by Lucy Score
Eden squirmed in her seat. “I do have feelings for you,” she said, choosing her words carefully. “I can see us being… friends. But how would us staying together teach the Beautification Committee anything? They’d see it as a victory and just line up the next victims, start their next fire.”
Davis’s jaw clenched and released. “That’s your priority?”
“It’s our priority! That’s what started this whole thing. I don’t want to quit until we’ve achieved what we set out to do. Teaching them not to meddle in people’s lives. We’re saving an entire town from well-intentioned arson.”
“I get that. Just like I get that you’re looking at this as a way to kind of rewrite your own history.”
“That’s not what I’m doing,” she argued. It was exactly what she was doing. But he owed her. Because of him, she’d spent her entire adulthood thus far trying to prove herself to an entire town who was content to think of her as a vindictive teenage arsonist.
It was her turn to have people like her, appreciate her, believe in her. And if that was selfish of her, then so what?
“Eden, who really wins in that scenario? I still won’t have my house rebuilt. You’ll be a victim in the eyes of the whole town. And the Beautification Committee will implode after one blemish on their record. But, if we give us a real shot, don’t we both win? We have something here.” He lifted her hand to his mouth, kissed her knuckles.
“You haven’t thought this through,” Eden began. “Things are complicated. Do you want to reward the Beautification Committee for pulling strings and setting fires? Do you want to bitterly disappoint your parents? Because I’m guessing that my parents are a walk in the park compared to yours. And what if I say yes? What if I’m all in, and then your parents come home and you change your mind?”
“I was eighteen, Eden. I was stupid and immature. I know better now.”
She sat up straighter. “Do you? You tiptoe around your father every day. Planting secret grapes, lying to him to protect his fragile health, banking good ideas for the one day that he might be open to hearing them. You’re no better at standing up to your parents now than you were at eighteen.”
Davis looked down at their joined hands and slowly withdrew his. The abandonment hurt her heart. But he had to hear her.
“Can they recover from the disappointment, the betrayal? Could we? Because I know what will happen. If you choose me now, our families will find a way to make us regret it. And eventually, we’ll resent each other for it. Am I worth hurting your family over?” She took a deep breath, let it out slowly. “Because I don’t know if you’re worth hurting mine.”
His jaw clenched. He needed to understand. This wasn’t the plan. They weren’t in the cards.
“If that’s what you want,” he said flatly.
“It’s what we want,” she said, hating the fact that she missed his touch already.
“So, we’re breaking up,” he said, leveling a long look at her.
“It’s not like we have to go back to being mortal enemies after HeHa. I mean, we’ve already done that,” she joked.
“Right. Ha.”
“And there’s no reason why we can’t continue enjoying… the status quo until next week,” she ventured.
“Actually, I don’t think that’s a good idea. One of us is obviously more attached to the status quo than the other. And if you don’t see a future for us, I don’t see a present.” He stood abruptly.
She scrambled to her feet after him. “What about HeHa? What about the… plan?” She felt like an asshole even asking.
“Don’t worry. By this time next week, you’ll have everything you wanted,” he said grimly. “Good night, Eden.”
Davis Gates was too good to even slam the door, Eden thought, as it quietly clicked shut behind him. She’d rejected him, insulted him, and then reminded him she still needed to use him as a tool for revenge. And he was too damn gracious to even slam her door.
Where was this tightness in her chest coming from? They were a team. They had a goal. They couldn’t just give up now. Not when she was this close to having every wrong in her life righted. It wasn’t fair of him to ask her to give it all up.
Shit.
She sank back down on the couch and picked up one of the happily bubbling glasses of champagne that taunted her. She’d gone from celebrating a victory to drowning her sorrow.
44
It was the second skillet of eggs she’d charbroiled. But Eden couldn’t really rouse herself to care as she scraped the burnt mess into the trashcan. Even Chewy turned his never-discerning nose up at the pan.
She dumped the pan into the sink and shoved her hands into her hair, mindful of the headache that had been her only companion recently. It had been three days. Three miserable days since she’d told Davis they had no future. And then he’d gone and got all righteous on her, claiming that they had no present.
“Just what exactly was wrong with enjoying our time together?” she asked Vader. The dog looked at her brother and back to Eden. “I mean seriously. What kind of a future did he expect? We agreed. We had a deal.”
Chewy backed himself into the pantry and feigned sudden hearing loss.
“Oh, sure. Go ahead and avoid me, too.” Eden’s flailing hand bumped the pitcher of utensils sending serving spoons and spatulas flying.
Davis was avoiding her. Every morning he left—or more accurately, snuck out—while she was cooking breakfast, and he didn’t return until late at night. He responded to her HeHa texts and emails tersely, ignoring the invitations to snack time and quiet nights in the library by the fire. She hadn’t worked up the nerve to ask him to be seen with her in public to remind the Beautification Committee what a “great” job they’d done with the pairing that was about to explode.
He was sending her a message. They now had a business-only relationship, something that up until recently Eden would have been happy with.
“I don’t know why everyone’s acting like this is my fault,” she continued to the empty room. “What was wrong with getting a little enjoyment out of our situation?” She wielded a set of tongs in the air, trying to find the mad that had gotten her through Day One. But mad had given way to something murkier, more desolate.
She missed him.
Her bed, a perfectly comfortable sanctuary pre-Davis, was now an infinite wasteland of sleeplessness and memories of orgasms past.
“How does that even work? We’ve only been together a few weeks, and that was in a fake relationship!” Davis had no right to deprive her of sleep. Everything was essentially the same as it had been prior to the stink bomb. She’d been happy then, hadn’t she? And, if it had all been fine then, why wasn’t it fine now?
“Because I miss him,” she confessed to no one.
That suit-wearing, grape-smushing, sexy picture-drawing man had gotten into her head. And quite possibly her heart. The inn was tainted with memories, both sexy and sweet. It was unforgiveable. Turning her home, her business, into an altar at which to mourn the death of a relationship that was never supposed to be real.
“It was all supposed to be fake!” she railed.
“We’re too late. She’s screaming at her kitchen cabinets.” Layla ambled in wearing running tights and a hooded sweatshirt liberated from a long-forgotten college boyfriend.
Sammy yawned her way through the swinging door in sweatpants and a cozy tunic sweater. “Told ya we should have come yesterday.”
“What are you guys doing here at six o’clock in the morning?” Eden asked wearily. She didn’t have a meal for her own guests, let alone food to feed her constantly hungry friends.
“Saving your guests from blackened eggs.” Layla wrinkled her nose at the ruined breakfast remains.
“Supporting our friend in her time of need,” Sammy countered, tossing two bags of store-bought biscuits on the counter.
“What. Are. Those,” Eden demanded. Not-from-scratch biscuits were never welcome at her inn.
Layla pushed her d
own on a stool. “Sit. I’m on coffee.” She bustled over to the coffee center, starting a thermos for the guests and a pot for the kitchen.
“I’ll make the gravy.” Sammy dunked Eden’s skillet into the sink and scrubbed at the mess.
“Gravy? What the hell is going on?”
The dogs—sensing nice, normal, friendly people—tap danced out of the pantry to join the fun.
“We’re making sausage gravy and biscuits for your guests before you turn anyone else off with your fruit and stale bagels like yesterday,” Sammy explained. “It was the talk of the town.”
Eden laid her head in her hands and moaned.
Layla put a mug of coffee in front of Eden. “Spill it.”
Eden looked down at the mug.
“Not the coffee. You and Davis.”
Eden sighed mightily. “Our pretend relationship is now one-hundred percent pretend. And even that will come to an end at HeHa when we rub the Beautification Committee’s noses in their failure.”
“Isn’t that what you wanted?” Sammy asked innocently, drying the skillet with a dish towel.
“Yes. At least I thought so, but we had this fight.”
“Did it involve makeup sex?” Layla asked.
“No, and apparently that’s the problem.”
“Davis didn’t like being used for some no strings attached fun?” Sammy surmised.
“I wasn’t using him,” Eden argued, though the allegation sat in her belly like a tray of ice cubes. “We had a deal. This was just temporary. Pretend. We were going to get our revenge and go our separate ways.”
“You’re still getting your revenge,” Layla pointed out, watching Sammy dump two pounds of sausage into the buttered skillet.
“Yeah, but Davis is barely speaking to me,” she said miserably.
“I thought that’s what you wanted,” Sammy reminded her. “Didn’t you just want to go back to the way things were before the fire?”
“I know what you two are doing,” Eden said darkly. Vader put her big head in Eden’s lap, her tail swishing. Eden stroked a hand over her dog’s smiling face.
“And?” Sammy prodded.
“And you’re right, and I’m wrong, but that doesn’t change anything,” Eden insisted.
“Let’s go back to the part about us being right,” Layla suggested.
“So maybe I got a little attached to Davis,” Eden sighed. “It was bound to happen, what with all the awesome sex and that time that he sketched me.”
Sammy spun away from the stovetop. “He sketched you? Like Titanic sketched you?”
Eden nodded.
“God. That’s so hot,” Layla groaned.
“Yeah, well now things are pretty iceberg-y between us.”
“So, he wanted more, and you didn’t,” Sammy prodded.
They’d been over the big picture on the phone two days ago, squeezing in a video call between animal appointments, small town disturbances, and guest needs.
“It’s not that I don’t want more,” Eden hedged. “It’s just I don’t see how more is possible. My parents hate him. More importantly his parents hate me. He’s not a rebel, guys. He’s a go-along to get-along kind of guy. And while that works in a lot of situations, it doesn’t make for a good romantic relationship. He already dumped me once for them.”
“Eden, he was eighteen. No guy is lady-smart at that age,” Layla pointed out.
Eden’s thoughts turned back to their conversations. The concessions Davis made to his father, the sneaking around, the bypassing, the biding his time. Why would that Davis suddenly decide to draw the line and take a stand now?
She put her head down on the counter. “I have so many feelings.” And none of them were good. Her watch vibrated on her wrist.
Mom: Are you done dating that doofus yet? I want to make sure I’m there to witness the big breakup!
Eden groaned.
“So, what’s the actual problem here?” Layla asked, popping the biscuits into the microwave.
“The problem is I don’t know what I want,” Eden told her. Which was a lie. She knew what she wanted, but it wasn’t possible. Davis Gates would never defy his parents to be her happily ever after.
“Well, you’ve tried mortal enemies, and you’ve tried hot and steamy bed buddies,” Sammy said. “Why don’t you try being friends?”
“Friends?” Eden repeated. The word felt funny in her mouth. Were the feelings she had wrapped up around Davis friendly? Or were they much, much more?
45
“Next, we’re going to take a little of the green and a little of the blue and mix them together on your palette.” Davis demonstrated, holding his palette up so his students could see.
Aretha, a skinny woman in her fifties who had narrowly avoided assault charges stemming from a fight she started at the bookstore during last month’s astrological apocalypse, raised her empty wine glass.
The tasting room attendant, Coriander, a helpful pink-haired college dropout, hurried over with a new bottle of Pinot Grigio. The dry run for Blue Moon Winery’s paint night wasn’t very dry. The class had already put away four bottles, and they were only twenty minutes into the class.
“Good,” Davis said, even though half of his students had mixed the wrong colors. Following instructions wasn’t Blue Moon’s strong suit. Residents didn’t like anything that challenged their creative freedom. Which was why twenty-two women and Fitz were abstractly slathering acrylics on canvas. Davis had considered a step-by-step landscape or even the standard bowl of fruit. But there was something satisfying about turning everyone loose on their own blank canvases with minimal direction. “Now, try out that fan brush in the shade you just created.”
He put his palette down, picked up his wine, and strolled down the first line of tabletop easels. They’d reconfigured the long tasting tables into stations fit for amateur painters.
Kicking off yet another venture hadn’t been on his to do list. Not with the fire, the winery, the HeHa Festival, and then, of course, Eden’s sudden claim that the feelings he knew she was feeling weren’t real…
Something had happened, a head injury or perhaps a visit from the ghost of feuds past, and the woman was suddenly hellbent on being his friend.
She’d been leaving little breakfast sandwiches wrapped in paper bags outside his room every morning. Texting him funny pictures of the dogs. Leaving candies on his pillow like she did for the rest of her guests. And she’d insisted on planning the winery’s first paint class.
She was the one who had found the bulk discount art supplies online and the one who posted about it in the town’s Facebook group. And now that same crazy woman was currently glaring at her canvas in the next row between her friends Sammy Ames and Eva Cardona.
It was her consolation prize for him, Davis assumed. She’d turned him down flat, claiming no interest in a relationship beyond their current arrangement that was due to end in three days. So here, have a paint night.
Unfortunately for her, Davis wasn’t interested in a consolation friendship or her pity art class. He’d been busy avoiding her rather than seeking her out. He’d missed every Snack Time and breakfast this week, and when she’d come knocking on his door two nights ago, he’d pretended he was in the middle of a conference call. So she’d organized this whole thing as a sort of apology. An olive branch. A friendship bracelet.
And he wasn’t biting.
The look she was shooting him now, the one he was studiously ignoring, singed him. She was as miserable as he was. Davis was sure of it. And they were still supposed to put on the “happy couple” face for the Beautification Committee until HeHa. That happy couple face might be the death of him.
A glance over Freida Blevins’s shoulder showed Davis the violent swath of turquoise she was working across her canvas. “Nice job, Freida,” he offered.
“I’m a natural,” she insisted, shimmying her shoulders, silver cactus earrings dancing from her lobes.
Mrs. Nordemann worked her paint brush with a
rigid wrist and the tip of her tongue peeking out of the corner of her unpainted lips. Near as Davis could tell, she was painting the Grim Reaper in a sea of morbid purples. But the reaper was smiling, and so was Mrs. Nordemann.
He continued his rounds, offering advice and compliments until he got to Eden’s row. He didn’t even care about revenge at this point. The whole thing felt like one big loss. They’d all have been better off if the Beautification Committee had left them alone.
What was upsetting him now was the fact that Eden honestly believed that he wouldn’t take a stand for what he wanted. That he wouldn’t stand up to his parents. Which was ridiculous. He was a grown man and—
The thought stopped him mid-stride. Reality—and Elvira Eustace’s fuchsia and tangerine masterpiece—punched him in the face, searing his eyes with the technicolor truth.
When had he stood his ground?
When had he fought for… anything?
Eden hadn’t been insulting his manhood. She’d been citing an observation, and if Davis couldn’t be counted on to stand up to his father when it came to grapes and wine labels, how could he be counted on to stand up for her?
He stopped behind her, drawn to the familiar scent of her shampoo. It twisted the knife in his gut. The way her shoulders tightened, he knew she could sense him behind her. Davis saw the prickle of goose bumps on her neck above the collar of her silky, sheer blouse.
“How does it look?” she asked shyly, never taking her eyes off of her canvas.
Davis couldn’t resist. He leaned in, his chest brushing her back. She tensed against him, then relaxed, remembering their pretext. Her canvas was a tangle of darkness. Navies, purples, and grays warred over the white in bold brushstrokes. One didn’t have to guess what was on her mind. Turmoil. Doubt.
And it gave Davis great satisfaction. Eden Moody might not be ready to admit her feelings for him, but she couldn’t keep them out of her painting.