Falling for You

by Travis, Stacy

  “You don’t need to do that. That’s not why I…”

  “Jen, I’m sending a goddamned gift. Just tell me if it’s a boy or a girl.”

  She hesitated, then probably gave up trying to get me to change my icy response to her. That wasn’t going to change. “It’s a girl. Lila.”

  “That’s a pretty name.” My voice still sounded stiff. If I didn’t know myself, I’d say it sounded like I was going to burst into tears at any moment.

  Get a grip, Owen. She left and never looked back. You don’t owe her anything.

  “Jen, I’m in the middle of a meeting, so maybe…maybe we can talk another time.” I said the words even though I didn’t mean them.

  “Sure.” She sounded hurt. What did she expect? “Call me whenever, okay?”

  I hung up the phone and wiped the sweat off my forehead. Still reeling from the strangeness of the call, I tried to refocus my mind on work before I reached the conference room.

  Looking down at my phone, I debated blocking her number so I wouldn’t have to deal with another ambush again.

  Instead, I entered it into my contacts list and went back to my meeting.

  Chapter 22

  Isla

  Over the next week, I started to rely on Owen’s presence in my life, even as I reminded myself that he wasn’t my boyfriend.

  He was my sounding board when I looked at other options for where I could expand Victorine if Centinela Bread was dead set on outbidding me on the locations I’d already scouted. I just had to hope the behemoth company wouldn’t stay on my heels and challenge me everywhere I tried to go.

  I came to rely on his comforting presence, his whip-smart brain, and his gorgeous body to make me happy, even on days when I got more bad news about my restaurant clients deciding to cancel their contracts to buy bread from me.

  He made me feel like I could weather the storm.

  So I decided it wasn’t too much of a risk to invite him to a family dinner night. My sisters and I had made rules about guests—specifically boyfriends—mainly because a few of us had had particularly bad luck after introducing someone we were dating to the rest of the pack.

  But those relationships probably had issues to begin with that had nothing to do with my family.

  At least that’s what I told myself when I invited Owen to come over. That, and the fact that he wasn’t my boyfriend. There was nothing to break up.

  Besides, I really wanted my sisters to know him. He’d been so good to me in the past few weeks, and thanks to Owen, I was happier than I’d been in a long time.

  “Is it time to talk about it?” Cherry asked me on our hike through the North Berkeley hills to Finn and Annie’s house. She’d agreed to the two-mile walk despite a big hill we’d reach in the second half.

  Cherry was always up for exercise as long as it didn’t feel like a workout. She preferred competitive sports for fun, hikes and walks where she was distracted by conversation, and anything that kept her out of a gym.

  For the moment, we were still buried amid tall trees that flanked the homes on Walnut Avenue, having just walked through Live Oak Park, one of my favorite nooks in North Berkeley. It was a little out of the way if we were intent on a direct route between Cherry’s house and Finn’s, but the whole point of walking was to deviate from the direct route.

  I also planned to have us walk through the Berkeley Rose Garden on Euclid if we had time. “Maybe Finn can terrace his hillside with roses once he’s done with that wraparound porch. What do you think?” I asked.

  “I’m not letting you change the subject,” Cherry said quietly, her breathing steady. She spent three mornings a week with a rowing club that competed locally and was in phenomenal shape.

  Eh, maybe we’d skip the rose garden if it meant she’d have less time for an interrogation.

  “I think I already did,” I said, walking a little faster. “I changed it to the subject of Finn’s porch. Let’s talk about that some more.”

  She picked up her pace to keep up with me. “You’re impossible. I’m just trying to help you do things the kinder, gentler way.”

  “What’s that supposed to mean?”

  “By talking to me. I could be telling you to go see a therapist, but the gentle way is to have a relaxed conversation while we walk up a hill. Are we stopping at the rose garden?” she asked, shifting the bottle of wine she’d brought from one hand to the other.

  Only Cherry would think nothing of carrying a wine bottle for two miles without putting it in a tote bag. She also thought nothing of doing the walk in cute boots with a two-inch heel and a cashmere scarf wound around her neck and trailing down her back. She looked fashionable no matter what she was doing, and she’d been that way since birth.

  I, on the other hand, was not too proud to wear an old pair of Chucks for our slog up the hill. At least I wouldn’t get blisters.

  I tried to change the subject again. “Cher, those jeans are cute. Have I seen them before?” She was wearing a loose-fitting pair of jeans rolled at the bottom.

  She cast me a side-eye. “That’s a funny question. Wouldn’t you know if you’d seen them before better than I would?”

  “Okay, Ms. Literal. I don’t think I’ve seen those before. Are they new?” I asked, enunciating my words for distinct clarity. She could be as big a pain in the ass as she wanted, as long as she wasn’t trying to force me to talk about personal stuff I preferred to leave buried.

  “They are new. From a very expensive shop that had no business charging as much as they did for ‘boyfriend jeans’ that probably did originate in some dude’s closet, though I’d prefer not to think of it. That’s what happens when you don’t have a boyfriend to give you his old stuff. You get reamed at retail.”

  “Eh, I’ve never had a boyfriend give me his old jeans. Boyfriend jeans are a myth.”

  We arrived at the rose garden, and I stopped to take in the sweeping expanse of greenery and roses budding in terraced rows heading down the hill before us. The upper level had a terraced overhang crawling with vining roses, and beneath each concentric half-circle of planter boxes, a path allowed for viewing and smelling each variety.

  “Finn should plant roses,” Cherry conceded.

  I walked down the path amid the tender blooms, completely ignoring the fact that I’d wanted to speed our walk. The flowers were too pretty to skip.

  Cherry checked the time and plunked down on a bench. “We’re early. That’s what you get for race-walking up the damn hill. Now I have you captive for the conversation you don’t want to have.” She patted the seat next to her.

  I could have walked away and pretended to be super interested in the Queen Elizabeth roses I knew were nestled in the lower tier of the garden, but Cherry was probably right. I had to talk to someone, she knew my history with Tom, and she’d also been the first one to suggest he might have something up his sleeve with all his attempts to reach out.

  “You need to stop avoiding Tom or you’ll never be done with him,” she said.

  She was right.

  I’d finally listened to Tom’s messages. He wasn’t asking to get back together. He was asking to help me. “He’s offering me funding so I can fend off Centinela Bread. If there’s anything I know Tom can do, it’s raise ridiculous sums of money.”

  He made it sound painless and easy to win back all the locations by matching or exceeding Centinela’s rent offers. It seemed crazy to get into a bidding war with a giant company, but Tom assured me that he knew how to handle a behemoth like Centinela.

  I actually felt relief at the idea of handing off the whole thing to him and moving on with my plans to expand.

  “How does he even know about Centinela? Did you tell him?”

  “No, but it’s Tom. He makes it his business to know about who’s raising money, who’s making acquisitions. Plus, he’s been hovering and trying to find his way back into my good graces, which won’t happen. Still, I have half a mind to take his money purely out of revenge.”


  “True, but then you’d be in bed with Tom.”

  I glared at her. “Hardly.”

  “Sorry, I just mean, do you want that entanglement? Isn’t there another way to raise the money?”

  “Not that I’ve come up with. But I’m still looking.”

  “Keep looking.”

  “Wow, hate Tom much?”

  She rolled her eyes. “After what he did to you, yes. The last thing I want to see is you back in a relationship with him.”

  “I’m not gonna date him.”

  “It doesn’t matter. It’s still an entanglement. He’ll be in your business, not just your bed, but your business that you worked your tail off to build. Do you really want that? You’ll never get rid of him. You don’t need that guy, regardless of what he might think.”

  She was right, of course. I didn’t want Tom anywhere near my business, but I was starting to run out of options. “No, I don’t want that. But sometimes it’s not about what I want. It’s about what’s best.”

  “I know.” She spoke quietly and turned to look at me. “I know you live a lot of your life logically, doing what you think you should do. I remember being a kid and watching you bake, and I don’t mean once you’d won the science fair and started really baking. I’m talking about when you discovered the Mixmaster mom had hidden in the back of the cabinet and started making cookies loaded with M&M’s and doused in colored sugar sprinkles. Your cookies were messy and gleeful and gorgeous. You were messy too. Total slob.”

  “I remember. I’d use one bowl to beat eggs and all the measuring cups and a sifter for the flour, which ended up everywhere. I hadn’t learned the magic of cleaning up as I went.”

  She laughed. “Don’t I know it. You were so bossy. If any of us wanted to eat whatever you’d made, you forced us to do all your dishes.”

  I held up an admonishing finger. “Hey, that’s the sign of a good kitchen steward. There’s no free lunch.” I inhaled a deep breath. There was no escaping the beauty of where we sat, no matter what direction the conversation went.

  “Whatever. I was eight. And you had me scrubbing mixing bowls for permission to eat a cookie.”

  I felt a little bit proud of my bossiness. “Yeah, I did love baking back then. It was different.”

  “Right? Because it was for fun. It wasn’t a business.” She stopped speaking abruptly and looked at me like she wanted to say more, but she turned back toward the water and said nothing.

  I nodded. “I know what you’re saying. But I do still love it. It’s just that I realized in order to make a living doing something I love, I had to deal with what I think of as market forces. Think of Tom as a market force.”

  She rolled her eyes and smacked my shoulder. “You’ve been drinking Finn’s econ nerd Kool-Aid.”

  “Oh, please. You work for a startup. You know that in order to make a business profitable, it can’t just be the whim of the creator. I have to run the business with customers in mind. Always. I can’t just bake cookies with crazy sprinkles all day long because they’re fun.”

  “You could though . . . I’d eat them and so would lots of other people.”

  The way she was talking reminded me of Owen. He had the same near-blind optimism about my potential, and some of the time I had a hard time seeing what he saw. But I did appreciate the effort he made to see it. It was what made my heart surge with joy just by thinking about him.

  Cherry looked at me and smiled. “Owen?”

  “Yeah. How’d you know?”

  “I know what love looks like, and it’s that. Your face.”

  It was crazy. We’d only been spending time together for a few weeks, but Cherry was right.

  I was falling in love with the guy. And falling without a net.

  Chapter 23

  Isla

  Owen had been at the new Sonoma property all day and was planning to meet me at Finn and Annie’s house on his drive back to the city.

  Annie, my four sisters, and I were sitting around Finn’s kitchen table with three open bottles of wine, two reds, and a white. Finn had gotten stuck in a faculty meeting on campus and wasn’t going to make it back in time to cook. Annie had offered to make the whole dinner herself, but we immediately voted her down.

  “Pizza and wine make a perfect dinner,” Becca said. She dialed Zachary’s on Solano. It was close by, and they delivered.

  “If I’d known, we could have picked it up,” I said. We’d passed right by Solano. Cherry looked at me like I was nuts. “What?” I asked.

  “You’d have made me carry four pizzas up the hill for two miles?”

  I shrugged. “You didn’t mind carrying wine for two miles in heels.”

  “That’s different. It’s wine.”

  I saw her point. Delivery it would be. “Are you really thinking we need four pizzas for seven people?” I asked the group. Zachary’s pizzas were stuffed deep dish Chicago style pies with layers of toppings, a second layer of dough and seasoned crushed tomatoes on top. We’d all grown up eating it, and Annie claimed it was one of the reasons she convinced Finn to move back to the Bay Area from Los Angeles.

  Becca rolled her eyes. “Yes, we’re ordering four. And now I’m thinking we need five. Are you making some kind of point, Island?” That was her nickname for me. When we were kids, it embarrassed me, but now I kind of loved that she still used it.

  “Fine, whatever. Get five. But I defy you to eat more than two pieces. That stuff’s filling. We’ll have at least two whole pies left over.”

  “Exactly my plan,” Becca said. “Blake will be jealous that we Zacharied without him, so I promised I’d bring some back.”

  We ordered an assortment of pizzas and Tatum topped off everyone’s wine glasses. Then Sarah and Cherry went with Annie to see what other wines we might want to pilfer from Finn’s collection before he got home. The rest of us stayed in the kitchen.

  “Wow, this could be dangerous on a hot day in the shade. I could drink a lot of it without realizing it,” Tatum said. I couldn’t imagine her doing that because she was a slave to her job in Silicon Valley, but I was happy to hear she was imagining a time when it might happen.

  I leaned back in my chair and sipped what turned out to be a sauvignon blanc that tasted like grapefruit. “I wasn’t expecting that taste. But if my time in the wine country taught me anything, it’s that I don’t know anything about wine.”

  “You know enough to drink it from a wineglass instead of a tumbler with a straw. That’s sufficient knowledge where I’m concerned,” Becca said.

  I lifted my glass in her direction.

  There was a faint knock at the front door, but it was loud enough to get my attention. “Oh, that must be Owen.”

  “Wait, you’re letting him come to a family dinner? Have you learned nothing? You know it’s the kiss of death to a boyfriend,” Becca said. Bringing Blake to dinner at my house when they were first dating almost ended their relationship.

  I waved her off. “I don’t believe in curses, and besides, we’re not officially dating, so the curse doesn’t apply.”

  “Suit yourself,” Becca said, but she looked wary. “And why aren’t you officially dating?” she yelled after me.

  “Because it’s only been three weeks since Tom,” Sarah yelled to her on her way back upstairs.

  Tatum followed me to the door. “I wanna meet him first. Is that cool?” She was following me regardless, which was typical of my sisters.

  “Sure. He’s a good guy. You’ll like him.”

  I opened the door and took in the sight of Owen in a pair of low-slung dark jeans with a belt and a button-up white shirt over a grey T-shirt. His hair was slicked back, and he wore aviator sunglasses. I unconsciously felt my heart sink at not being able to see his pretty eyes. But I was so happy to see the rest of him.

  He smiled when he saw me and pulled me in for a hug and a quick kiss on the lips. Then he looked over my shoulder at Tatum.

  “This is my youngest sister, Tatum,” I told Owen.
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  “The rest of the sibs will monopolize you so I wanted to get in my own hello first,” she said.

  After letting Tatum take in the full glory of his smile, I handed off Owen’s proffered chocolate mousse so she could put it in the fridge. Then I stepped out onto the porch and closed the door behind us.

  “Hey.” I hugged him and gave him the kiss I’d longed for all day. It only make me hungry for more, so I wistfully looked in the direction of his car, contemplating an escape.

  “Are you going to invite me in? Not that I’m opposed to doing this for a lot longer.” His hand glided along my jaw, cupping my face as he bent to kiss me again.

  When he finally pulled away, his eyes went to the front door, which I made no move to open. Then he looked at me.

  “So…?” he asked.

  All I could think of was the earlier comments about the curse. It was insane. There was nothing to it. Right?

  “Okay, full disclosure… My sisters seem to think there’s some kind of family curse that will rear up with you being here. The family dinner has led to some breakups.”

  He cast his eyes down so I couldn’t read into them. When he looked up, his expression was serious. “Do you believe in it, this curse?”

  “Not really. It’s kind of a joke, mostly, but I like you too much to take a chance.”

  His eyes softened and he bit his lip, nodding. “Then we shouldn’t risk it.” He looked like he wanted to say more, but he pressed his lips together and watched me.

  I couldn’t hide my shock. “Really? One mention of a curse and you fold? I had no idea you were that superstitious.”

  He shrugged. “Not superstitious, just practical. I want to meet your sisters, but not at what sounds like great personal risk.” His eyes danced with amusement.

  “Okay, forget I said anything. There’s no curse. It’s ridiculous. In fact, the real thing you should be worried about is spending two hours with my sisters. They can be a bit much.”

  He laughed. “I’m all in for that, curse or no curse. I want to meet these hellions of whom you speak. I bet they’ll behave.”