If I Loved You Less

by Tamsen Parker

  If I Loved You Less

  Tamsen Parker

  Copyright © 2018 by Tamsen Parker

  All rights reserved.

  No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means, including information storage and retrieval systems, without written permission from the author, except for the use of brief quotations in a book review.

  Created with Vellum

  Contents

  About This Book

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  Chapter 19

  Chapter 20

  Chapter 21

  Epilogue

  Also by Tamsen Parker

  About This Book

  Matchmaking? Check. Surfing? Check. Falling in love? As if.

  Sunny, striking, and satisfied with her life in paradise, Theodosia Sullivan sees no need for marriage. She does, however, relish serving as matchmaker for everyone who crosses her path. As the manager of her family’s surf shop in Hanalei Bay, that includes locals and tourists alike.

  One person she won’t be playing Cupid for is the equally happy bachelorette down the street. Baker Kini ʻŌpūnui has been the owner of Queen’s Sweet Shop since her parents passed away and her younger brother married Theo’s older sister and moved to Oahu. Kini’s ready smile, haupia shortbread, and lilikoi malasadas are staples of Hanalei’s main street.

  However, Theo’s matchmaking machinations and social scheming soon become less charming—even hazardous—to everyone involved. And when she fails to heed Kini’s warnings about her meddling, she may be more successful than she ever intended. Theo has to face the prospect of Kini ending up with someone else, just as she realizes she’s loved Kini all along.

  For my parents. I hope you like this book, because I’m never writing a book with no sex in it ever again.

  Chapter One

  “This cake is frigging amazeballs.”

  “Theo—”

  Theo waved her father away with a fork that was still streaked with white frosting.

  “I know, I know.” She swallowed so her father wouldn’t scold her for eating cake and talking with her mouth full. Because if the processed sugar or the gluten or the butter didn’t kill her, surely choking on the best freaking cake she’d ever had in her life would. But seriously? What a way to go. She’d never tasted anything like it. Kini had really outdone herself, which was saying something. “I’ll only have the one piece, and it’s not even a big piece. But it’s a wedding, Pops. Lighten up.”

  Somewhere between his moustache and his beard, her father’s mouth tightened in disapproval. “It’s bad enough poor Charlotte had to leave us. I can’t believe Jim insisted they also have cake at their reception. You know Charlotte agrees with me on healthy eating; this couldn’t have been her idea.”

  Theo answered by shoving another bite of cake in her mouth—she wasn’t going to rat out Charlotte. After all, Charlotte had been her nanny when she was little, and after Theo had grown up enough not to need a nanny, Charlotte continued to live in the cozy apartment tacked onto their ramshackle house/surf shop. The rent was cheap, which was nice since it wasn’t like she was making good money teaching at the elementary school. Well, she had lived there, until today. Hence all the poor Charlotte-ing. Never mind that Charlotte was moving in with Jim, who had a house ten times the size of Charlotte’s tiny apartment. Not to mention Jim was a really good guy. One of the best on the island. Except Theo’s dad, of course, even if he was being eye-roll-inducing at the moment. He really did mean well. And he loved Jim, despite the fact that they fundamentally disagreed on cake.

  With a final scrape of her fork, Theo took up the rest of the frosting clinging to the plate and sucked every last smear of it off the tines. She tried not to provoke her dad, she really did, but this cake was so worth it. Besides, the dancing would start soon, and he’d be able to fret over all the women in their best slippers and whether everyone was warm enough despite that it was a perfect evening. Like tourists-snapping-a-zillion-pics perfect. He’d forget all about the great cake peril.

  Luckily for her, before he could get another word in, Jim and Charlotte came by their table, and her father did love to hold court.

  Charlotte was glowing, her brown hair all twisted up with plumeria tucked into some of the shiny swirls and loose tendrils blowing around her face in the light breeze. Her smile was almost blinding, and it hadn’t faded at all during the evening. Jim looked just as happy with his maile lei draped around his neck, even though his son hadn’t been able to make it for the wedding. Something to do with Austin’s fussy mom, which was a big bummer for Jim and a lesser bummer for Theo who’d known Austin as a toddler and had idealized him a bit ever since based on Jim’s stories and the elusiveness of his twenty-year absence.

  Despite Austin being a no-show, Jim looked unbothered, happy to be with his new bride. He was wearing a suit instead of aloha wear as a nod to Charlotte’s mainland parents, who seemed to think aloha wear was somehow disrespectful in a church, but he’d swapped out his dress shoes for slippers, which was good, because the real shoes thing had kind of freaked Theo out. She couldn’t remember the last time she couldn’t see Jim’s toes.

  “Congratulations, you two,” Theo said, as she stood to give both of them hugs. She felt pretty smug herself, knowing she’d orchestrated this match. “Are you going to change your name, Charlotte? I totally forgot to ask.”

  Charlotte flushed and glanced at Jim, who grinned back. “I am. I’m kind of excited about being Mrs. Inoue, though the keiki will probably still call me Miss Taylor.”

  “And who could blame them?” Theo’s dad tutted. “Too much change isn’t good for a person. So you know, Charlotte, you don’t have to do this all at once. You could keep some of your things in your apartment for a while if you—”

  Theo hushed her father with a hand on his shoulder and a dirty look. “Pops, it’s fine. Charlotte and Jim are going to be very happy together. And it’s not like Charlotte will be far. It’s not even the other side of town. You could walk if you felt like it.”

  Yeah, right. It had been hard enough to get her father out of the house to come to the wedding. Him walking halfway across town for anything less than a life-changing event would be a high-level miracle. And she got it, she really did. He’d been like this pretty much since her mom had died, and it was only through Charlotte’s social nature that Theo hadn’t become a hermit herself. Not a complete hermit, anyway. It was a little pathetic that she’d never left Kauai and rarely crossed the Hanalei Bridge, but honestly, why would she? It was paradise here, and she had everything she needed. No reason to go gallivanting off anywhere else.

  Besides, it might kill her dad if both his daughters left him. It had been bad enough when Eliza had left the islands to go to law school and had barely come home, but then she and Kai had gotten married and moved to Honolulu. Not exactly the other side of the Earth, but as far as Dermot Sullivan was concerned, she may as well have gone to the moon. They hadn’t even made it back for Charlotte and Jim’s wedding. Something about a big case. Whatever. If Charlotte and Jim weren’t upset about it, Theo wasn’t going to be either.

  She hugged Charlotte and Jim again and urged them to go see their other guests, although a pang of sadness hit her as she did. Rationally, Theo knew Charlotte wasn
’t going far. As she’d told her father, it was an easy walk to the Inoues’ house and even easier to the gallery Jim owned or the elementary school where she sometimes had lunch with Charlotte. It would be fine.

  Sadness wasn’t really a thing for Theo anyhow. Her life was pretty great, and if the worst thing that happened to her was that her bestie/replacement mom lived a few hundred yards away instead of a few feet, then she was really freaking lucky. It wasn’t, of course, the worst thing that had ever happened to her, but it’s not as if she remembered her mom going out on a big-wave surfing expedition and not coming home. No, she’d been a toddler then, and her disposition had always tended toward the sunny and cheerful.

  Eliza had been older, so she carried a haze of loss with her that had cleared over the years, though a fog of melancholy rolled in from time to time. Their father was the one who’d been stuck in a never-lifting gloom of grief, though he tried not to show it. You wouldn’t know chipper and chatty Dermot Sullivan was depressed unless you understood all his fretting was really covering up his heart-shattering loss.

  It wasn’t something Theo liked to dwell on. She took care of her father as well as she could, and there was no reason for her to ever leave, so it was a nonissue really. Moot. And even though weddings sometimes brought the worry to the forefront, he wasn’t doing too badly tonight, and besides, the band had started playing.

  She jumped up from her seat, eager for the excuse, and laid a kiss on her dad’s cheek, right above the scruffy line of his snowy beard. “Don’t worry, I’ll be careful not to twist an ankle, swear.”

  Chapter Two

  It was easier to say you wouldn’t miss someone than to actually not miss them.

  Theo kicked the wooden counter at the shop as she perched on her stool, waiting for customers. It was a slow-ish time. Not the high season when the snowbirds from SoCal came to the island, and it was a weekday so the people with weekend condos and cottages were back on Oahu or in California or wherever they flew in from.

  Her next lesson wasn’t until two, and the shop was quiet. Too quiet.

  She’d already tidied up, done the books, and ordered some new inventory. Charlotte and Jim were on their honeymoon, so she couldn’t even stop by their house or the gallery. She didn’t feel like listening to Beatrice drone on about her niece’s latest and greatest accomplishments—not to mention that Bea’s cluttered house made her skin crawl—but Theo was approaching desperate. Maybe being forced to read the printout of Jessica’s latest email—why did Bea always have to print them out? The poor trees—wouldn’t be so bad. Preferable to the boredom of kicking around here for another few hours. It’s not like anyone would miss her if she was out. After all, they knew she’d return soon-ish if the surfboard sign on the front door were flipped over to the “Be Back in Ten Hawaiian Minutes” side.

  She could go to the bakery, but she didn’t want to annoy Kini. Not that she ever seemed annoyed with Theo. Not really, even though Theo had been wreaking havoc on Kini’s serene existence since she was born when Kini was fourteen.

  Indeed, Kini’s patience with her seemed almost limitless. Except when Theo was being a brat. Even then, Kini would purse her lips and shake her head, making the huge coiled bun on her head wobble. Then she’d hand Theo an apron and tell her to at least help if she was going to run her mouth. That didn’t sound so bad. Hanging out in the bakery, being put to work instead of maybe getting a splinter in her toe from kicking the counter.

  Putting on her slippers, she shoved her cell in a pocket of her jean cutoffs and headed for the door. Theo was about to flip the surfboard sign when someone behind her cleared their throat. She turned to find a girl, about her age, maybe a little younger, standing there with a sheaf of papers in her hands. She wasn’t from Hanalei for sure, and even with her East Asian features, Theo didn’t think she was a local. Not with that skirt suit and definitely not with those close-toed kitten heels. Could be from Honolulu, but that didn’t feel right either. The girl looked like she’d fallen out of one of the mainland shops where people who had office jobs bought their clothes. Maybe a tourist, but what was with the papers?

  “Aloha.”

  “Uh, hi, aloha, I mean, hi, I’m…” The girl stuck a hand out and dropped all her papers. Wow. She was pretty, but kind of a mess. She started muttering under her breath about being a disaster as she scrambled to pick up all the fluttering sheets and tried to resettle her glasses on the bridge of her nose.

  Theo crouched to help her retrieve the rest of the papers and caught a glimpse at the top of one. Laurel Kim. A local address, but she definitely wasn’t from here because Theo knew everyone who was. New? And there was a whole list of jobs and schools and skills and other stuff on the page. A résumé.

  She handed the papers over to the girl with a smile, because she was struggling and still mumbling, now more loudly and in Theo’s general direction. “Thank you, sorry, I, um, I’m…”

  Shuffling the papers into a semblance of order, the girl almost seemed like she needed to reference the pages before she remembered her own name. Yep, hot mess.

  “Let me guess. Laurel Kim?”

  “How did you know? I heard word got around here fast, but I didn’t think—”

  “Yeah, the coconut wireless is good, but I saw it on your papers. So you’re Laurel?”

  The shiny black bob of a haircut Laurel was rocking danced as she shook her head, and her tawny beige cheeks colored a ruddy pink. She squeezed her dark eyes shut behind her glasses and wrinkled her nose before she looked at Theo again. “Yes, I’m Laurel. Laurel Kim. I just moved here, and I’m looking for a job. I know you don’t have a Help Wanted sign out front or anything, but I thought maybe you might have something?”

  Oh. Theo and her dad had never had another helper in the shop, and they probably didn’t need to hire someone full-time, but… A lightbulb practically burst above Theo’s head.

  She linked her arm through Laurel’s—the one that wasn’t clutching the dozens of copies of her résumé. “I was about to go out for lunch. Why don’t you come with me, and we can talk about it?”

  Theo took advantage of the walk to grill Laurel. Nicely, of course. But she needed to know what her deal was. A girl shows up looking like she should be interning at a law firm or something but is applying for a job at a surf shop that doesn’t even have an opening? Gossip was absolutely her jam, and she was determined to get the scoop on Laurel.

  “So where are you from?”

  Laurel tripped and almost dropped all her résumés again, but managed to right herself in time. “I grew up in northern California, but I went to college in Boston.”

  “And you ended up here how?”

  Laurel’s frown was pathetic. “I couldn’t take it anymore. The weather was dismal, the pressure was out of control, and I couldn’t stand my major. It was awful. I…I know I shouldn’t have, but I dropped out and came home. When I showed up on my parents’ doorstep, they freaked.”

  “Dude, that sucks. I’m sorry.”

  So Laurel was a college dropout, which was further than Theo had ever gotten in school. It had been bad enough hauling ass to Kapaa for four years for high school, her dad admonishing her every morning to be careful on the half-hour-plus drive. At least she’d gotten a sweet ride out of it—a Jeep that she still drove because it’s not like she put many miles on it.

  If she’d gone to college and been unhappy and quit, her dad wouldn’t have done anything except welcome her back and tell her they’d figure something else out. She couldn’t imagine someone’s parents turning them out if they hadn’t done what was expected of them. But from what she’d heard about Austin’s control-freak mom, it sounded as though she was like that and imagining this happening to her childhood BFF made her skin crawl.

  She had only fuzzy memories of running around on the beach naked with Austin when they were toddlers, constructing massive sandcastles and sharing each other’s shave ice, but there was photographic evidence that all of that had happ
ened, and she’d always harbored a slightly unhealthy curiosity about Austin’s life and a yen for him to come back. But this wasn’t about Austin, it was about Laurel, and yeah, them losing their shit when she’d already felt awful was the pits.

  “Yeah. So I bought a plane ticket out here, figuring I’d just chill until the semester was over and then maybe transfer somewhere else? But…” Laurel’s eyes popped behind her glasses.

  Theo nodded knowingly. She was used to tourists complaining about prices on vacation. Or the odd mainlander who moved here thinking they could set up a bed-and-breakfast, have a few visitors, and make ends meet. Most of them were sorely disappointed and ended up back onshore. “Oh, yeah. It’s hella expensive here. Even more than California. Paradise tax.”

  “I thought I had enough in savings to last me a while, but I’m only twenty-one so I’ve never had, like, a real full-time job, and—”

  Uh-oh. Laurel’s voice had become unsteady and her chin wavered. That wouldn’t do.

  Theo slung an arm around the girl’s shoulders. “Hey. Don’t worry. We’ll find you something, and you’ll be able to stay. You walked into the right shop because I know some people.”

  Queen’s smelled the same way it always did—delicious and as familiar as her own home. Theo directed Laurel to dump her stuff at one of the small tables and waltzed up to the counter. There wasn’t anyone standing there to wait on customers, and she was tempted to walk behind the counter and serve herself because, dammit, she was hungry, but she didn’t want to set a bad example for Laurel. Theo had earned the privilege of being able to treat Queen’s like her personal pantry, but Kini would not take kindly to some stranger wandering around her establishment.