He wanted to tell her she was wrong. That there was no way Paige would do that. She wouldn’t give up everything she’d built for herself here in Port Landon. Not because of an argument. Not because he had been so damn unfair to her and ended things so abruptly.
Then, it hit him. Maybe she would, because of a broken heart.
And he’d been the jerk to break it.
If the rumor was true, not only had Cohen broken Paige’s heart, but he had ruined all that was good in Paige’s eyes about her new home. A place she had fallen in love with. That notion pierced Cohen’s own heart just as deeply.
‘She wouldn’t do that. She wouldn’t.’ There was no conviction in his voice. Cohen knew what a broken heart could do. He remembered all the times in the first few years after losing Stacey that his unending pain and sadness had driven him to contemplate packing up and leaving Port Landon as well. To start over. To have something and somewhere that didn’t remind him of his wife. Of his loss. Of the torture of being without her.
But he’d stayed, and, now, he was glad of it. Which was exactly why he had to make sure Paige stayed, too. Not just because she would be losing everything she had thought she found in their little town, but because he didn’t want to lose her. He couldn’t. Not like this. Sonya was right. He couldn’t lose the woman he loved, not when she was in arms’ reach of him and he still had a chance to remind her that a lot of good things still remained here. That the town needed her, and loved her.
So did he.
Chapter 25
Paige
Paige flipped the sign on the bakery door to read Open, hoping she hadn’t missed too many customers in her tardiness. Maybe no one had noticed. Maybe no one had realized the bakery hadn’t been open for the past hour. It was after ten o’clock, and …
Who was she kidding? Paige knew someone would have noticed. Probably multiple someones. This was Port Landon, after all. Small town extraordinaire. If she didn’t know what she was doing, or was supposedly doing, someone would fill her in. She was sure of that.
And that’s what she was afraid of. Not because the shop hadn’t been opened on time, but because of why the shop hadn’t been.
It had all seemed so innocent the night before. One simple phone call with Alex Livingston. After the text messages he had sent her since she left his company, she owed him that much. And Paige had expected him to offer up her old job on a silver platter. She’d done her job well in New York City, and she was a go-getter. She was an asset to any design company. Livingston Designs knew that. Alex knew that.
Which was why, over the course of their hour-long phone conversation, Alex went a step further. He sweetened the deal. Not only did he offer her old position back if she wanted it, but he offered higher compensation than she had previously received, increased commissions, and the opportunity to spearhead a bunch of new projects they had on the horizon.
Livingston Designs wanted her back. Alex wanted her back. And they were willing to pay what was needed to achieve that.
At least, that was what Alex Livingston said to her, face to face, this morning when he showed up on her doorstep, ready to prove how serious he was. At eight o’clock, Paige’s cellphone rang. She didn’t know who in the world would be calling her at that time of day. When she saw Alex’s number on the display screen, she’d become even more confused.
He could have knocked her over with a feather when he said that Main Street was nice. Quaint, even. And yes, he was standing outside her storefront, waiting for her to let him in. Baffled, she scurried down the stairs and ushered him in off the sidewalk, unable to comprehend how her New York life had just collided with her new hometown.
Eight hundred miles was nothing when you were the young and powerful Alex Livingston, apparently.
He spent the next hour explaining his stance over the pot of coffee they shared at her kitchen table. After their phone call the night before, he had made the split-second decision to hop on a red-eye flight and offer up his business proposal in person. Dressed in an Armani suit that cost more than half of Paige’s entire wardrobe and a red silk tie that knotted tightly and effectively at the base of his throat, Alex was the epitome of professionalism. He pulled files, spreadsheets, and typed documents from his briefcase to outline his plan for Livingston Designs going forward, producing hard, cold facts and numbers to back up his plans, and highlighting exactly how he hoped Paige would play a crucial part in bringing those plans to fruition.
Many times, she had seen Alex’s negotiation tactics at work, and every time she was awestruck by his abilities. He was a businessman by trade, but a businessman by heart as well. He lived and breathed the corporate life. Though only a year or two older than Paige herself, she knew there would never come a day when Alex Livingston would walk away from the company his family had built in search of something smaller, quieter, and less New York-like. The family business had built him just as much as the family had built the business.
Alex talked for more than twenty minutes straight, pausing only to sip from his coffee cup. Paige admired his zest for the proposal, but halfway through she was only catching every third or fourth word. This was the first time she’d seen him from this side of the negotiations; as a man with every intention of having his studious preparation awarded with the acceptance of what he was expertly proposing. A man who had every intention of getting what he wanted.
They were similar in age, and similar in vocational background. But that’s where it ended. Paige had never viewed her ex-boss as a potential love interest, though she knew Alex’s side of things was another story – and Allison’s, apparently. It had gone nowhere, mostly due to Paige’s explicit rules about mixing her career and personal life together. Despite his chiseled good looks and their comfortable working relationship, there’d never been a spark between them. Not like that.
And the inner romantic in Paige, though submerged and buried deep inside her so as to let her career shine, hoped there was some kind of spark that jumpstarted her heart when it came to real love. Her mother’s words echoed in her head, never far from the forefront of her thoughts. When it comes to love, it’s the heart that counts, Paige, not the mind.
As she listened to him and watched his mannerisms, admiring his clean shaven, handsome face and pale crystal eyes, Paige realized with a bit of a start that she couldn’t see herself with someone so devoted to the corporate hustle. Not anymore. She had nothing against Alex and his enthusiasm to become a business mogul, but that wasn’t who Paige saw herself with. No, not anymore.
Because that wasn’t who she was. Not anymore.
Paige let Alex put forth his entire spiel, not interrupting him until he asked her thoughts about it.
Her head spun, filled to the brim with all the facts and figures and hopes and dreams he’d planted in her brain. ‘It’s all a bit much to take in, Alex. I’m going to need some time to think about it.’ After all, she had a life here now. One that would need to be packed up and moved eight hundred miles if she chose to accept his extravagant offer.
And Paige couldn’t think about that. It was too much to process. Besides, she had a bakery to run.
She’d told Alex as much, which quickly ended the impromptu job interview. Thankfully, he had ‘a couple of phone calls to make’, which was probably the understatement of the year. His phone had beeped a steady string of text alerts along with countless missed phone calls that he had ignored while sitting at her kitchen table. His gaze landed on the phone every time, and she’d seen his fingers twitch, aching to reach for it. A kneejerk reflex. Paige had been a slave to her cellphone once, too. Now, though she carried it with her, she could go more than half the day without even glancing at it.
So much had changed in such little time. Sure, it had only been months since she left New York, but now that life seemed like it was someone else’s. She didn’t feel like she was the one who’d lived it. Breathed it.
Paige had Port Landon to thank for that. She had the entire community to tha
nk.
She had Cohen Beckett to thank. And right now, she didn’t want to thank him for anything. She wanted to walk down to the shoreline, write his name in the sand, and let the water wash away every letter, along with all the hurt and sadness she associated with him.
Paige might have known she could never be with someone like Alex, but look at what she got by finding someone she thought she could. Finding someone who ignited that elusive spark within her.
Heartbreak.
It was the sadness she was feeling that made New York City look so enticing. She could see that now. Alex made it sound like the sun rose and set more beautifully in the cityscape. There were things she missed about the city, sure. She would never say otherwise. But if Paige left Port Landon, she would miss it, too. Terribly. She would miss so many things.
She would miss Cohen.
Paige silently chastised herself. Why did everything have to come back to him? Why was her mind still consumed by him when he had made it perfectly clear she wasn’t fit to be a part of his and his son’s life? She knew exactly where she stood when it came to him. It was time to make a decision that would help her get past him, the same way his decision had been made to move on without her.
But first, she had a couple loaves of multigrain bread to get in the oven and a batch of death-by-chocolate brownies to whip up. She would feel better once she did that.
Paige had to get her head back in the game. If not for herself, then for her cousin, who was about to get married in only four short days. Paige had a thousand things to do to help with the wedding – the decorating, the organization of the favors, confirming timely delivery of the flowers …
The cake. Being the one to bake and decorate the wedding cake was both a blessing and a curse at this point. Agony had plagued her over the thing. So much so that if Paige ever saw another wedding cake with purple and gray fondant decor again, it would be too soon.
The wedding itself was weighing on her. She blamed that on Cohen Beckett, too. Paige loved weddings, always had. And this was her cousin’s wedding. Her cousin, who was also her best friend and most trusted confidante. She should have been over the moon with excitement and practically bursting at the seams to wear the gorgeous gray dress and watch with joyous tears in her eyes as Allison pledged her love and devotion to Christopher.
Instead, she was constantly reminded that her date for the wedding wouldn’t be coming. She never should have let Sonya and Allison wrangle poor Cohen into it in the first place.
Poor Cohen. She was doing it again. Feeling bad for all that had happened to him when she was supposed to be letting it go. Letting him go. Moving on. She would have even settled for just being able to pretend the whole thing hadn’t happened.
Donning her favorite purple damask apron, Paige threw herself into her work. If she couldn’t forget about Cohen, she would work her fingers to the bone and make sure she was so exhausted by the end of the day that she would be too tired to speak his name, let alone contemplate the meaning of life with or without him in it.
Each time a customer came in, she was relieved when they didn’t mention she’d been late to open the shop this morning. She was even more relieved that no one asked her who the tall man in the swanky business suit standing outside her apartment had been. She had already made the mistake of mentioning last night’s phone call to Allison during her impromptu trip to the coffeehouse before she opened the bakery. Although her cousin would eventually find out all the juicy details, Paige hadn’t had it in her to dish on the fact that Alex had flown there to win her over. She would misconstrue it as more than it really was. She could practically hear Allison’s over-the-top, mushy comments now. The woman would swoon until she collapsed, thinking the gesture was the most romantic of all romantic gestures. Which it wasn’t. That wasn’t what this was about. At all.
Paige ran the risk of people hearing only bits and pieces of the story if she spoke about it, so she was better to just keep it to herself. For now, anyway. She didn’t need, nor want, others’ input on the matter just yet, anyway. All she’d wanted at the time was good coffee, not a chance to feed the gossipers.
The entire bakery smelled wonderfully of fresh baked bread and warm sugar by the time the hours rolled into the afternoon. Paige was starving, but she had been productive and felt better for it. The lunch rush resulted in selling out of all the oversized oatmeal cookies. She was right; they were a hit. Most of the bread and biscuits had flown off the shelves, too. Many residents of Port Landon were going to be indulging in comfort food tonight. She was just pulling the last loaves of whole wheat bread out of the oven in hopes of having something to cover the bare bread shelves with when the bell above the door chimed. She glanced out around the wall, intent on promising she would be with the customer in a minute. She was met with the hazel gaze she hadn’t been able to stop thinking about.
‘Cohen.’ She recovered from her shock, quickly adding, ‘Hi.’
‘Hey.’
He looked disheveled, to say the least. Paige wagered a guess that his day at the vet clinic had been a trying one. But there was something else hidden amongst the fatigue and stress in his eyes. Sadness. It pulled at her heart strings and messed with her resolve. Setting the bread pans on the stovetop and removing her oven mitts, she headed out to the front counter. ‘What brings you by?’
‘I, uh …’ He held a stapled stack of papers out for her. ‘I brought the interview questions for Bryce’s school project. If you still want to do it, I mean.’
She had completely forgotten about Bryce’s project. Her answer was out of her mouth before she even realized she was saying it aloud. ‘Of course, yes.’ Inwardly, she cringed at her own neediness. How unattractive was it to hold on to such a small sliver of a connection between her and the Beckett family like it was a lifeline? ‘I mean, unless you want to answer the questions about the clinic instead.’
‘I can’t,’ he replied. ‘I filled out Hunter’s questionnaire a few days ago.’
‘I’m glad to help.’ She reached for the sheets of paper.
Cohen stepped forward and held it out, but not before taking her hand between his fingers, sending every nerve ending in her fingertips into a fiery frenzy. ‘Paige, I need—’
Paige wasn’t sure if she would have heard what he was about to say over the incessant pounding of her own heart. Unfortunately, she didn’t get the chance to find out. The front door swung open wide, sending a loud toll of the bell ringing through the air. Alex Livingston sauntered in, his gaze assessing the quaint storefront with a look of thinly veiled amusement.
‘So, this is the childhood dream you left me for?’ Alex mused.
Paige pulled her hand out of Cohen’s grip, thoroughly unprepared to deal with both New York and Port Landon personified in the storefront of her suddenly very cramped bakery. ‘Alex, hey. I didn’t … expect you back so soon.’ It sounded ridiculous as soon as she said it, but the truth was that she didn’t know what to expect from him at all. She certainly hadn’t expected him to jump on a plane and come all the way there to offer her a dream job in the heart of New York City.
There was no mistaking the way Cohen was looking Alex up and down. He wasn’t even trying to hide it. Taking in his pressed suit and shiny shoes, the expensive cellphone in one hand and the leather briefcase he held in the other, Cohen’s posture stiffened. Paige watched as his eyes widened, registering Alex’s poor choice of words, which Paige realized too late could have easily been misconstrued. Eyes narrowed, Cohen obviously had come to some kind of presumption.
She stifled a groan, fearful of how wrongful that presumption might be.
‘I didn’t leave you, I left Livingston Designs.’ Paige chuckled, trying to pretend it was no big deal. Just a simple joke. Anything to diffuse the awkwardness in the room. Which wasn’t working. At all. ‘Alex, this is Cohen. Sorry, Dr Cohen Beckett,’ she corrected, meeting Cohen’s gaze. ‘He’s … a friend of mine. Cohen, I’d like you to meet Alex Livingston, my boss from
New York.’
Ex-boss. But she realized her mistake too late, and it was too late to take it back. Alex was running with it, and he was in full sprint, in it for the win.
‘We’re friends, too,’ he said, enunciating the words to give them the full effect of blatant insinuation. He grinned like the Cheshire cat as he held his hand out to Cohen, shaking his hand firmly. ‘It’s good to meet you, Dr Beckett.’
‘Likewise.’ The edge in Cohen’s voice was sharp as a knife, his knuckles turning white with the pressure he exerted in the handshake. There was very obviously nothing good about meeting Alex Livingston as far as he was concerned. His stunned expression only fueled the tangible tension between them.
‘Alex, I was … I mean, I …’ She couldn’t get the words out, sputtering as she tried to explain. Explain what, exactly? She didn’t need to explain a thing to Cohen concerning Alex’s presence. And she surely didn’t need to explain to Alex that while, yes, they were friends, the obnoxious way he’d said it was very much on purpose. Goading Cohen.
Ugh, men.
Both men were going to do what they wanted, and think what they wanted. Paige was through with putting everyone else first all the time.
‘I should go, Paige.’ Alex pulled his hand away from Cohen, leveling his gaze on her. ‘Meet me for dinner, though? Before I head back to New York later tonight? We’ve still got so much to discuss.’
Paige’s head was swimming with so many flustered thoughts. All she could do was nod. Anything to get him and his fancy suit out of there. ‘Yes, of course. Call me in a bit and we’ll arrange something.’
‘I’ll text you. See you tonight.’ He flashed her a smug smile, then nodded toward Cohen, who still stood there with a flabbergasted expression plastering his face. ‘Again, nice to meet you, Dr Beckett.’ Alex left the bakery as quickly as he’d come, his wry grin never once faltering as he closed the door behind him. The bell chimed loudly, shrill as a siren in the deafening silence that ensued.
The Forget-Me-Not Bakery Page 24
