They were quiet for a minute. Ava watched the fields passing the window, marveling at how far she could see out here. She’d barely noticed the drive into Bliss from the Kansas City airport. Her attention had been riveted on her laptop. As usual. And her three months so far had been spent in the town. She hadn’t really experienced the countryside. She wasn’t sure what struck her most—the lack of buildings, the lack of traffic and people, or the lack of noise.
“Wow, it’s really different from New York here,” she commented. She turned from the window as he chuckled. She smiled. “I know. That’s dumb to say. I mean, in my head, I knew it would be different. I even knew the ways it would be different. But it just hit me.”
“I remember driving to Bliss for the first time. I was so pissed. I was convinced that I’d die without having pizza available twenty-four seven.”
She frowned. “You remember coming to Bliss? You knew what pizza was? Weren’t you a baby?”
He laughed. “Nope. I moved here when I was fourteen.”
Her eyes widened. “Really? You’re not actually from here?”
His smile got smaller but also softer. “Oh, I’m from here.” There was emotion—love—in his voice. “I just didn’t come home until I was older.”
There was something about how he said it that made her throat tighten. She loved New York. That was where she’d grown up. She appreciated everything that made New York City New York City. But she didn’t feel that, everything that was on Parker’s face now, about the city.
“How did that all happen?” she asked, suddenly wanting to know all about him.
He blew out a breath. “I was a spoiled brat rich kid hanging out with other spoiled brat rich kids. Thinking nothing could touch us. Bored because everything was being handed to us.”
“You were a rich kid?” Ava asked, completely surprised.
“Well, not Carmichael rich,” he said with a little smile. “But yeah. We had money. My dad was an investment guy and did really well. I spent fourteen years in Chicago.”
“I had no idea you grew up in a city.”
He shook his head quickly. “I didn’t grow up until I came to Bliss.”
Ava felt herself smile. He was so in love with this town. It made her like it even more. But in that moment, it occurred to her that she liked it a lot anyway. Somehow, in a short time, Bliss had grown on her. It was a bump in her road, or so she’d thought, but there was something about a place that ran according to its own rules and everyone was accepted for who they were and where everyone had a place, no matter how quirky.
Life was pretty simple here. Everyone got up in the morning, did something that contributed to the lives around them, gathered for a meal, and went to bed happy, safe, and content. She supposed the same things happened in New York, just on a bigger level. People went to work to produce products or offer services that other people needed. But it was harder to see there.
Here, Noah opened his garage, people brought their cars and trucks in, and he fixed them. Parker opened his diner, people came in to eat, and he made them food. Evan opened his office, people came in to trademark their homemade jam and to transfer the ownership of their farm to their kids, and Evan reassured them that he’d take care of them. Teachers went to the school and taught the kids of the town. Farmers planted their crops and took care of their animals. Ed, the electrician, fixed people’s wiring. Nancy, the bank president, gave people loans so they could add on to their house, and Josh, the local builder, built that extra room for them.
It was so much easier to see how lives intersected and interacted here.
It had definitely grown on her. Especially considering that she very rarely got to see the impact of her work directly on the lives it affected.
Unlike the pie shop.
She sighed. She sucked at making pies, but she understood the interaction that her father had enjoyed. Even more, seeing it on Parker’s side of the wall. Okay, so Rudy hadn’t been entirely off base in having her come here.
“So how did you end up in Bliss from Chicago?”
Parker turned the truck onto a narrower dirt road. “Dad threw a dart at the middle of a map of the US,” he said.
Her eyes widened. “Seriously? He literally threw a dart at a map? The dart hit Bliss and so you up and moved here?”
“Kind of. I was getting into some stuff that concerned him and he determined we had to make a change. He thought the Midwest was a good bet but didn’t know anyone or any place in particular. So he put a map up on the wall, closed his eyes, and left it up to Fate. As soon as he saw the name Bliss, he knew this was the place.”
Ava turned the rest of the way on the seat and tucked her leg underneath her. This was fascinating stuff. She’d never trusted Fate for a damned thing. She worked for everything. With a carefully laid-out plan and lots of research.
The Fate idea kind of sounded nice. Letting it go. Trusting it would work out instead of sweating it.
“What were you getting into?” she asked, trying to picture Parker as a spoiled rich kid with an attitude.
It wasn’t that hard to imagine, actually. She grinned. Sure, he wore denim like he’d been born in it, and he nearly always paired that denim with a cotton T-shirt—she’d seen him in a button-down shirt exactly twice in almost four months—but she could definitely picture him challenging authority with an I’m-better-than-you attitude. Maybe not so much in a prep school uniform with khakis and a tie, but she had no trouble visualizing a young Parker with a smirk, thinking he was above the law. It was interesting, really. He liked order and routine, but it wasn’t hard to believe that, while rules mattered, he would think his rules were the ones that counted. He exuded confidence and if he thought he knew better about how people should eat grilled cheese sandwiches, then she was sure he thought he knew better about bigger things too.
“My group of friends decided to make some money,” he said. “They started…acquiring objects and then reselling them.”
“Acquiring?” she repeated, noting the slight pause before the word. “You mean stealing?”
He nodded. “From their parents.”
She felt her eyebrows rise. “A bunch of fourteen-year-olds stole from their rich parents and resold the stuff?”
“Pretty much. Though there was a fifteen and a sixteen-year-old too.”
She shook her head. “Wow. What kind of stuff?”
“Jewelry. Small art pieces. Antique dishes and vases and stuff.” Parker shrugged. “Had to be small so they wouldn’t be noticed.”
“And what did they need this money for?” she asked.
“We didn’t need it for anything. We were bored. And thought rules didn’t apply to us.”
“Because the rules were different for you than for the rest of society,” Ava said. “I know what that’s like.”
He glanced over. “Yeah. And I think we wanted to see what would happen. How long could we get away with stuff and what would happen when we got caught. But then things started getting bigger. A couple of the guys broke into a neighbor’s house and I knew things were getting out of control.”
“How did you get caught?”
“My dad found me going through my mom’s jewelry. I was trying to find her grandmother’s wedding ring.”
Ava winced.
“Yeah,” he said with a nod. “It had gone from little stuff our parents didn’t really care about, to bigger stuff and then on to meaningful stuff. Things that couldn’t be easily replaced. But that night—” Parker paused. “I think I wanted to get caught. I was getting nervous. Some of the buyers weren’t exactly nice people. And we were kids.”
“And you wanted to know what he would do,” Ava guessed.
He nodded. “I wanted to see if he’d sweep it under the rug, or yell, or punish me, or what.” Parker took a breath. “He’d never done any of that. He wasn’t around much, for one thing. He worked all the time. When he was around, his head was somewhere else. Always thinking about—worrying about—work.”
“You were trying to get his attention?” Ava asked, feeling a knot in her stomach. She knew exactly what it was like to never really mentally leave her work. And how it felt to look around and realize she’d missed stuff in the process. And how it felt to regret that.
“Not at first,” Parker said. “But I think it was bugging me how easy it all was. I did want his attention that night. I wanted to show him that things weren’t perfect, things weren’t just going along easily in spite of him not being there.”
He was frowning and the knot in Ava’s stomach tightened. “You wanted to punish him,” she said.
Parker pulled to a stop and shifted the truck into park. She barely noticed anything around her. She was completely focused on the man beside her. It seemed he was one of the few things that could capture her full attention.
He turned slightly, resting his arm on the top of the steering wheel. “Yeah,” he finally said. “I guess so. He was living in this world where his work took all of him, and he just assumed—and hoped, I learned later—that the money, the nice things, made me and my mom’s life easy and so everything was fine.”
“And when he found out what was going on?” Ava asked.
“I’ll never forget it,” Parker said, his voice a little gravelly now. “He asked what I was doing and I told him. I mean, I just confessed the whole thing. It just poured out of me. I remember feeling relieved. And then he stared at me for a long time, ran his hand through his hair, and then went to his desk. He pulled the map out, stuck it on the wall, and threw the dart. He quit his job the next day, and we were driving into a Bliss a week later.”
Ava swallowed hard as jealousy wrapped around the knot of what felt like regret in her gut. “Wow. I mean, that was…”
“Everything,” Parker filled in. “It was everything. He stepped up. Immediately. And he left it all behind to come here and make a life here that was about family and community and straightforward hard work that paid off in fewer dollars but a million other ways.”
She pressed her lips together and nodded. She understood all of that. A few months ago, she wouldn’t have. She would have been amazed to think of a man doing what Parker’s dad had done. But now…it was the perfect expression of love and fatherhood.
“Your dad did the same thing,” Parker said, his voice quieter. “He didn’t do it soon enough, he didn’t do it in the right way, maybe. But he got you here. He gave you a chance at a life you never would have imagined if not for something major making him look at things and realize it wasn’t going the way he wanted it to.”
She swallowed hard again, her throat tightening. She understood, cerebrally, that Rudy had been trying to give his daughters something good, something he’d found in Bliss, when he’d mandated they come to this town for a year. But she hadn’t really believed it would happen. Until Cori had fallen for Evan. Until Ava saw Brynn with Noah. Until she’d walked into the pie shop one morning and smiled at the bright colors and the curtains covered in pictures of fruit, and the scent of coffee and spices that hadn’t been there before she and her sisters had taken over.
The pie shop had been just one more thing Ava had to handle, that she had to make work for her sisters’ sakes. But slowly, she’d started to like it. She’d started to feel proud of the things she and Cori and Brynn had done together. And lately, with Parker, she felt something happening to her. She didn’t really worry about herself. She was in control of the things that happened to and around her. Usually. With Parker and the pie shop though, she’d come up against the first things that seemed to be happening in spite of her. When she’d wanted the pies to turn out, they hadn’t. Now that she didn’t want them to be perfect, yet, they were turning out great. And she had realized that she had no control over Parker and the things he made her feel.
And the lack of control made her a little nervous. But it also felt kind of good. New. Exciting.
“He changed the rules on me,” she finally said. “I always knew exactly what he was expecting, what he wanted to see with the company, what I needed to do, how he would react to things. I made running that company like he did, my entire focus. And then suddenly…this.” She sighed. “He dies of cancer before I even knew he was sick. Then I find out that he’s put together this trust and I have to live in this tiny town in Kansas that I’ve never heard of. I find out that he was running a barely-making-it pie shop simply because he liked pie. He wants me to make pie. I mean, it’s all crazy.”
He’d left her completely recipe-less.
Parker nodded. “He changed the rules on purpose.”
Yeah, she knew that. And she suspected that Rudy had known how good it would feel to succeed without following a recipe. By finding her way on her own.
“I figured out pretty young that Dad wanted us to go into business with him,” she said, her voice sounding raspy. “It wasn’t until I was older that I realized it was because he didn’t know how else to relate to us. It was all he could imagine having in common with us. He’d never been around kids, had no idea what to do with girls, not to mention three of us at once, and especially girls who were being raised by a woman who was socially conscious and was the one person he could never negotiate or bully into doing what he wanted—marrying him.” She smiled, thinking of her mom. “So he exposed us to his business because it was really the only thing he had. It wasn’t like he could take us to ball games or teach us to play violin or talk to us about his fascination with American history. He didn’t have any other interests. He didn’t know what else to do with us. For a while it was really frustrating, for everyone, because Cori and Brynn had no interest in any of it. But then I figured out that as long as I was interested, then Cori and Brynn could do their things in relative peace. It kept Cori from trying to make him happy and getting her heart broken when it didn’t work, or he didn’t get her. It kept him from trying to pull Brynn out of her shell, which just exasperated them both.”
“Basically, as long as you were interested in the business and could talk to him about it, he left Cori and Brynn alone?” Parker asked.
She nodded. “Cori didn’t get hurt and Brynn didn’t get pushed.”
“So you pretended to be interested and got in too deep to get out?”
“No. No, nothing like that.” She shook her head. “I really was interested. I loved the numbers. I loved dressing up. I loved the intense meetings, the negotiating, the victories. I figured out that people would underestimate me—because I was young and a woman—and I loved showing them what I knew and proving them wrong. I know everyone thinks I work too hard and too much and I’m super stressed out but the truth is, this fits me. I don’t think the job made me this way, I think the way I am makes me really good at the job. And it’s not bad for me. My blood pressure is below average, all of my other numbers are great. I get checkups every six months, I exercise to work off the stress, I sleep really well. I recognize it’s not for everyone, but it works for me. I’m not fun and sweet, but that’s because that stresses me out.”
He laughed. “You are fun and sweet, Boss.”
That made her stomach flip. “But not like Cori and Brynn,” she said with a smile. “And that’s okay. Honestly. Being fun and spontaneous and creative like Cori gives me heartburn. I can’t abandon schedules and I need a plan. I can’t just be sweet like Brynn because I can’t let stuff roll off. When people are being assholes, I call them on being assholes. Letting it go makes my stomach hurt and makes me want to yell at other people when it’s not their fault. Lots of people aren’t good with confrontation. I, on the other hand, excel at it.”
“So, not being fun and sweet is better for you?” Parker asked.
“Exactly.”
He seemed to think about that, but after a moment he nodded. “I get it.”
“You do, don’t you?” she asked with a smile. He did because he was the same way.
“I can have fun, but only if there’s a plan in place. I’ll go to a barbecue if I know what time it starts and what I’m
supposed to bring. Pop-up parties aren’t really my thing.”
“Because you already have a plan and don’t want to just drop it at the last minute, right?” she guessed.
“Exactly.” He smiled at her. “What’s with these people who only plan for an hour or two at a time?”
“Right?”
They laughed. “And yeah, I’m not so good at sweet either.”
She felt everything in her soften at that. Soften. Not something she was used to feeling, but with Parker it seemed to be happening with some frequency. Interesting that a by-the-book grump would be the one to soften her up. “I think you’re better at it than you think.”
“Well, you let me do dirty things with butter,” he said. “That definitely helps my mood when I’m around you.”
The air in the truck heated but she laughed, feeling happiness soaking in clear to her bones. She loved that they could be matter-of-fact about everything—the things they were good at, the things they sucked at, their pasts, and their attraction. “I will definitely let you do dirty things with butter whenever you want.”
“You mean, if it’s on your schedule for the day.” He gave her a wink.
Nope, pretty much any time.
“You can put it on your schedule,” she said. “As long as our calendars on our phones are synched, we’ll be fine.”
He kept his eyes on hers as he reached for his phone. He swiped a couple of times, then typed. A second later, her phone pinged with a notification.
It was a calendar reminder that said simply Get naked.
14
Well, it was on the schedule. She didn’t have a choice. Ava started unbuttoning.
Parker gave a choked laugh. “Right here, right now? I never would have taken you for the type to jump when a guy says jump.”
His eyes were hot as she parted the shirt and let it fall to the seat around her hips. “I think it’s cute that you think you’re telling me to jump,” she said. “It’s me who’s telling you to tell me to jump. Because it’s hot.” She reached for the zipper on her skirt. “And I really want to jump, Parker.”
High Heels and Haystacks: Billionaires in Blue Jeans, book two Page 20
