by Lori Ryan
Ashley grinned but Laura shook her head. "It might be a long story, but you're gonna need to back up and give me a little more information. I'm completely lost."
"She's opening a flower shop." The pride in Ashley's voice was almost funny, but Presley did have to admit, it felt really good to hear it.
"And I need to buy a building."
"Buy?" Ashley looked a little stunned. "You're not planning to lease?"
"I will if the right building isn't for sale, but if I can find something for sale, I'd prefer to do that."
"I take it you have savings?" Ashley never was one for dancing around the topic.
"I have very few bills. I've got savings."
Ashley linked arms with Presley and Laura, grinning wickedly as she turned them toward the southern end of the main street in town. “I love shopping, don’t you?”
“I’ve never shopped for a whole building before,” Laura said.
Ashley waved a dismissive hand. “It’s like buying shoes. Only bigger.”
They stopped when they got to the corner and turned back around to face the commercial section of the small town. It was growing. The town had expanded in recent years and the artist studios that were housed in a number of small houses converted to commercial space brought in a fair amount of business. Ashley sat on a committee that had added to the number of festivals the town offered and those had been growing in popularity and reach as well.
“This looks like trouble.”
The women turned to find Haddie Gillman smiling at them with the kind of look that said if they weren’t causing any trouble yet, she’d help them remedy that.
Haddie was eighty if she was a day, but she was Ashley’s best friend. They filled her in on what they were doing.
“Good for you, girlie,” she said with a little pinch to Presley’s arm.
“Okay,” Laura said. “What does your business plan call for as far as size and location.”
Presley didn’t need to look at the plan, which she’d tucked away in a file folder in the large tote on her shoulder. She knew it by heart. “I need a space of between seven hundred to one thousand square feet. I’ll need to be able to divide the space into the showcase space and then have my design space in the back.”
“And I’m willing to bet you know exactly where the spaces that are available that fit those needs are.” Laura grinned.
“I do.” Presley smiled at them. She’d never gone so far as to call a realtor and go looking at spaces, but she had checked routinely to see what locations were available for lease or sale in town. “At the moment, there are four empty buildings and two spaces for lease within large buildings. Two of the empty buildings are much too large. Although, I guess I could buy them and try to lease the other space.”
Ashley tilted her head. “Then you have to take on the loss until then, not to mention learning how to be a landlord at the same time that you’re dealing with becoming a business owner.”
“True,” Presley said and mentally crossed the two buildings off the list.
“And you prefer to buy?” Laura asked.
“I think I would,” Presley said. “It’s unlikely that the business would grow in a small town to the point where I’d need to move into a larger space, so I feel like buying is a good option. And real estate is an investment. If the business doesn’t do well, I can sell the space or lease it to someone else.”
Ashley jumped in. “Tell us about the two buildings for sale that are the right size.”
Presley lifted her hand to point. “There’s the house on that side of the street,” she said, pointing to a small older house that stood a few doors down from where their friend, Katelyn Davies, had her sculpting studio. “It’s close enough to the artists’ houses to be considered part of artists’ row—” the name had attached itself to the row of houses the artists had turned into studios—“and it’s eight hundred and fifty square feet, so it’s a good size.”
She pointed to the other side of the main street. “Then there’s the old convenience store. It’s eleven hundred square feet.”
Haddie cut in. “Yeah, but it’s butt ugly.”
“True.” Presley looked at the women, who were all nodding their heads in agreement.
The house was old, but it had been painted on the outside. It was a very basic saltbox style house with little charm or character, but she could see about adding a front porch or front eaves or something to add some charm. Even window boxes with flowers would help brighten it up. It was a cheerful light-yellow color that would suit a flower shop well.
The old convenience store was a low squat looking rectangle with a door near one end of the rectangular front. Why the building had been built with no windows, she would never know, but it had been.
“Should we see if we can get a realtor out here to show us them?” Laura asked.
“They’re both owned by the Hart brothers,” Presley said. The Hart brothers totaled four in number and they hadn’t been in the business of buying and leasing property long. Maybe a couple of years.
“Oh, that’s better!” Laura said, pulling her phone out. “I’ll text Seth. He can’t resist May’s pies. He’ll come out and show us the buildings on a Sunday if I promise him an invitation to Sunday dinner afterward.”
And so it was that an hour later, they’d toured through both of the spaces.
Seth, the oldest of the Hart brothers, had said he could talk to his brothers about the possibility of selling one of the buildings rather than leasing them. They stood now, with Seth, in the brick building that had once held a mom-and-pop-style convenience store. It had gone out of business years before when a larger grocery store had opened on the highway between Evers and the next town over.
“I like that this building is larger,” Ashley said.
“It’s still butt ugly,” Haddie put in.
The building was mostly one large room with a small storage space and bathroom at the back.
“True. The house is cute, but with all the small rooms, we’d have to take walls out to open up a large enough display area.” Presley looked to Seth. She had told him what she would need before they’d looked at the spaces.
He answered the question before she could ask. “We can take down the walls in the front and open up the living and dining rooms to make a larger space. You can use the kitchen as your work room.”
He stepped over to the front wall of the building they were in. “But there’s also a lot we can do with this. My brothers and I have talked over a few ideas and planned to make some renovations, but we got tied up flipping a few residential properties.” He pointed to the wall that faced the main street in town, where the single entrance door was cut in the corner. “We can break through this wall and put in either one large window along the length of it or even two bay windows, if you’d like. The effect would really add character to the building by getting rid of the boxy shape of it.”
Presley nodded and pointed to the shorter wall of the rectangular building. The property was on a corner and this wall faced a small side street. “Can you add a window to this side?”
“Sure. Another bay window might be too much, but maybe two smaller ones to bring in light? You could do window boxes on the outside.”
He lifted his clipboard and sketched for a few minutes, before turning the page to her. Laura and Ashley looked over Presley’s shoulder, while Haddie pressed in from the side, standing on tip-toe to see.
“Oh I like that,” Presley said as the other women nodded their agreement. She pointed to the back of the space where the small storage space and bathroom now stood. “In here, I would need to have you bring the wall of this storage space out some to make the back area bigger. I need a little more space for the work room.” She eyed the distance from the front to the back of the building. “Do you know the measurement from front to back?”
Seth looked at his notes. “Says it’s twenty-four feet.” He took a measuring tape out of a clip on his toolbelt and measured the s
pace as though he would never go only on what a piece of paper said.
He nodded when he’d finished, and Presley calculated in her head. She’d be able to fit the refrigerated display cases along one wall.
She looked to Ashley and Laura who both nodded like it was no big deal to buy a building. Haddie just shrugged her shoulders. Presley looked back to Seth. “Will you talk to your brothers about selling? Look at what you’d want to ask for it.”
“You got it,” he said, and handed her the clipboard and his pencil. “Write your phone number on there and I’ll give you a call sometime tomorrow.”
Presley took a deep breath and let it out slowly. She was going to do this. She was really going to do this. And it felt great.
18
James stood still, Lulu next to his side, pressing her head up into his hand. He’d been doing the exercises Sarah had talked him through when they met, but he couldn’t say they were helping him any. Still, he’d see her again next week. He’d give it a shot, if for no other reason than it had finally gotten him off the ranch. Sure, it had been early when there was no traffic and he wouldn’t have to see anyone, but still. He laughed as he remembered sitting with Jamie after, talking about the virtues of the sprinkled donut. She had a long list. They could be eaten all at once or one sprinkle at a time, thus suiting any mood (her words, not his). They were soft and melted in your mouth but the added crunch of the sprinkles gave them a nice little boost of texture (again her words, and ones he was pretty sure she’d heard on a cooking show although, likely, not in regards to a donut). And, a sprinkled donut could always bring a smile to your face, she’d added.
She’d said this with a grin, then proceeded to tell him she was hoping her mom and dad had another baby soon because she thought a baby brother or sister would be fun to play with and she could boss it around someday. Her friend, Lily, had a baby brother and she got to tell him what to do. James had said he liked telling his little sister what to do, too. That had earned him a look from Laura.
Lulu’s nudge brought James back to the present and he watched as a car pulled into the ranch drive. The silver Jaguar wasn’t a car he’d seen before, and it certainly wasn’t designed for the ranch, but when it came into view he easily made out the figures inside.
His sister and Presley. His breath caught and held in his chest. When he’d fallen asleep with Presley the night before, he’d known he needed to keep this purely physical between them. She couldn’t possibly understand the extent of the damage that had been done to him in the hole he’d lived in for years. She couldn’t know that he wasn’t ever going to be whole again, wouldn’t ever heal.
He should tell her he could seem normal one minute, then the next he’d slip into the inky blackness that could swallow him up for days, and there was no reaching him. He should tell her that one minute he could be standing on Bishop Ranch, sure he was safe, and the next he was flipped upside down and backward, sent back to the jungle where demons and dragons tore at his skin, tore at his soul.
But he didn’t tell her.
He needed to back way the hell away from her.
He should have been happy to see she’d left his bed when he woke that morning. Should have been relieved. Should have taken advantage of the escape she’d given him.
“Don’t know what the hell is wrong with me,” he mumbled to the dog as they walked toward the car.
Laura bounced out of the passenger seat and came toward him. She slipped her arms around him and hugged, pulling back quickly. He hadn’t told her it was hard to let people touch him, but she seemed to understand that. All the same, she also didn’t seem to be able to resist, but she always pulled away quickly. He understood.
It would have been hell for him to have to think she was dead, and that’s what had happened for her. Laura had thought he was dead for over three years. They still hadn’t figured out whether their father had been behind the lie or her husband. Laura suspected a little bit of both.
When James had left for the military, their father had been livid. Not because he worried for James at all, but because he was angry they’d both left him. Laura when she married her first husband, Patrick Kensington, and James when he walked into a recruiting office and signed over control of his life for the foreseeable future.
Their father spent his life belittling and neglecting them, only ever paying attention to them when it suited his needs. Like if he wanted someone to demean. It should never have been a shock to the man that both his children walked away as soon as they were able.
Of course, James had gone too soon, it turned out. He buried himself in basic training, then moved into his specialized weapons training before joining the 7th Special Forces Group where he was quickly whisked into special forces training that had him off the grid and out of contact most of the time. He’d left Laura behind, thinking she was safe and happy, but he’d been wrong.
James suspected their father might have called looking for Laura and got Patrick instead. If he said anything remotely like “the boy’s dead to me now,” which was exactly what his father had been saying at the time, Patrick would have taken that chance to tell Laura her brother was gone.
The man had turned out to be a sick, sadistic son-of-a-bitch. From what Laura’s current husband, Cade, had told James, Patrick then proceeded to beat Laura so badly when she wanted to attend her brother’s funeral, she never again questioned where James was buried or when she might be able to visit the grave. She’d been existing in her own hellhole for years, just trying to stay alive. Just trying not to lose herself to the misery and the terror.
“Presley has exciting news!” Laura said now, pulling back from him.
James had already found his gaze locked onto Presley, so he didn’t miss the flush in her cheeks when Laura made her statement.
“News?” He found himself asking. Moments before, he’d been agitated and antsy. Lulu had needed to interrupt the clenching he tended to do with his hands when anxiety hit. She’d interrupted it three times in the last hour, to no avail.
Looking at Presley now, he felt the tightness in his chest ease. He found himself wanting to hear what she had to say. That and so much more. He wanted to go to her, to pull her into his arms. To take her inside.
He didn’t.
He stayed glued to the spot while she remained at her car.
“She’s opening a flower shop. We went and looked at locations today,” Laura said.
“Really?” He asked, not at all missing the spark in Presley’s eyes. “Good for you. Did they try to talk you out of it?”
Laura’s brow furrowed. “Did who try…” she looked between James and Presley a few times, then shook her head. “James is apparently way ahead of me in the news department,” she said, with not a small amount of huffiness to her tone.
She circled around to Presley, hugging her, before looking back at James with a shake of her head. “I’m just going to leave you two…”
She didn’t finish the thought. It didn’t matter. The two of them weren’t in the least bit focused on Laura. She turned and walked toward her greenhouses on the other side of the driveway.
James repeated his question. “Did they try to talk you out of it?”
He wasn’t sure if he made a conscious decision to go to her, but as he waited for her answer, he found he was closer to her.
“I haven’t told them yet, but I’m sure they will,” she said, the frown on her lips telling him it would hurt to have her parents trying to talk her out of it.
Then he was next to her and for the life of him, he couldn’t stop himself from leaning in and kissing one corner of that frown, at the seam where her lips met.
He stood and looked her in the eye, then leaned in and kissed the other side of the frown.
Her mouth opened in a small “oh.”
He took her hands and pulled her behind him to the barn, leading the way up into the loft. Every part of him knew this was a piss poor idea. He needed to get his head out of his ass and s
teer clear of Presley Royale.
But he couldn’t. When he’d seen her standing there, next to her car, looking as though she wasn’t sure if she should go to him, he’d wanted nothing more than to pull her into him and wrap himself around her.
He’d slept the night before. Really slept. Not for a huge amount of time, but for six hours, which was a hell of a lot longer than he’d slept in a long time.
She hadn’t kept the blackness, the nightmares completely at bay. They had come in the night, waking him, but when they had, she’d been there. Her body warm and soft and ready for him. She’d moaned and smiled sleepily at him when he woke her with his body.
She’d kept the darkness from swallowing him and he had the uncontrollable thought that he’d waited forever for her, without ever knowing who she was. She’d somehow been there in his world before he knew she was there. It was a sensation more than a concrete thought. And it was a sensation he couldn’t really explain.
He left her standing in the center of the room, then went and closed the shutters on the large window in the loft. It was still early enough that anyone walking on the ranch would see what he was about to do to her.
And no one but him was going to watch as he stripped Presley bare.
He was silent as he moved back to her, running his hands along the line of her neck and up to cup her face as he took her mouth in his. Sweet Jesus, she was heaven on earth. She could make a man want, all the while convincing him he could never want for anything again with her in his arms.
She made a small sound in her throat and moved closer, pressing into him as he let his hands drop to run down her back, this time cupping her ass with his hands. He pulled her to him, letting her body meet his. His dick throbbed for her and he needed both of them out of the clothing that separated them.
He reminded himself to be gentle. Her ankle was still weak.
His fingers shook as he worked the buttons of her blouse, then started on her jeans as she removed her arms from the light fabric. His shirt was next, this one coming off over his head. Then he knelt at her feet and tugged her jeans down and off. He stayed there, looking up at his goddess, in her lace panties and bra. She stood, looking down on him, eyes bright and open. She was so damned open. Where she was open, he was closed. Where she was light, he was dark.