by Cara Colter
“Yes, very.” She did not say it seemed her mother had moved on to happiness with unseemly swiftness. Bree had felt so abandoned. Of course, there was nothing like feeling abandoned to leave a young woman looking for love in all the wrong places.
“What did you take? In college?”
Heartbreak 101.
“I took a culinary program. I’m afraid I didn’t finish.”
He cocked his head at her. “That doesn’t seem like you, somehow.”
She cocked her head back at him. “Doesn’t it?” she asked, deliberately unforthcoming, and letting him know that really, he knew very little about her, past or present.
“In some ways, you are very changed,” he told her.
For a moment, she felt panicked, as if the sad ending of the pregnancy that had forced her to leave school was written all over her. She hoped her face was schooled into calmness, and she made herself release her stranglehold on her mug.
He still made her nervous.
“Your confidence in high heels for one thing.”
Relief swept through her at his amused reference to her clumsiness on the night of the prom.
“Oh, geez, you must have had bruises on your arm the next day. I should have practiced. I clung onto you most of the night.”
“And I thought you were just trying to feel my manly biceps.”
Despite herself, she giggled.
“It was a really nice thing for you to do,” she said. “To take the boss’ dateless daughter to her senior prom. I don’t think I thanked you. Of course, it didn’t occur to me until later that it probably wasn’t your idea.”
“It wasn’t,” he confessed. “I didn’t date girls like you.”
“Girls like me?”
“Smart,” he said. “Sweet.”
Not quite as smart as anyone had thought.
“I bet you still don’t,” she said wryly.
“I’m more the superficial type.”
He made her laugh. It was as simple as that.
“So,” he said, leaning forward and looking at her intently, “tell me how you have passed the last years. For some reason, I would have pictured you the type who would be happily married by now. Two children. A golden-retriever puppy and an apple tree in the front yard.”
Happily-ever-after.
She could feel that same emotion claw at her throat. It was exactly the life she had wanted, the dream that had made her so vulnerable.
He had her pegged. Well, you didn’t rise as fast in the business world as he did without an ability to read people with some accuracy.
There was no sense denying it even if it was not in vogue.
“That is my type. Exactly,” she said. She heard the catch in her voice, the pure wistfulness of it.
“It’s what you come from, too. I can see that you would gravitate back to that. Your family was so...”
He hesitated, lost for words.
“Perfect,” she said, finishing his thought.
“That’s certainly how it seemed to me. Coming from one that was less than perfect, I looked at the decency of your dad and the way he treated you and your mom, and it did seem like an ideal world.”
One she had tried to replicate way too soon after the passing of her father, with a kind of desperation to be loved like that again, to create that family unit.
It was only now, years after her miscarriage, that she was beginning to tiptoe back into the world of dating, looking again to the dream of happily-ever-after. So far, it had been a disaster.
“Are you, Bree? Happy?”
She hesitated a moment too long, and his brow furrowed at her.
“Tell me,” he commanded.
Ridiculous that she would tell him about her happiness, or lack there of. He had worked for her father a long time ago, and somehow been persuaded to take the hopeless daughter to her prom. They were hardly friends. Barely acquaintances.
“Deliriously,” she lied brightly. “My little company builds a bit each day. It’s fun and it’s rewarding.”
“Hmmm,” he said, a trifle skeptically. “Tell me, Bree, what do you do for fun?”
The question caught her off guard. She could feel herself fumbling for an answer. What could she say? Especially to someone like him, who moved in the sophisticated circles of wealth and power?
She couldn’t very well say that she had all the Harry Potter books and reread them regularly, with her ancient cat, Oliver, leaving drool pools on her lap. That after Chelsea, seamstress extraordinaire, had showed her how, she had individually quilted each of the cookies on her aprons. That she was addicted to home-renovation shows, especially ones hosted by couples, who had everything, it seemed, that she had ever dreamed of. That she trolled Pinterest features about homes: welcome signs, and window boxes, and baby rooms.
It would sound pathetic.
Was it pathetic?
“My business takes an inordinate amount of time,” she said when her silence had become way too long.
“So you don’t have fun?”
“Maybe I consider developing new cookie recipes fun!”
“Look, my business takes a lot of time, too. But I still make time for fun things.”
Just then a man came over and squatted on the floor beside her. He stuck out his hand. “Miss Evans? I’m the manager here. Mr. Wallace leads me to understand you have a line of cookies. We’d love to try them. Have you got a minute?”
She looked over the manager’s shoulder at Brand. He was smiling. He nodded encouragingly at her.
“Yes, I have a minute,” she said. The manager got up and sat beside her. She started to tell him about Kookies.
When she looked over at Brand, he was gone. The love seat across from her was empty.
No goodbye.
But at least he hadn’t stuck her with the bill.
Fifteen minutes later, she left Perks. They were going to give Kookies a trial term of six months.
She walked back to the concert hall. Outside the door, before going in, Bree debated only for a full five seconds before she pulled out Brand’s business card with his phone number and called him.
“Hello?”
She had been expecting it to go to voice mail, since she thought he was probably now in the front row for the Crystal Silvers performance. But there was no background noise.
“I was expecting to leave a message,” she said.
“Bree. What an unexpected pleasure.”
“I was rehearsing my message!”
“Okay, just pretend this is my voice mail.”
“All right. Hello, Brand. Thank you for a pleasant evening and for buying me coffee. I wanted you to know Perks is going to try my cookies for a trial period.”
“Excellent!”
“Voice mail does not respond,” she reminded him primly.
“Oh, yeah. Forgive me. Continue.”
She took a deep breath. “Thank you, but you didn’t have to use your influence for me.”
“Of course I didn’t have to. But what exactly would be the point of having influence if you didn’t use it to help others?”
And then he was gone, no goodbye again. She contemplated the kind of man that would make a statement like that.
This was what her father had always seen: the decency of Brand Wallace, a guy who could be trusted to do the right thing, even with a starry-eyed eighteen-year-old girl, desperate to be kissed.
His innate decency made her feel shivery with longing. He appeared to be the polar opposite of Paul Weston, the college professor who had taken what was left of her heart after the death of her father and run it through the meat grinder.
But it would be a form of pure craziness to think that a woman like her could ever have a man like Brand Wallace.
On the other hand, who had ever looked
at her hair before and seen sun-kissed sand?
She went in the doors, and could hear the music blasting out of the auditorium. Chelsea, looking a little worse for wear, was behind a completely rummaged-over sample table, dancing enthusiastically by herself to the loud music spilling out into the foyer. She danced salsa competitively and managed to look ultrasexy even in the cookie apron and beret.
She stopped when she saw Bree coming toward her. Sadly, it did not appear her sudden cessation of movement was because it had occurred to her it might be inappropriate that the table in front of her was badly in need of straightening.
“Did you have wine?” Chelsea demanded.
“No, I had a chai latte.” Bree decided, then and there, she probably would never have one again. Those smoky, spicy exotic flavors would remind her of a surprisingly pleasant evening—and forbidden longings—for as long as she lived.
“Oh, you’re all glowy.”
Bree was pretty sure glowy was not a word, not that she wanted to argue the point.
“What has happened to the table?” Bree asked, not wanting to encourage an interrogation from Chelsea. “It’s a mess.”
“Oh! About ten minutes before Crystal Silvers started to sing, the people just started to pour through the front door. They were on me like the barbarian hordes. Just grabbing things, ripping open boxes, uninvited. I have tidied, you know. There were wrappers all over the place. Anyway, somehow samples made it back to the lady herself. She sent out an assistant to tell me she loved our cookies, to expect a big order for her birthday blowout.”
It was more than Bree had hoped for! So why did she feel curiously flat about it?
If that came through, along with the extra business from Perks, there would be no time for thinking about happily-ever-after, or lack thereof, as the case might be.
Thank goodness.
“Oh, there goes the glowy look,” Chelsea said. “The frown line is back. Miss Worry rides again.”
Bree deliberately relaxed her forehead. She hadn’t even realized until tonight she was endangering her chances of aging gracefully because of her perpetual frown. Despite the fact she knew better than to encourage Chelsea, she could not stop herself from asking.
“What color would you say my hair was?”
Chelsea regarded Bree’s hair, flummoxed, clearly thinking this was a trick question that she was not going to answer correctly.
“Brown?” she finally ventured.
Bree nodded sadly. “Just as I thought.”
CHAPTER THREE
YOU DIDN’T HAVE to use your influence for me.
After Brand had disconnected the phone and put it back in his pocket, he made his way through the rain-glittered streets. He had decided to walk home. Going back to the gala after being with Bree Evans would have felt like getting dumped onto an eight-lane freeway after being on a quiet path through the country.
Despite her new proficiency with high heels, and the way she filled out her trim white blouse, she was still sweet and smart. Definitely adorable. Totally earnest.
And completely refreshing.
Those words—you didn’t have to use your influence for me—just reinforced all those impressions of her.
Everybody wanted him to use his influence for them. Even the manager at Perks had approached him, not the other way around. He’d recognized him from that blasted City article.
Brand came to his house, and stood back for a second, gazing at it through the walkway opening in the neatly trimmed hedge. His architect had called it colonial, a saltbox, and, thankfully, it was less ostentatious than most of the mansions on his street.
Inside, Beau, who seemed to be largely telepathic, had figured out he was home, and gave a deep woof of welcome.
When people asked why he’d gone with a single-family house instead of a superglamorous condo, he said he’d purchased the Shaughnessy heritage home because it was close to his office tower in downtown Vancouver, his golf course and the VanDusen Botanical Garden.
That seemed much easier than admitting he had purchased the house because he thought his dog would prefer having a tree-shaded backyard to a condo balcony.
He opened the front door he never locked. Anyone with the nerve to try and get by his one-hundred-and-thirty-pound bullmastiff deserved a chance to grab what they could before dying.
The dog nearly knocked him over with his enthusiastic greeting, and Brand went down on his knees and put his arms around him. They wrestled playfully for a few minutes, until Brand pushed away Beau, stood up and brushed off his clothes.
“You stink.”
The dog sighed with pleasure.
“I met a woman tonight, Beau,” he told the dog. “More terrifying than you.”
Beau cocked his head at him, interested.
“And that was before she laughed.”
Since the events of this evening were about the furthest thing from what he had expected when he’d headed out the door, it occurred to him that life was indeed full of little surprises. He had the renegade—and entirely uncomfortable—thought that maybe her cookies held predictions in them after all.
And he had eaten that one.
Happily-Ever-After.
But one lesson he had carried from his hardscrabble childhood, left far behind, was an important one.
Fairy tales belonged to other people. People like her.
Except, from the stricken look on her face when he’d asked her about her happily-ever-after, somehow her great ending had evaded her. Or she thought it had. She was way too young to have given up on a dream.
And it was none of his business why it had, or why she had given up hope on it, but he felt curiously invested—as if that night he had taken her to the prom, he had made a promise to her father, a man who had been so good to him, that he would look out for her.
Brand also felt, irrationally perhaps, that he had given Bree a dream he couldn’t have and she had let him down.
She was, in many ways other than just the high heels, very different. All grown up, as he had noted earlier. Her hair had been very long, but now, once she had let it down, he’d noticed it was shoulder-length and very stylishly cut. She used makeup well, and it made her cheekbones stand out, high and fine. She hadn’t had on lipstick when he’d first seen her, but when she had sat down across from him at the coffee shop, her lips had the faintest pink-tinged gloss on them, shining just enough to make a man’s eyes linger there for a moment.
And yet her eyes, huge and brown with no makeup at all, were almost exactly, hauntingly, as he remembered them—owlish and earnest, behind spectacles.
Almost, because now there was a new layer there. Sorrow. For her father, of course, but maybe something deeper, too.
She had pegged it. He’d never dated a girl like her before her prom, and to be honest, never had again.
“And I’m not about to start now,” he told the dog. He took off his jacket and threw it in a heap on the floor, then undid his shirt and took off his shoes and socks. He padded barefoot through his house.
The architect had kept the outer footprint of the house, as the historical society demanded, but the inside had been stripped to the bones and rebuilt in a way that honored the home’s roots, yet still had a clean, modern aesthetic.
The kitchen was no exception. Except for the Elvis cookie jar in the center of a huge granite island, his kitchen was a modern mecca of stainless steel and white cabinets, photo-shoot ready.
The designer had convinced him to go with a commercial kitchen, both for resale value and for ease of catering large events at his home. So far, there had been no large events at his home. As good as it sounded on paper, he didn’t like the idea of boisterous gatherings in his space. Home, for him, was a landing strip between business trips, one that was intensely private. It was what it had never been when he was growing up—a place of
quiet and predictability.
The cookie jar was stuffed with Girl Guide cookies. Brand shared a fondness for them with his dog, but he wondered if his enjoyment was now compromised for all time after sampling Bree’s wares. Not feeling ready to admit to that, Brand passed on the cookies, grabbed a beer from a fridge that could have stocked a cruise ship for a month and went to the media room.
The media room was bachelor heaven: deep reclining leather seats, set up theater style, and a wall-to-wall television set with surround sound. There were Elvis posters on every wall. He flopped into one of the chairs, while Beau took up guard in his dog bed at his feet. He turned on the TV set, and let the comforting rumble of sound fill the room. He flipped through to the hockey game that had been recorded in his absence.
“This is the life,” he told Beau, a little too forcefully.
Beau moaned, and he was aware of an echo, as if this room, filled with everything any man could ever want, was empty.
Bree had done that, made him aware of emptiness, in one single encounter.
If there was one thing Brand was really good at, in the business world and wherever else it mattered, it was heeding the subtle first tingles of a warning.
She was the kind of woman that would require more of a man.
No doubt most men would find her quite terrifying. That included him.
So, he knew what he had to do. Nothing. Absolutely nothing. Disengage. He’d already done way too much. In a moment of madness he’d actually given her his phone number. She had already shown she wasn’t afraid to use it.
Or maybe she had been afraid, and used it anyway, which was much, much worse.
See? That’s the kind of woman she was. Simple things could become complicated way too fast.
He thought of the new layer of sadness in her eyes. Was that from the death of her dad, or had something else happened to her? He thought of her trying to get that business off the ground by herself. He thought of her not having an answer about having fun. He thought of her assistant letting it slip that Bree was on a dating site, and was meeting losers who stiffed her with the bill. He thought about how good her father had been to him.
He took her business card out of his pocket. It was a well-done card. Glossy. Colorful. Professional. Memorable. Kookies for all occasions. Her number was already in his phone, because she had called him.
