Starting Over (Nugget Romance 4)

by Stacy Finz

  “All right, I’ll talk to Richard. We’ll work something out. Stay calm. You ready for the bridal expo next weekend?”

  “Oh God, you’re not making me do that again, are you? Send Lisa or Randall.”

  “Tracy, you’re head of event planning for Breyer Hotels—a vice president in the company. Why would I send anyone other than you?”

  “Because my time is too valuable to be selling stupid wedding packages, especially when I can be snagging the big fish, like tech conferences and corporate events.”

  Yeah, because you did so well with Landon Lowery. “Wedding packages are our bread and butter, Tracy. So this is nonnegotiable. See you in a few days.” He hung up.

  One temperamental female down, another to go. Nate headed to Sam’s office and knocked on the door.

  “Come in,” she called, and he went inside and shut the door behind him. “What do you think of these wine glasses?” She turned her computer monitor toward him so he could get a view of the stemware.

  “They’re fine,” he said. “What are they for?”

  “Your house.” She flipped to another picture of goblets. “Or we could go with these.”

  “Sam . . . Sam. Look at me, Sam.” She finally pulled her head away from the computer. “I’m sorry. I screwed up last night. Again. You think we could—”

  “Forget it?” she said, cutting him off.

  That wasn’t what he was going to say, but—

  “Okay, let’s forget it,” she continued. “In fact, let’s pretend it never happened and move on. No more after-work visits. No neighborly chats on the deck. From now on, we’ll keep everything strictly professional. So if that’s all, I’m really busy.”

  “Fine,” he said, duly chastised, and started to walk out the door.

  “Which glasses did you want?”

  “Uh, the first ones looked good. But whatever you think.”

  “Fine,” she said as she clicked away on her computer.

  “Sam?”

  “What?”

  “Uh, thanks for doing that.” He pointed to the wineglass website, then left with his tail between his legs.

  The next couple of days passed in telephone back-and-forths between him and Richard and Tracy, highlighting all the reasons why he needed to be in San Francisco and not Nugget. The truth was the Lumber Baron was in good hands. Sam, who rarely talked to him anymore, had conquered the place. Loved by the guests, more organized than anyone he knew and a multitasker by nature, she had no problem running the Lumber Baron in his absence.

  What she had was a problem with him. He suspected that she hadn’t taken well to his comment about her being his physical type but that he didn’t like anything else about her. It was akin to saying, I’d like to do you as long as you leave after I’m finished, because you bug the crap out of me. And then, to make matters worse, he’d grabbed her ass and given her a tonsillectomy with his tongue.

  Nate would never win awards for being the most sensitive man, but even he knew that he’d done irreparable harm to their relationship, such as it was. It was for the best, he kept telling himself. They’d been getting too friendly, reminding him all too well of how it had been with Kayla in the beginning. Back when she’d hung on his every word and then abruptly lost interest the night before four hundred of their best friends and family were due to attend their wedding. He certainly didn’t need a repeat performance of that disaster.

  He and Kayla had met at a Harvard mixer. Out of a roomful of brash MBAs, all tussling to appear smarter and more aggressive than the next, she’d chosen him to spill her drink on. Later, she confessed to doing it on purpose.

  But that night, her cheeks pinked prettily and she apologized profusely, whipping off her Hermès scarf and patting him dry.

  “It’s okay,” he assured her, taking her in from head to toe.

  Her blond hair had been swept back in a sleek ponytail, showing off high cheekbones, a prominent nose, a slightly too-wide mouth and pale blue eyes that danced when she talked. She wasn’t textbook beautiful, but she had that extra, undefinable something that turned heads. And his was spinning.

  Two hours later he took her home, took off her clothes, and took her to bed. And when they woke up the next morning, he didn’t want her to leave. Ever. And that had never happened to him before.

  “What is it about you?” he teased.

  Naked, she propped herself up on the bed and said, “I’m your It Girl.”

  He didn’t even know what that meant, but he liked the sound of it, so from then on he called her his It Girl. That first month they were stuck like glue, attending parties at her society friends’ homes, visiting Cambridge and Boston museums, and eating takeout on the floor of his apartment.

  The next month she took him home to meet her parents. He had known that Kayla was a Cumberland, but not until they visited the estate did he fully understand what being part of one of America’s most moneyed families entailed. First off, her family home was entrenched in history, from the portraits on the walls to the antique patina on the furniture. Second, there seemed to be an endless supply of relatives who lived there. Some, apparently, had never left the estate.

  And as nice and down-to-earth as her parents seemed, they’d run a background check on him. They knew that his parents owned and operated hotels, his grandparents were Wisconsin dairy farmers, where he’d gone to high school (Kayla didn’t even know that), and his GPA as an undergrad.

  “You’re one of those smart fuckers,” her father announced. No one seemed shocked that Milton Cumberland, one of the richest men on earth, cursed like a truck driver.

  At one point, sometime between dessert and cognac, Milton took him aside and said, “You seem good for our girl.”

  By the time they left, Nate felt like he’d passed the test. “I think that went well,” he told Kayla.

  “It went fabulous, darling,” she said in a voice she reserved for self-deprecation. Kayla liked mocking her wealthy culture. It made her feel one with the people.

  In their second month together, Kayla dropped out of Harvard law. She came to Nate’s apartment after taking a torts exam and announced that she’d had an epiphany.

  “The world is full of lawyers, people who make sense of civilization by twisting and manipulating the facts to serve their own ends. It’s disgusting.”

  He wrapped her in his arms and kissed her on the forehead. “You blew the test, didn’t you?”

  “I most certainly did not.” She pulled away. “If you must know, I aced it. Of course I won’t get my grade for another week or two, but I knew every answer. The test was tedious, a lot of memorization of useless facts. I’m done with law school, Nate. I’ve decided that if I want to make a difference in the future of this great world, I have to study the past.”

  A few weeks later, she enrolled in archaeology classes in Harvard’s Department of Anthropology. If Nate had been on his game and not crazy in love, he might’ve seen her impulsiveness as a red flag. Instead, he saw her newly found obsession with human bones and fossils charming. She was so different from him. He chose a course and stuck to it, no deviations, no last-minute lightning bolts, no newfound passions that would highjack his old ones. From childhood, Nate wanted to own and operate hotels. Even when the goal seemed unattainable, like during the 2008 recession, when obtaining bank loans and private venture capital seemed as likely as winning the lottery, Nate kept his nose to the grindstone.

  So Kayla’s spontaneity was infectious. She dragged him to exhibits, lectures, and even a local dig where construction workers had stumbled upon a Native American burial site. For weeks, she immersed herself in the study of human history.

  And then, just like an earthquake when there are no warning signs, her interest in archaeology caved in and crumbled like an ancient civilization.

  “It’s so incremental,” she grumbled. “It takes years, decades, and even centuries to analyze a culture. I need to feel like I’m accomplishing something now, like I’m making a marked
difference in someone’s life.”

  She decided that the best way to immediately save the world was to feed it, and a few weeks later registered at Le Cordon Bleu College of Culinary Arts in Boston. The cooking school was close to Harvard and Nate told himself that this was a good thing. She was now entering his world—the hospitality industry—and together there wasn’t anything they couldn’t accomplish.

  When he told his parents the news, they seemed less than enthused. “She sure does change her mind a lot,” Nate’s father said.

  Maddy tried to be more optimistic. “It sounds like she has ADD, but hey, she’s finding herself. That’s good, right?”

  A couple of months later, Nate thought Kayla’s career indecision was over. He’d never seen her more happy. The woman was born to cook. Often she showed off her new culinary skills by whipping up gourmet meals and complicated pastries. As a graduate student, he’d never eaten so well and his belly was starting to show it.

  “Hey, Kay, they teach you how to make anything healthy at that cooking school?” he said as he dressed one morning for class. “I’m getting fat.”

  “You are not,” she argued, pushing him down on the bed and unbuttoning his shirt to have a look for herself. “And even if you were, I’d love you forever.”

  “Yeah? Maybe we should get married then.” And there, without a ring, on the unmade bed with her sprawled on top of him, he proposed.

  “Let’s do it now, Nate, and surprise everyone.”

  “Don’t you want a wedding, baby?”

  “Weddings are so bougie.”

  He didn’t think they were. Weddings were traditional and he liked traditional. But later, he would always wonder what would have happened if they’d just run off and done it.

  “That would make my mother, and I suspect yours, unhappy,” he told her, undoing the zipper on her jeans. “We don’t have to do a long engagement, but we should plan something.”

  “Whatever you want, Nate. Because I love you that much . . . and this much,” she said, stripping him bare and rocking his world.

  They decided on spring, which was only two months away. Kayla vacillated between having a large wedding and a small one. Eventually, they settled on holding it at the Cumberland estate and inviting four hundred guests. And for a woman who originally didn’t want a wedding, Kayla went to town. She delved into color schemes, menus, and seating charts with the same manic fervor as she did all her new projects.

  At night, when they lay in bed, they talked about their future. Going to San Francisco, where Nate had a job waiting as soon as he finished school and Kayla had unlimited culinary opportunities. They talked about kids and where they should live and how they would grow beautifully old together.

  Everything was perfect. No signals that Kayla was unhappy or having second thoughts.

  After the rehearsal dinner, an intimate party with just immediate family and a few close friends, Nate dropped his parents and sisters off at their hotel. Superstitious, Kayla went back to the Cumberland compound, afraid that being together on the eve of their wedding would bring them bad luck.

  At ten o’clock, while Nate packed a suitcase for the honeymoon, his phone rang. It was Milton Cumberland.

  “I think you should come over,” he told Nate.

  “Is everything all right?” Clearly it wasn’t, unless old Milt wanted to get his drink on early and wanted company, which wasn’t totally uncharacteristic for him.

  “Kayla’s got a case of the jitters. Neither her mother nor I can talk her down. We thought you should come.”

  Nate bit back a sigh. “I’ll be right there.”

  It took him eleven minutes to get to Back Bay, where Kayla had locked herself in her room. “Kay”—he knocked on the door—“let’s talk it out, honey.”

  Still wearing her rehearsal dress, she let him in. “I can’t, Nate. I’ve made up my mind. To go through with this wedding would be a farce.”

  “Slow down, Kayla, and tell me what’s wrong.”

  “I should never have said yes to this.” She held her arms wide, and he wasn’t sure if she meant yes to having the wedding on the estate, to sleeping in her own room, or to marriage in general. That was the thing about Kayla; her internal dialog moved at warp speed and it was impossible for the rest of the world to keep up.

  “Yes to what? Us getting married?”

  She nodded and started to cry. “Being a wife . . . it’s just so archaic. Tyrannical, actually.”

  He handed her a tissue so she could blow her nose and tried to stay calm. This was Kayla, after all. These little fits of whimsy had been what attracted him to her in the first place. “Kayla, honey, I don’t know what you’re talking about. Yesterday you were crazy about the idea of being my wife. When have I ever been tyrannical?”

  “Not you, per se, but the institution of marriage. It’s all bullshit, Nate.” She wiped her nose on the sleeve of her dress.

  “We don’t have to be like everyone else, Kay. We’ll have a different marriage. A completely non-tyrannical marriage.” This talk about tyranny was completely crazy, but right now he’d say anything to calm her down and get her back on track.

  “No.” She shook her head. “Don’t buy into it, Nate.”

  He gently clasped her shoulders. “What are you saying, Kayla? You want to call off the wedding?”

  She took off her engagement ring and put it in Nate’s palm. “It’s for the best, Nate, before we start hating each other.”

  “Start hating each other?” Where the hell had that come from? “Up until a few hours ago you told me I was the love of your life.”

  “I’ve had time to think about it and I believe it was an illusion. I wanted to love you, so I convinced myself. But it was never real, Nate.” She got off the bed and opened the door. “My parents will take care of notifying everyone. But I think you should leave now.”

  Nate was a proud man. Never in his life had he begged for anything, but he got down on the floor and groveled. He pleaded and said they could buck the institution of marriage and continue to live together, even though he wanted it all. He made a lot of promises that no self-respecting person makes. Anything to keep her from leaving him. But she was done, just like she’d been done with being a lawyer and an archaeologist.

  After he left the Cumberlands he went to the hotel and told his family.

  “The woman is obviously mentally ill,” his mother said. “Who does something like this?”

  But Nate knew the truth. Kayla’s craziness was an act—an affectation that she thought made her seem more interesting. When in fact, she was nothing but a spoiled, mercurial rich girl who used people and hobbies to keep her entertained until she found something more amusing.

  Samantha Dunsbury might come off saner than Kayla, but the two of them were cut from the same cloth. If you didn’t believe him, just ask Royce Whitley.

  Chapter 14

  “No, I think they should go here,” Sam told the furniture delivery guys who had put Nate’s new couches in the wrong spot.

  She wanted the seating to take advantage of the view, the fireplace, and the flat-screen TV. No easy feat, given the configuration of the room. The furniture had arrived in record time and luckily Nate had given her his key before he’d left for San Francisco.

  Good riddance to the creep.

  She’d only gone through with decorating his house because she’d said she would. Sam kept her word. And wouldn’t he be surprised when he got home? The place was shaping up nicely. After approving her first few purchases, he’d given her permission to do the rest without him. Apparently, he trusted her taste, even though he didn’t like anything else about her. Oh, except for her body. He’d made it perfectly clear he liked that just fine.

  “That’s much better,” she told the men, who now had the two couches in the proper location. “I think the recliners should go here.” They went back out to the truck to get them.

  Sam had been dead set against the recliners. In general she found them t
acky. But Nate had insisted. In fact, the chairs and big screen had been his only requirements. That, and the dictate that there be no throw pillows and no “over-the-top art.”

  In a spare bedroom she’d found boxes of books and arranged them on bookcases she’d purchased from Colin. She’d also gotten the coffee table and dining room set from him. Colin’s pieces were works of amazing craftsmanship and she figured Nate must like the furniture because he had one of Colin’s beds.

  In less than a week, she’d managed to stock his kitchen with dishes—antique ironstone knockoffs she’d found at Nugget Farm Supply—glassware, flatware, cookware, a coffeemaker and toaster she’d ordered from Williams-Sonoma. She was still waiting for the bar stools to come.

  According to UPS tracking, the rugs and lamps were due in tomorrow. By the time Nate got back, his house would be a home. And she planned to charge him an arm and a leg in overtime for her hard work. She’d donate the money to charity.

  In the meantime, she had a few more errands to make for Emily’s wedding and a meeting later that afternoon with Lucky. Then tomorrow she was off to San Francisco for the bridal expo. Saturday night, after the expo, she planned to have dinner with an old friend from Greenwich at a restaurant that Emily had recommended near Fisherman’s Wharf.

  Andy had sworn up and down that he could be trusted to hold down the Lumber Baron while she and Nate were away. Sam got the sense that he was looking forward to having the inn to himself. Nate wasn’t too thrilled about it, but Maddy had offered to check up on the place a few times during the weekend.

  Once the delivery guys returned with both recliners, set them in place and removed the plastic wrap, Sam nearly texted Nate a picture of the room, it looked so good. Nah, she decided, let him see it in person with the rugs and lamps and all the other finishing touches. Maddy had volunteered to be here for the delivery tomorrow and Sam had drawn a diagram of where everything should go.