to Iris’s table.
“What are you doing here?”
“It’s strange for you to be here,” Iris said.
Logan and Rose worked full-time at Hope Springs Ranch, her family’s ranch. Iris still lived in the house. She was basically a rancher wife, without the benefit of the husband.
She had spent years of her life taking care of her cousins and siblings. Cooking for them, cleaning. It was a full-time job even now.
But it was a full-time job that didn’t have any pay, and didn’t have a lot of personal satisfaction at this point.
Her brother was married now, and while Sammy had always been involved in the household to an extent, she now lived in the house. And was… Well, it was her house.
It made Iris feel like there wasn’t as much to do. And like she didn’t really have the authority to do it.
It was the same with her sister Pansy and her husband, West. They were firmly established at their own home, raising West’s younger brother. A family unit apart from the one the Danielses had spent years building after their parents had died when they were kids.
And now that Rose and Logan were engaged, Rose had moved out of the main house too, and Iris just had…less and less to do.
She and Logan no longer came to the farmhouse for every meal. Instead, they usually ate at their place.
It seemed fitting that they were all settled first. Well, she couldn’t have imagined another way for it to go. She was a practical girl, and she tried not to give in to self-pity. Self-pity didn’t help anyone. But she’d always occupied a particular position in her family. She was steady and she was well behaved, and she was…well, she was the one who had to shepherd them all into the safe, happy finished places of their lives.
Ryder had taken care of them, it was true. But the emotional well-being of her siblings, that she be a good example…all of that was an essential part of who she was.
Of what her mother had needed her to be.
And sure, there were hard things about that, but she’d never seen the point of arguing with the way things were.
She’d tried. But she’d lost her parents at fourteen. She’d exhausted her lungs arguing with the universe back then. And it hadn’t changed a thing.
And yes, it burned a little more at the realization she was the only one left alone. And maybe she was irritated by the fact that a few months ago her pride had suffered a mortal wounding at the hands of her sister.
Unintentional of course.
But when Rose had tried to set her up with Elliott, who had ultimately been after Rose and not Iris, it had driven a splinter deep beneath Iris’s skin.
She should be grateful, she supposed.
With everyone so decidedly moved on, that left her in the house with Ryder, Sammy and baby Astrid, feeling like a third wheel.
Her poor eldest brother had his maiden spinster sister living in his house with him while he was trying to adjust to being a husband, and a new father.
Of course, being in the same house as her niece was wonderful. And she knew that Sammy appreciated having help with the baby.
But it just served as yet another reminder of what Iris didn’t have for herself.
She was always enjoying things through other people.
Their milestones. Their triumphs. All of them falling in love. Having children.
It made her ache, and it was inspiring her to act. And this bakery was supposed to be her way out of that.
And now it just felt like she had been shaken out of an impossible dream.
“We decided to have a date morning.” Rose frowned. “You look upset.”
Iris hesitated. She knew that if she told Rose about what was going on, Rose would immediately go into scheming mode. And when Rose schemed, things tended to go… Well, they went. Awry or well, that was never a guarantee, but something always happened.
She might as well see where Rose’s momentum could take her. She was currently stagnant. And sure, sometimes Rose had terrible ideas. Like trying to set Iris up with Elliott.
But Rose also had a sort of mischievous magic that Iris herself didn’t possess.
“I called about the bakery.”
“Yay!”
“Not yay. It’s being managed by a different company now, which means I think it got bought by someone else. And the rent is higher than it was when I looked into it a couple months ago. I just don’t think there’s any way I could ever afford it.”
“You know Ryder would help you.”
She nodded slowly. She did know that. But she didn’t want to put strain on her brother when he had just started a new family. Plus…
“But that’s not what you want, is it?”
Rose asked.
Iris nodded. “I want to be independent. And maybe I’m jumping into it a little bit too fast. Maybe I’m being too ambitious.”
“I don’t think so,” Rose said. “I don’t see why you can’t have everything.”
She had a feeling her sister was being overly supportive in part because of what had happened between them a few months back. But she appreciated the support either way.
“Well,” Rose said brightly. “We just have to figure out another way to problem solve this. Is there a way to figure out who bought it?”
“It might be… Somewhere. I mean, I don’t know what difference that would make.”
“You don’t want to deal with the management company. Whoever has this all set up probably has a management company because they don’t have a business brain. They probably don’t have the resolve to handle all this kind of stuff. Which means if you talk to them directly, maybe they won’t hold firm on the rent. You can’t go through the rental company, because they’re set up to be a barrier. You need to remove the barrier.”
“I don’t… That’s not how it’s supposed to work, though.”
And even as she heard the words come out of her own mouth, she realized what she was doing.
She was wimping out. She was taking this first hurdle, and allowing it to be insurmountable. Well, she couldn’t do that. She was going to have to make it… Surmountable.
“Okay. Where do you suppose I might find the information?”
Rose sat down, and Logan pulled a chair up to the table, while Rose helped Iris scour the document.
If Logan was irritated by Iris co-opting his date, he didn’t show it.
Logan had grown up with them on their ranch. His mother had died along with Iris’s parents and aunt and uncle in a plane crash on their way to a joint family vacation.
The kids had all been staying together while their parents had gone on the trip, and they had remained together thereafter.
They had created a tight family unit, which had been a blessing growing up, but was now part of what Iris suspected was holding her back.
“What is it you’re looking for?” Logan asked.
“We’re trying to figure out who owns this place,” Rose said.
“Which place?”
“The one that used to be Sugarplum Fairy. Iris wants to rent it to make her own business.”
“Oh,” Logan said. “Well, I know who owns that.”
“You do?” they both asked in unison.
“Yes. West was looking into it because the guy who used to own Redemption Ranch also owned those buildings, and he decided to sell. But then, some out-of-state guy made an offer that the guy couldn’t refuse. So, West decided to back out. He didn’t want rental properties that bad.”
“And you remember the buyer’s name?” Iris pressed.
“Yeah. I think so. Griffin… Griffin Chance. Very California. You don’t forget a name like that.”
“I don’t suppose you do,” Iris said.
“Well, do you know where to find him?”
“I bet it would be easy enough to find out.” Rose had a wicked gleam in her eye.
“You can’t ask Pansy,” Iris said. “I’m sure that she’s not allowed to get that kind of information.”
“Maybe she just knows it. Because he’s a new person in town, and he bought a sizable amount of property, so honestly, she might…”
“I’m not one hundred percent sure he’s in town,” West said.
“Oh, right,” Iris said, feeling deflated.
“Well, all we can do is ask,” Rose said.
She was in full Rose mode, and this was when Iris had to be thankful for her sister.
Because Iris was very good at putting her head down and enduring whatever hardships came her way.
She was good at creating calm. At creating quiet.
When she was in her element, she was strong. She’d wrangled Rose and Pansy even before their parents had died. They’d been two of the most high-spirited kids Iris had ever seen. And it had been up to her to keep them corralled from an early age because she was naturally more…well, more of a rule follower.
She was used to taking that role at Hope Springs, but outside of it she tended to shrink back a little. Some people even read her as being shy or timid—Iris didn’t feel she was either—but she definitely didn’t have a lot of practice with taking charge away from the ranch.
She was in a space now where she needed to push, and Rose was an excellent pusher.
Rose scurried off, and made one phone call, and Iris could see from where she was sitting that Rose was wheedling. She exchanged a glance with Logan.
“Try living with it,” he said.
“I did,” Iris said, deadpan. “I raised it.”
“Yeah, well,” he muttered. “You’re not as much of a sucker for her as I am.”
“That is true,” Iris responded.
When Rose returned a moment later, she had a triumphant grin on her face. “I have an address for you. 9020 Carson Creek. That’s all the way up Echo Pass.”
“There’s not… There’s not even electricity out there,” Iris said. “He can’t live out there.”
“Well, that’s the address that Pansy had for him. Honestly, he’s probably got some huge fancy house up there with satellite internet and a generator and stuff. Anybody that owns that much property in town has to have some fancy spread way out there. He’s probably some rich old guy. You should bring cookies.”
Iris didn’t know how she had gone from standing in front of a shop window only a few moments ago to being sent on an errand up into the north forty to meet a man she’d never even heard of.
“Rose, I don’t know…”
“It might be worth it,” Rose said. “And you won’t know unless you try.”
Her sister had a point. And as this sort of thing went, it was better than being with a guy who didn’t excite her. She had been offended before when she’d thought Rose had imagined that she couldn’t handle a fantasy more compelling than Elliott.
At least this felt like the start of something exciting.
* * *
GRIFFIN CHANCE WAS impossible to get a hold of, it turned out. Or maybe it was just that he declined to be gotten a hold of. Iris couldn’t be sure. But in the days since she had discovered he was the owner of the property that she was interested in renting, she had left messages on two different phone lines, both with robot voices that had given her no indication of what the man himself actually sounded like, and had written two emails.
So it couldn’t be said she hadn’t tried to warn him.
But Iris had spent the last several years of her life in a place of absolute stagnation, and she was over it. Absolutely and completely. That meant that she wasn’t accepting no response for an answer. You would think that the man would get back to her. After all, she had matters to discuss with him. Well, she was trying to finagle a way to get lower rent. And maybe he sensed that. Maybe that was why he wasn’t getting in touch with her personally. But she had a plan, a plan that involved a about two dozen cookies.
Shortly, Mr. Chance would see that what she was proposing was going to be so profitable that in the end he would benefit.
If there was one thing Iris knew about herself, it was that she was a fantastic baker. She didn’t have a whole lot in the way of self-esteem. But what she had was pretty solid. And that was how she found herself driving her sister’s truck up the back roads toward Griffin Chance’s house.
She hoped that he was home. But if not, she would leave everything behind with a detailed note and go from there. The important thing was that he try her food. It was very, very important. Much to her chagrin, the road narrowed, and turned to gravel long before her phone said she was set to arrive at his house. And then there was… There was a damn log in th
e middle of the road, not five hundred feet from where she was supposed to turn to get up the drive to his house.
She parked her truck and sat there, looking around. She didn’t know what the hell she was supposed to do. This is it. This is the first challenge. You can either fall down, or you can keep going.
Keep going.
She was not going to be thwarted now over something this stupid.
She got out of the truck, her plate of cookies and her just-in-case note in hand. She pocketed the truck keys, locked everything behind her and marched right over the tree, carrying on up the road.
“If there are any cougars out there,” she said. “Do not eat me.”
She was not about to die a thirty-one-year-old virgin with no career.
Whose one and only attempt at dating had resulted in facing the truth that things were as she’d often feared.
Given the option, a man would choose her younger sister over her.
As much as that bothered her, of the two, currently the business situation bothered her the most. Because it was the one she felt motivated to fix.
The other… Well, she’d lived this long with it. It wasn’t going to hurt her if it stayed. Anyway. She had a feeling that her biggest problem was the fact that she didn’t do much of anything. This business was the start of that. The start of the change. Shoving all thoughts of her virginity to the side, she continued on up the narrow road. She tightened her hands on the plate. It was beautiful out here, but a touch eerie.
The trees were tall and green, and it was impossible to see too deeply into the woods, because the plants were so dense. It was wild out here. And for being so near to town, it felt wholly removed.
She took a left from the gravel road, onto an even narrower, more harrowing road. It was a hike up toward his house. Whatever vehicle the man drove, it had to have tires that were bigger than the truck she’d come in. She muttered as she hiked up the trail. And then she saw it. It was not a grand custom home. It was a little cabin, dilapidated and run-down.
“This is ridiculous,” she said. “There’s no way he even actually lives here.”
