“Hey, did you see the dirt on Tom Stone? Finally got some bad ink for being a cheating asshole. Figured you’d enjoy that comeuppance,” Raf said.
I didn’t enjoy it, not when it led to the look I saw on Isla’s face earlier.
“Dude, all good?” Rafael asked. I realized I was still standing over his temporary desk and staring at his piles of paper which he probably found unnerving.
I nodded and backed away from his desk. “Yup, all good. Saw the Tom Stone thing—guy’s a Grade A douche.”
A douche who doesn’t deserve a woman like Isla Finley.
Raf was staring at me. Had he asked me something else? “Sorry, didn’t sleep enough. Need coffee.”
“Don’t have that flavored shit that’s in the first drawer. It tastes like moldy blueberries,” he said, going back to his files.
“Noted. Thanks,” I said, making my way to the kitchen. I’d bought the flavored coffee and happened to like it, but I didn’t want to get into it with him. We had a new hotel to build and I needed to find a new company that would give us a decent deal on mattresses that normally cost ten grand apiece.
I looked at the clock and made a mental bet with myself that I could get it done by lunch.
* * *
Two hours later, I’d gotten a decent deal on organic, handmade mattresses, talked a developer into selling a piece of land at a discounted price, and put out fires at three different hotel locations where the in-house restaurants were spending too much money on ingredients and not making it up in wine sales.
There was an ebb and flow to these things. We lost money on Wagyu beef and hangar steak but we made it up on locally sourced salads and wines.
It was all in the story. We were running curated vacation destinations that made people feel like they’d left their lives behind and entered a haven of sustainable farming, lavender spa therapies, and food as medicine.
The customers needed to buy into the farm-to-table philosophy or they wouldn’t spend the money on heirloom greens.
We were falling short there, and it wasn’t something one phone call was going to solve. I needed to visit the properties and rewrite our entire marketing strategy to speak to the right customers. Preferably by yesterday.
No wonder I preferred to escape it all to hang out and eat bread. I rubbed my eyes and tried to decide if it would make me look like a charming, dedicated customer if I started showing up twice a day or if I’d look desperate and pathetic. Probably the latter.
My mind was drifting back to Isla when Julia knocked on the doorframe of my office and waited until I invited her in with a wave. Even then, she looked hesitant.
“I apologize, I know I’m not on your calendar,” she said. Having worked for a stodgy architecture firm for a year, Julia had a hard time breaking out of a corporate mold.
“No one here is on my calendar. What’s up?”
She stammered and stood stiffly in the doorway and I marveled, as I always did, at how uncomfortable and formal she was, despite the fact that our workplace was anything but. Her dark brown hair fell in a shoulder-length bob and she wore a navy blue dress with a scarf tied around her neck. She could’ve moonlighted as a flight attendant at Delta Airlines, except that at barely five feet tall, she’d be too short to reach the overhead bins.
Julia was a contradiction if I ever saw one—probably the most artistic person I’d met with a degree in architecture and a self-proclaimed heavy metal music fan, who wore conservative clothes and was scared to death of people. She was one of my favorite hires at the company, mainly because I’d yet to figure her out.
I pointed to one of the chairs on wheels that were out in the hall. “Come. Have a seat. Did you bring sketches?”
She brought the chair over and presented the tube of drawings as if it were a gift. “Yes. I have a couple alternates for the new location.”
She was still sitting about nine feet away from me. I waved her over and stood up so we could unroll the sketches and look at them on my desk.
“This one has a bigger footprint, but because of the way it’s facing and the option of putting up solar panels, it’s more cost-effective to build but it would have fewer rooms.”
“Why fewer rooms if it’s a bigger building?”
“Just the way it lays out. There’s wasted space, but the aesthetics are better.” She’d also brought three dimensional renderings that showed what the building would look like from the ground, which was crucial for someone like me who only knew what I liked once I could see it.
“And this version costs more to build but it looks worse?” I asked pointing to the other sketch.
She looked guilty at my conclusion. “Yes. In my opinion, it’s less pleasing, but I’m only one person.”
“You’re the one with vision and a degree in this stuff. That’s why I need your opinion. “
She blushed and started to back away, leaving me with the drawings. “I’m going to work on a few more ideas. I just wanted you to see what I had so far,” she said, backing up some more until she was in the doorway.
She was so strange and oddly intriguing, maybe because I had no fucking idea what was up with her.
“Great. Thanks.” I waved but she’d already turned around and scurried away. I squeezed my eyes shut, as if I could open them to some sort of clarity on her weirdness.
“She’s got the hots for you,” Raf said, striding into my office without knocking.
I looked at him like he was nuts, which he clearly was if he thought Julia’s behavior was some sort of mating call. “I’m gonna say no to that. But man, is she . . .”
“Awkward in a completely sexy and awesome way? So crazy town that she might be a serial killer, might not? Buttoned up at work but hot in bed?” he asked.
“I was going to say strange. But now I see where the hopped up pheromones are hiding out,” I said.
He shrugged. “Yeah, sure. I’d tap that if it was an option, but it’s probably not. So be it. I might be getting beers later with a couple of the guys if you’re interested. Did you finish looking over the numbers?”
Raf’s brain was a meat grinder of thoughts that came out in no particular order but somehow all made sense and didn’t waste valuable words.
“No to the beer, almost done with the numbers, but I might want to add in a few new costs, so prepare for that. I’ll tell you more when I know what I’m doing.”
“Cool, man. But trust me on the Julia thing. She’s weird with everyone, but she’s especially strange with you. Just something to think about . . .” He left my office as abruptly as he’d appeared. Maybe everyone I worked with was weird. The last thing I needed was to consider dating an employee, especially someone who acted the strangest around me.
Besides, I was pretty sure she didn’t bake bread.
Chapter 4
Isla
The saving grace of my job was that I was so busy all day baking and talking to people that I didn’t have time to think about much else. It was my Zen place, my version of meditation.
Being all-consumed was key on days when boyfriends were caught cheating and my cell phone was buzzing nonstop with social media updates, calls from a couple gossip-hungry reporters, worried check-ins from friends, and even a few photographers outside the café taking pictures.
It still struck me as nutty that relationship drama between a financial guy and a baker would qualify as social media fodder. But when the financial guy was a billionaire and a player, people followed the money.
Now I had messages from gossip blogs asking for comment. Anything pithy and sassy I might have wanted to say about Tom would only fan the flames and lead to more attention, so I said nothing.
But when things slowed down toward the end of the day, my resistance caved.
My baked-on armor melted away and I was left with the visual of him with his lips all over some tall blonde.
I went back to my phone and by now there were more salacious details about the Swedish model that Tom Stone was linke
d with, in addition to some older photos of me with Tom at a charity event. According to social media gossip, Tom and the model had met in New York a month ago and had been seeing each other on the down low ever since.
The painful realization that he’d been seeing her behind my back made me feel sick.
“You okay, cherie?” Camille asked, looking past me to where Tom was now standing outside the bakery. She was wrapping her scarf around her neck and getting ready to leave.
He didn’t hesitate before pulling the heavy door open and flashing a broad smile like he owned the place.
She put a hand on my shoulder. “You want me to stay? When he’s gone, we can drink absinthe in the back and bake something really weird.”
I laughed. “I do want to do that with you someday, but nah, I’m good. Your twelve-hour day ends now.”
She kissed me on both cheeks and glared at Tom before heading out. He had the good sense to look contrite, but just barely.
“No. Not who I want to see right now,” I said with my arms folded as Tom stood there the way he had so many times before when he’d met me after work and whisked me off to some fancy dinner at a new restaurant. He always knew where the hottest tables were in San Francisco and he always got reservations.
“Isla, please. I need to explain,” he said extending his hands to me.
I shook my head. “I’m not sure what explanation you could possibly have that would make cheating okay.”
He reached a hand out and touched my shoulder, but I backed up a step. “I had a plan . . .”
WTF, he had a plan?
“Oh, tell me, Tom. Tell me about your plan. I’m fascinated.” I couldn’t keep the sarcasm from my voice.
“Can we just . . . let’s sit and talk somewhere.” He looked around the room like some five-star options were going to magically materialize. I gestured to the rustic tables for two against the walls.
He walked over to a table and pulled out a chair for me, ever chivalrous. I took the one on the other side and he glared at me. “That’s mature.”
“Says the man with high school bleacher moves. So explain your plan or whatever the hell you have to say and go, please,” I said.
He ran his hands through his hair, which I knew he did when he was aggravated. Since I’d known him, I’d seen him do it a hundred times while he was on the phone with investors or recalcitrant startup founders. But never with me.
Now I’d become frustrating just like the people he dealt with every day.
“I’ve only been seeing Giselle for a month,” he said. As though I wanted to know her name and bra size. She and I were not going to become shopping buddies, getting mani-pedis on the weekends.
I blew out a breath and shook my head. “Only? A month is a long time when you’re still having sex with your girlfriend and sleeping in her bed.”
The scumbag.
“I had standards. I never spent the night with her. I wouldn’t do that. We only met in hotels. It was tawdry, I admit.” He kept his voice calm and even, like he was telling me a relaxing bedtime story.
“It astounds me that you somehow think that makes it better.”
“That’s not what I meant. I meant that I had what I assumed was a fleeting interest in her and I thought if I acted on it, I could put it in its place as a mere distraction and move on to a more substantial future with you. It was like a safety check to make sure I could only be tempted physically, not emotionally. My heart belongs to you. Being with Giselle made me certain. I want a future with you.” He folded his hands when he was done talking.
Tom presented his explanation so matter-of-factly it felt like he was trying to sell me on an investment. It was why he was so successful as a venture capitalist—he made his reasoning sound logical and even flattering.
Also insane.
“That’s how every cheater rationalizes it. If you wanted a substantial future, cheating was not the way to get there,” I said. As I heard my own voice, I realized that in his backward way, he was proposing the long-term relationship I thought I should have by thirty-five.
But I didn’t want it with him. I didn’t want anything to do with him.
I just wanted to make sure he knew his logic was flawed.
Then he could go fuck himself.
He tipped back in his chair and nodded, conceding. “I know. I’m sorry. Like I said, this wasn’t how I wanted it all to go down.”
“Meaning, you wanted to dump me yourself instead of having me see photo proof that you’re an asshole? Or you wanted to have me see the photos, say everything’s still cool, and work out how to be a throuple? Sorry Tom, not doing that.”
He ran a hand through his hair again. It made me smile. I liked that I was aggravating him. It was more emotion than I’d seen from him in weeks. Maybe ever.
“So now what? Is there any way to repair this?” he asked. His voice was strained and irritated, which I found funny since he had no right to be annoyed with me, and yet, he was always self-righteous about business.
I’d become a piece of business to him, a problem to be solved, a possession to be secured so he could check it off his list.
“Giselle . . . she was just entertainment. You’re the kind of woman I belong with.”
I shook my head. “See, that’s the problem, Tom. I’m not a real person to you. I’m just the kind of person you think you should be with. That’s not the same as love.”
He huffed a laugh as though I’d just said something completely ridiculous. Then he shook his head and wagged a finger at me like he was lecturing a stupid person.
“No. You and I agreed. We wanted the fun. The good times. And we have that. We look good as a couple. We’re both professionals and it works well for both of us.”
I closed my eyes and took a deep breath. “That was the conversation we had in the first three weeks of dating, the time when no one thinks about anything other than fun. It’s been a year, Tom. Fun doesn’t work for me. Not anymore.”
Tom looked annoyed. He wasn’t used to people disagreeing with him.
He was a smooth talker and he was accustomed to breezing into a room, making a convincing argument, and having everyone—male and female alike—swoon at his feet and tell him he was the greatest thing they’d ever encountered.
Well, that’s not me.
Tom rolled his eyes like he’d drawn a bad poker hand. “Do you need a bigger apology? Do you need a fucking diamond on your hand, is that what this is about? Tell me what we do from here.”
“Um, we do nothing,” I said because he didn’t seem to see how obvious it was that we were done. “I should have called time of death on us months ago, but I got lazy. I’m sorry for that because it wasn’t fair to either one of us. And if I’d done what I should have back then, I’d have saved myself some embarrassment. But the end result is the same.”
He looked confused. He actually seemed to think he was going to apologize for getting caught on camera and “acting on a fleeting interest” and we’d be back on track. He wasn’t used to unplanned outcomes, and I wasn’t giving him what he wanted. “So . . . you don’t want the ring?” he asked.
“No, Tom. No ring. I want you to go,” I said, getting up from the table. We really hadn’t needed to sit and now I wanted to be back on my feet. I needed to move around.
I wanted to punch some dough. Or Tom’s pretty face.
“It’s just . . .” He shook his head. He had too much pride to engage in a losing battle. “Okay then. I regret that it didn’t work out for us,” he said.
I choked out a laugh. “Really? Was that regret I saw on your face in the photos? Didn’t really look like it.”
He was staring at me like I was an out-of-control toddler. “Are you quite finished now?”
“Quite. Or possibly not. I’m not sure.” I saw no reason to make it any easier for him.
You were going to break up with him anyway. Just let it go.
And yet…I couldn’t let it go. I was too angry. And that anger ne
eded to have its due.
“You know what, Tom? I am finished. Completely finished. So even though this wasn’t the way I would have liked things to end, I’m glad to be free finally.”
He looked dumbfounded and it wasn’t a good look on him. “Okay, well, maybe we can talk down the line…”
“Sure, sounds good,” I said even though I had no interest in keeping in touch. He leaned over and kissed me on the cheek. I didn’t move to hug him or show him any of the affection I’d planned to bestow when I’d imagined our breakup last night. I didn’t have warm feelings for him anymore.
“Okay, well, I guess this is goodbye.” He focused his eyes on mine almost like he was daring me to disagree. Instead, I nodded. Left with no other options, he turned and went for the door.
I watched it close behind him with a mixture of relief and the grief that always came with endings, even when they were expected. I had to shake that off, and the best way I knew to do that was either running or baking.
Sex was also a good option, but probably not a viable one, given the situation.
I preferred the long weekend runs I usually went on with my running club, and they met over in Oakland, which wasn’t quite as hilly as my neighborhood route, but I liked the camaraderie. Plus, it had gotten dark between the time Tom had shown up and the time he left.
I wasn’t a huge fan of running in darkness, even though my sister Becca had bought me a headlamp for the purpose. I found that somehow I tripped on cracks in the sidewalk more often when I wore the headlamp than when I didn’t.
All of that is to say that I rationalized myself out of running. So baking it would be. I headed to the kitchen to see what trouble I could get myself into now that everything had been put away for the night.
Before long, a noise came from the front of the shop. It sounded like a knock on the glass. I wasn’t worried about intruders because the front door self-locked at six as a matter of safety. Ideally, I’d have left by six, but lately it hadn’t happened very often.
Falling for You Page 3