by Serena Bell
37
She went into Beachcrest’s tiny office to put things in order. Trey had said that the closing would have to be within the next thirty days, which meant that she’d have to cancel all the reservations from August 1 on. The thought made her stomach hurt, badly—and tears filled her eyes—especially when she thought about the Gardners, who always came in September and had for more than ten years, to celebrate their wedding anniversary. And the Hoopers in October, and Carson and Sage and their families at Christmas … and on and on. But this was how it was; they had done their best, and it hurt, but it was life.
She was still sitting in there, an hour and a half later, when she heard Trey’s voice, just a murmur on the other side of her closed door. Talking to Luz.
She came out of the office. “Hey!” she said. She was determined to be upbeat; what was happening was awful; it was impossible to think about without misery, but she wouldn’t wallow and she wouldn’t guilt-trip Trey.
Luz looked from her to Trey, then bit her lip. “I’m going to go check on the kitchen inventory,” she said, slipping between them and out to the back of the inn. “Auburn can help you with whatever you need help with.”
She and Trey were alone at the front desk, facing each other, once again, over its width.
The grave expression on his face made anxiety skitter across the floor of her stomach. But she took a deep breath. She’d known getting past this would be weird and hard, but they were good. They had to be good. What had passed between them during the last few days had to mean something to him, as it did to her; she knew it. You couldn’t just walk away from that kind of chemistry.
“Is Carl back?”
“He’s still at Brynn’s, but—it’s good. I took care of it. I explained it all to him. He was angry I hadn’t told him any of it before. He’s just plain angry. He called me a lot of things I probably deserved—”
It took her brain a minute to catch up to him. “You talked to Carl. Without me… That wasn’t the deal we made earlier, Trey.”
“I know. But I didn’t want to put you through that. It’s not your mess to clean up.”
“You said we’d talk to him when he came back from Brynn’s! And then, what, as soon as I wasn’t looking, you drove over there? Which means, you lied to me, doesn’t it?”
The expression on his face answered the question.
“Because I knew you’d try to tell him this wasn’t my fault—”
“Well, yeah! I would tell him how I saw things. That’s why I wanted to talk to him with you, so we could make him see the big picture—” Then she caught her breath, realizing she was missing the more important point. “What happened isn’t your fault, Trey.”
“Yeah,” he said. “Yeah, it fucking is. There’s no version of the universe in which it’s not my fault. I made the decisions that put Home Base where it was. I made the choices that brought me here. And then I put you in an impossible position and forced you to make an untenable decision. And—” He took a deep breath; she heard it catch somewhere in his chest. “I need to own that, Auburn.”
“People make bad business decisions, Trey. They make mistakes. They don’t think things all the way through. And sometimes there are unintended consequences. I don’t blame you for any of that.”
“You should,” he said. “I blame myself. I can’t forgive myself for letting this happen.”
She was starting to get a very bad feeling about this. “So—so what does that mean?”
He took a deep breath and looked away, his gaze roaming the corners of the room before landing back on her face. “I’m going back to San Francisco.”
“For how long?”
As soon as the words left her mouth, as soon as his expression shifted, a curtain falling behind his eyes, she knew. But he said it anyway. “For good.”
“When you say ‘for good,’ what exactly do you mean?”
She was surprised—and pleased—to hear her voice sound almost normal. Like she was just asking a casual question. Not one that was forced up from her soul, even though that was what it felt like.
He shook his head. “I don’t think we should see each other again.”
He reached out and set something on the shiny surface of the front desk, pushed it across to her. It was the key to his room.
For a moment, she could only stare at it. Then her mind clicked back into motion. “You. Don’t. Think.” She stopped. “You don’t think we should see each other again. And just like that—” She snapped her fingers. “That’s it. None of that happened.”
“Auburn, this isn’t about you.”
“No?” she asked, arching an eyebrow. “Please, do explain. Explain how this isn’t about me. Because I’m not seeing it. I’m feeling like this is about me in every possible way. Because I am the one who just lost the place I live and work and love. I am the one who spent this last week trying my damnedest to make everything work out for Beachcrest, and for me, and fuck it, for you, Trey! I am the one who was there when you talked about your childhood and your failed marriage and your overleveraged business, when you ate biscuits and bacon and marshmallows, when we danced and raced and when you—” Words failed her; the images of him moving over her and inside her, watching her shatter, spilling as she watched him, were too much for words. “So, how exactly is this not about me?”
“It’s about me.” He sounded agonized. “And what I can’t give you. I can’t take care of you. I didn’t take care of you. I don’t deserve you.”
“Oh, my God, is that really how you see this? That this is all about you and what you did? Do you have any idea what an asshole that makes you?”
It was funny that of all the things he’d done, this was the one that finally, finally made her angry. Because he’d done it to her, after everything that had happened between them, knowing how she felt about having her autonomy taken away from her. “So you just decide to write me out. Make this your story, tell it like you see it, decide what you need to do about it, and not even take me into account.”
“I am taking you into account. You deserve someone who can take care of you.”
“I deserve someone who treats me like a human being with free will. I deserve someone who doesn’t make decisions that definitely are about me … for me!”
She was shouting. It took a lot to make her shout. She’d never shouted at Patrick. She’d never really even gotten mad at him. She’d let Chiara do it for her.
Maybe that had been a mistake. Because it felt pretty good to let someone have it.
“I helped make this decision. We were working together to solve a problem, and we made a deal! You don’t get to storm out of the room if you don’t like the terms you get. You don’t get to ruin all the good that’s come out of this week because you have to be the big man on campus.”
“What good has come out of this week?” he demanded. “At the end of the week, you have nothing. No place to live. No place to work. No future.”
“What good has come out of this week?” she echoed. “Where were you? Did you not have the same week I had? Because all I saw was good. I saw you laugh and relax and make friends, and that sure as hell wasn’t happening last week. I saw you—I saw lots and lots of people—enjoying the beach and campfires and marshmallows and parades and barbecues and family. I saw people spending time together who hadn’t been together for too long. My first July 4th with my family in years. Also, I had some really fucking great sex. But apparently, you were just waiting to see how it would all end, and if it didn’t end the way you wanted it to, you would just write the whole fucking thing off, like the control freak you are. Well fuck you, Xavier. Fuck you. And just in case it matters, I fucking love you.”
If she’d expected that to work like some extreme magic spell, she was sorely disappointed. His expression barely changed.
“That doesn’t mean anything if you can’t take care of the person you love.”
“I. Don’t. Need. You. To. Take. Care. Of. Me. And neither does Brynn an
d neither does Carl. Maybe you need to take care of us or else you feel like an epic failure—but that’s your problem, now, isn’t it?”
Her chest was heaving like she’d run a mile. Or like it had every time he’d gotten close enough to touch her. She tried to catch her breath, but it was a lost cause; she was too angry, she was too hurt—how had she been such an idiot?
Again.
“Go,” she said. “Just, go. Go take care of all the people who work for you whose asses you just saved and enjoy feeling like a big damn hero. You want to go back to San Francisco? Fine.” She grabbed the key from the counter, yanked open the drawer, dropped the key in, and slammed it shut.
“You’re checked out.”
38
“I brought molten chocolate cake from the Tierney Bay Diner.”
Chiara set the boxes down on the night table next to Auburn’s bed.
“You’re a saint,” Auburn said.
“Hardly. Just a sister.”
“A good sister.”
Chiara opened the two boxes. Each held a single dark round of tender lava cake and a scoop of vanilla ice cream. She stuck a spoon into each and pushed one toward Auburn.
Auburn took a bite, gave a small sigh of satisfaction and despair, and slumped back against the headboard.
“You said chocolate. And ice cream. This was the purest hit I could score.”
Auburn sat up, took another spoonful. The soft chocolate melted on her tongue, and the contrast between the hot of the cake and the cold of the ice cream took her out of her own misery for the first time that day.
“So. Are you going to tell me what happened?”
She did. How the other financing option had fallen through. How the Bootstrapper, even with James’s help and all the advertising support, hadn’t moved the needle. How she and Trey had looked down into the mouth of the cannon and made the best call they could.
“It’s over,” she told her sister. “We did everything we could, but it wasn’t enough to save Beachcrest. Or each other.”
And there it was—she burst into tears. Ugly, snotty tears. But Chiara, being Chiara, didn’t care, just found the box of tissues in the bathroom and passed them, one by one, to Auburn, until she could talk again.
“You didn’t tell me how the breakup went down.”
“No. I didn’t.”
So she told that part, too. His high-handedness, his arrogance, his insistence on doing it his way, telling his story to Carl, icing her out, deciding their fate without her, seeing the whole thing through the lens of his actions. And when she was done, she said, “I wish—I wish I’d stuck to my guns. I knew as soon as I smelled that fucking cologne. A zebra doesn’t change its Armani stripes. Not every guy in a suit is Patrick, but every asshole who dons a suit, even if he’s willing to wear beach clothes for a few days to get what he wants, is still an asshole.”
She went through a few more tissues then, because she was so angry at herself for doing it again. Sex, money, power.
“If you want, Mason and Levi could probably have him killed,” Chiara said.
That made Auburn smile through her tears. “They’re pretty self-sufficient; they’d probably do it themselves. But no. I think it’s too late for that. Wish I’d thought of it earlier this week.” She snickered, then sobered up. “Truly, I think the Beachcrest sale was always inevitable. But acting like a self-righteous douche bag? He did that.” She crossed her arms. “It probably doesn’t deserve death. Just an ice cold ghosting.”
“Sounds like a plan,” Chiara said. She tilted her head, indicating Auburn’s now dormant dessert, melting into a big mess. “The romance writers are playing Pandemic in the dining room—want to go join them?”
“I couldn’t even save Beachcrest; how am I supposed to save the world?”
“You saved a hundred and fifty jobs.”
“And lost Luz’s and Sarah’s and mine. And Carl’s legacy.”
“I’m sorry, Auburn. I’m so sorry. But Levi’s still hiring, so Luz and Sarah will be fine. And you’ll be fine too. If you don’t want to work for Levi—”
“I don’t think Cape House needs two managers.”
“Me neither.” Chiara sighed. “At least you’re in the right part of the world to find another position.”
Auburn smiled, an effort, but it felt good to do it. “I’m going to give myself just a little while to feel sorry for myself, and then I’ll get back on my feet. I’ve done it before—” More times than she wanted to think about, but she was good at it. “And I’ll do it again. The truth is, it’s just a building. It’s not actually an enchanted castle in a fairytale.”
Chiara looked stricken at that, but Auburn just shook her head. “There’s no such a thing as magic, in the end. I’ll start again somewhere. Abracadabra, new life.”
She took a last bite of the molten cake and ice cream soup—she’d hit that stage of eating where the taste had gone out and she was just spooning it into her mouth reflexively—and said, “You know what, let’s go play Pandemic. Feels like the end of the world, so why not?”
“Are you sure?”
“Positive.”
“Asia’s a mess. Look,” Priya said, indicating the heaps of red cubes on the Pandemic game board. “We spent too much time trying to cure and not enough time trying to treat.”
“We don’t have the medic card this time, which was a bad move,” Lindsey said.
“Where’s your hot billionaire?” Aria demanded. “Get him. If I’m going to lose this stupid game and decimate the world’s population, I should have something pretty to look at while I do it.”
Chiara and Auburn exchanged glances.
“He left,” Auburn said.
“What?!” A chorus of romance writers.
She sat down and brought them up to date on the events of the day.
“Well, shoot!” Aria said. “We were going to come back at Christmas and next summer. We were going to make it our place!”
A glum mood settled over the six of them, and they gazed down at the board. Auburn could still feel Deja’s gaze on her. “I’m so sorry, baby,” the older woman said.
“It’s okay.”
“No. It’s not. We led you wrong.”
Auburn brushed it off with firm sweep of her hand. “It was a rock and a hard place from the beginning. You tried to squeeze me through a tunnel that turned out to narrow to a crevice.”
“You ever think about writing books?”
Auburn grinned and shook her head.
“You got a gift for a turn of phrase.”
“Not like you.”
“It’s not just Beachcrest that’s got you down, is it? It’s him.”
Auburn sighed. “He had a heart of gold, but it’s buried too deep underground.”
Deja smiled at that. “Common problem with hot billionaires,” she said dryly. “Only way to fix them is to keep digging, even if you need to use a pickax. Literally.”
“I don’t think you mean literally,” Lindsey whispered.
“Oh, I do,” Deja murmured back.
Auburn couldn’t help a small smile. “Yeah, well. I don’t want to keep digging. I don’t want to be with a guy like that.”
“You could tell him not to talk and to just give up the goods,” Aria said.
“That came out of your mouth,” Deja told her friend.
“Gah. Sorry.”
“We need to get this woman some ice cream. Or chocolate,” Priya declared.
“Already done that,” Chiara said. “This is not our first rodeo.”
“Rodeo,” Aria mused. “Do you think you could do hot billionaire at the rodeo?”
“With amnesia,” Priya put in.
“Head injury. From falling off. Doesn’t remember he’s rich. Falls for … oh, my goodness gracious, Auburn, take over my seat, I have to go write this down.
Auburn surveyed the mess that was the map of the world.
“Can’t keep Beachcrest from being torn down,” she said. “Can’t seem
to stop making the same dumbass romantic mistakes. But fuck me if I can’t save the world from the rampages of biowarfare.”
39
In the morning she made waffles.
She’d had the flu late last fall in New York, right before she’d left Patrick. She hadn’t been able to get out of bed because her body ached like it had been hit by a truck and she got nauseated if she stood up. Patrick had been busy making a deal, but he’d had his housekeeper care for Auburn, bringing her chicken soup and orange juice and echinacea. After a week she’d been able to rise for short periods of time, but she’d felt like she was moving underwater, suffocated and weighed down, the world strangely sluggish and bland.
That was how she felt this morning. She watched her arm move, beating the batter in the bowl, but she felt strangely disconnected from it. She carried plates out and set them down in front of her guests; she smiled at them and made conversation, but she couldn’t have told you what anyone said.
When she’d left Patrick, she’d felt liberated. Terrified, yes. But elated.
Right now? She felt like a mug that had been shattered and glued back together again.
“What should we do today?” Priya asked.
“Have you been to Nehalem Bay State Park?”
Priya shook her head.
“It’s really pretty. And the weather’s nice, so you could have a real beach day. There are horseback rides down there, too.”
“Research,” Aria said. “For my cowboy.”
“This stay has been so inspiring,” Priya said. “I don’t think I’ve ever done a writing retreat where there’s been so much material to draw on.” And then she fell silent, her gaze dropping to the table, realizing what she’d said, and how it didn’t matter anymore.
Auburn’s own chest felt painfully tight, but it wasn’t the flu.
When most of the others had gone, Dewann and Rick were left. It was their morning to check out, and they’d already brought their suitcases down and stowed them behind the front desk.
