Was that so much to ask?
The meeting had ended on a surprisingly flat note now that I took a moment to think about it, watching the green of the valley blur and smear out the car window.
I really figured there’d be a lot more parading about, some epic music score maybe and a really elaborate stack of legalese-strewn documents to sign. In fact, there had been absolutely zero documents to sign.
“We didn’t sign anything,” I realized belatedly. Did that mean something bad happened that I had been too caught up with casual conversation to notice?
Claire’s voice came out a little strangled. Maybe she was surprised I was talking to her. “That’s…that’s pretty normal.” Her voice evened out. “You need to have documents signed, notarized in some cases, and a whole group of lawyers usually oversees it. It is, and I cannot overstate this enough, the most boring thing you will ever do in business. And that includes ordering office supplies in bulk.”
I turned to look at her but Claire, ever the responsible one, kept her eyes glued to the road. She glanced at me once, a nervous flick of the eyes in my direction and back again.
“So when they said they’ll send over the documents, they meant the contract between us?” From what Claire had taught me, it was standard practice to draw up an ironclad contract stipulating what each partner was owed, what their contributions were, and what would happen in the unfortunate case of dissolution.
Claire nodded.
It seemed like a whole lot of work to stop people from being assholes to each other. When I had voiced that to her the night before last, she laughed and kissed me on the mouth stealing both my breath and whatever I was going to say after that.
Sometimes it felt like she cherished my naïveté. Which seemed weird. Far be it from me to judge her but if she wasn’t so obviously smitten with me whenever I showed how much I did not know, I would have been offended.
Instead, she made me feel comforted and loved. My heart swelled with the thought of how kind and good she was to me. How much I loved her. How much I needed her in my life.
Whatever anger I had in me would not stay. Even if I went through the effort of banking the coals of resentment, I could not stay angry at Claire. It wasn’t in me.
I reached over and put my hand onto her thigh and gave it a firm squeeze of reassurance. I wanted her to know I was not mad at her. I was upset about the situation and when we got home we could talk about it. Maybe I’d steal some pumpkin pie from the bakery and we’d have a slice.
That set off a chain of thoughts that occupied me until the car pulled into the parking space at the rear of the bakery. It took me a moment to shake myself of the various thoughts and concerns running through my head.
Claire ambushed me before I could finish locking the door behind me. An idle action I barely even noticed I did anymore.
No wonder I was always double-checking if I locked the door or not.
Her breasts pressed tight against me, her arms snaked around my middle. She pressed herself against me with shocking desperation and need that made my heart ache. “Claire, what’s wrong?”
The words poured out of her. She must have been wanting to talk about it in the car but bottled it all up.
“I’m so sorry. I didn’t mean to hide anything Thomas, really I didn’t, please don’t be mad at me. I never meant to do it. I was worried at fir-”
I silenced her tirade with a gentle press of my finger to her soft lips. “It’s okay, Claire. I’m not mad at you.”
“But I hid something from you!” She almost seemed incensed that I was not angry at her. It was a comical turn that I couldn’t help but laugh at and pull her into a tight hug.
“I am mad at the situation. I am mad at what you did.” I wanted to make that crystal clear. “I am not mad at you. I love you, Claire. I always will, even when things are rocky or you do something that hurts me or makes me mad. I will always love you. There is absolutely nothing you can do about that.”
The tension bled out of her and she practically sagged against me. I struggled to hold her up at first and then slipped an arm beneath her and tipped her up into my arms, carrying her to the couch.
“Did you want to purposefully hide it from me?” I asked as I struggled to kick one shoe off, then the other on the way to the couch.
“No,” she said with a sheepish shake of the head.
“Then why did you?” I already had a pretty good guess but I was not about to force my words into her mouth.
“At first I didn’t want to get your hopes up. It was such a long-shot. Then when it became real after I quit my job, I didn’t know how to bring it up without you thinking that I hid it from you.”
“Pretty ironic.”
She hid her face in my chest. “I know. I am sorry though, Thomas. I really didn’t want to get your hopes up and make you think I had this awesome plan to save the town when all I had were a few soft maybes from some contacts.”
I deposited her gently onto the couch. “Want some pumpkin pie?”
I could see the emotional whiplash as it played out across her radiant features. The way her brows crumpled in confusion, then dawning realization, and finally rose to crested desire.
“That’s it, you don’t want to talk about it anymore?” she asked, though I could tell she didn’t want to. She was as ready to lay the matter to rest as I was.
As far as I was concerned, there was nothing more to discuss. She had her reasons. I disagreed with them but what did that matter? “Are you planning on doing something like that again?”
She shook her head emphatically.
I gave her a lopsided grin. The way her eyes slightly widened melted my heart. There was nothing in the world like a woman who looked at you like you were everything. Like you were the only thing in the world. “Then I don’t see any reason to hash it out anymore.”
Hands braced on the arm of the couch, I leaned down to give her a kiss on the forehead. She watched me warily, almost bashfully. I was out the door in a flash, taking the steps quickly in the brisk autumn morning to the back of the bakery.
I heard Sam’s voice from the front, ringing somebody up and decided I’d leave her to it. I had told her the meeting would run over a little and that whenever she wanted to take her lunch to close up the shop.
Even though I had stopped manning the shop entirely on my own, I still had the lunch-break sign that let people know when I would be back.
Pumpkin pie prize in hand, I whisked it and a bowl of homemade whipped cream back to the apartment.
“That was fast,” said Claire. She was coming in from the bedroom, already dressed in comfortable sweater and yoga pants that showed all her deliciously glorious curves.
“Yeah, Sam was still working so I figured I’d let her alone for the time being. After we have something to eat I’ll go back and relieve her if she hasn’t taken her lunch yet.”
Claire licked her lips, though whether it was for the pie or me I wasn’t sure. She took one predatory step after the other, her bright green eyes held barely a ring of color around dark pupils. “Not before I relieve you of your clothes,” she husked.z
11
Claire
Sometimes I don’t know what gets into me. I have never been the type of person to be romantically forward. Though I had to admit, I loved the way it made me feel powerful and free. Thomas practically locked up at the sight of me.
We laid naked in bed afterward, my finger tracing along the curve of his muscles I so adored. I had taken him in the kitchen, and he had taken me back in the bedroom and once more in the shower.
Needless to say, he was going to be late to work. So it was a good thing that he had a cool boss.
I could not help but think about having a baby. Once Thomas had said it, a door opened somewhere in my head that I had never noticed before. From it spilled all sorts of crazy thoughts about children and what kind we’d have.
Would they be smart and kind as Thomas? What would we name them? Before
we even talked about it again I was deeply considering going off the pill. I knew it would still be a while before I could get pregnant but something in me ached for it.
It made our lovemaking so much hotter to imagine that this time, I could get pregnant. There was a strange urgency to it, a purpose beyond pleasure and connection.
I wanted to scream out during sex, tell him to make me pregnant, to put his baby in me but I didn’t want to freak him out.
Thomas was the kindest and compassionate man I ever knew but even he had his limits. The very last thing I wanted to do was baby trap him. When we got to that stage, I wanted him to be fully onboard with the decision. It would be something we chose together.
I wasn’t going to be that girl that got knocked up to keep her man. Though looking him up and down, dozing in utter relaxation, his tanned muscular body half-hidden in bundled-up sheets, could anybody really blame me if I did?
But we still had a wedding to plan, a business to expand, a town to save, and a laundry list of other details that went along with each of those.
As much as I wanted to have his baby - and that need was growing at an alarming rate that had already taken over half of my sexual fantasies - I couldn’t say I enjoyed the thought of finding a business suit that fit my balloon-shaped belly.
The idea of doing a presentation and then abruptly having to turn around and throw up due to morning sickness was not appealing either.
The horrible things I had once read as a way to scare myself into making sure I always used protection had lost their bite. I wasn’t scared of all the terrible things that could - and often did - happen during and after pregnancy.
Maybe that was the difference being in love made, truly in love with somebody. Even the scariest things didn’t seem quite so scary anymore, as long as I had Thomas by my side.
I still wouldn’t go through a haunted house, though. I had my limits.
Some things were too big and that was number three on my list right next to sky diving and bungee jumping. No, thank you. I got all the adrenaline I needed from a heated negotiation in a board room.
Jumping off things or purposefully getting the pants scared off me was not my idea of fun. Thankfully, it wasn’t Thomas’ either. He was deeply afraid of haunted houses and though he loved old horror movies he was not a fan of the newer frightening ones with jump scares and gobs of gore.
He rolled over to me and kissed me on the crown of my head. A ripple of delight passed through me. “Going to work?” I asked.
“Mhm, are you going to stay in?”
I shook my head. There was so much to do and yet not much I could do at the same time. “I figured I would take a look around town, scout out some places and get a better feel for what sort of changes we could make. To be honest, I can’t do much until they send the contract over and that could be a couple of days.”
With an ache in my chest, I watched him roll out of bed and stalk to his dresser. He pulled on his clothes with a languid athlete’s grace. I wondered if he felt as strongly as I did when we were separated. It was like there was some unseen tether that stretched when we were apart.
The longer we were apart the worse it felt. Eventually it was all I could think about and I would do anything to ease that dull ache in my chest.
Reluctantly, I got out of bed and rooted around until I found something presentable to wear around town. “I was thinking of going down to the county clerk’s office and seeing if I can’t find any public records about who owns those buildings. If it really is Beth, we need to know.”
Thomas looked over at me, drank me in with those coffee dark eyes. That look nearly made me take the clothes back off before he cleared his throat and said, “Are you going to be home for dinner?”
“Oh, definitely. I wouldn’t miss a family dinner, you know that.”
The tug of that invisible tether between us pulled us together at the center of the room and I hugged him with all my might. “Have a good day, Thomas.”
He kissed the top of my head. His finger curled under my chin and Thomas tilted my lips up to meet his. The salty-sweet flavor of him drove me wild and made my knees weak. “You too, Claire-bear.”
Thomas swept out of the room, leaving me with his lingering warmth. The room still smelled of him and I stayed there a moment basking in it until the click of the door brought me back to my senses.
Right, you’ve got stuff to do today, Claire! Ugh. A trip to the county clerk’s office was decidedly not something I wanted to do. But if we were going through with this plan then I needed to know what we were up against.
If Beth had bought the properties for another buyer, then I needed to do some digging - likely through many layers of shell companies - in order to find out who we could discuss business with.
On the other hand, if Beth was the one who owned them, that was an entirely different matter. One that I hoped would be easier to solve. She would not want anything to do with me but she would not know my partners. If they were to approach her interested in developing then maybe that would be our way in.
We would pay over market price but the returns would be well worth it.
Not to mention it would cut Beth out of the picture entirely. She would no longer be able to stonewall us. As it was now, well over half of the stores on Main Street were sold and shuttered, rusting in silent ruin.
It was a painful sight and as a fellow native of Sunrise Valley I cannot fathom for the life of me why she would be okay with hurting her home like that.
Not that it mattered in the end. We were on opposite sides of this issue and while I would not partner with her, I have done business with worse people. Far worse.
As I threw on my coat and locked the door behind me, I could only hope that if it was Beth as the sole owner, she had not bothered to set up any kind of obfuscation.
The last thing I needed right now was more tedious paperwork.
“Well, here you are Claire,” said the kindly old lady that had been helping me sort through the mess of a filing system for the better half of the last three hours. If I didn’t hurry up soon I was going to break my promise to Thomas and miss the first family dinner ever.
I could not let that happen.
“Thank you so much, Francine,” I said, touching her arm slightly.
She was sweet and surprisingly helpful. I had expected some method of stalling or the typical government bureaucracy. What I got instead was a sweet grandmother that was doing her crosswords and seemed bored out of her mind.
I guessed that there was not a lot of reason for most people in the valley to come to the county clerk’s office looking for the sort of ownership information I was.
“Oh, you’re quite welcome. This is everything for the past decade. I found quite a few commercial property sales. Are you sure you don’t want the private sales?”
“No, thank you. I think I’ve got my hands full as it is.”
There were several boxes full of old documents, all sorted in endless amounts of hanging folders. Since I couldn’t be sure it was Beth I had to go by date of sale and location rather than any specific name.
It would have been too easy to assume that she signed everything as ‘Beth Ingvar’ in bold letters.
As it turned out… that is precisely what she did.
In an ironic twist, I had spent an extra hour or so getting a wide swath of documents out in preparation for having to sort through them. Instead, Beth had literally signed the properties over to herself.
She bought them through the Ingvar trust in her name but that hardly counted as an obfuscation layer. Then the Ingvar trust signed them over to Beth. It was alarmingly simple and I admit I expected a bigger fight to get the information.
An hour later I had amassed my own stack of documents I wanted to be copied.
“Normally,” said Francine, copying one document after the other. “You would need to submit a copy request form and we would take two to three business days to fulfill the request then require payme
nt for each page.”
I leaned against the small window. “I don’t mind waiting,” I said. I really didn’t. It would take me at least a week to sort through that mess.
Francine flapped one pruned hand my way and continued methodically copying. “I said ‘normally’ darling. I have not had such good company since before Dan died.”
“I’m so sorry, was that your husband?”
“Oh, it’s quite all right Claire. He was the finest husband I could have ever asked for. But as I was saying, it is as boring as a tomb in here most days. It gets me out of the house and gets me doing something so I don’t usually mind. Today was the first day I was glad I came to work, and I have you to thank for that.”
It warmed my heart to hear I had such an impact on her. An icy fear chased it away a moment later as I wondered what I would be like at that age. Would Thomas, super fit and health-conscious as he was, die before me? I could not bear the thought of being alone even after fifty or more years with him.
It would not be enough. It could never be enough.
“Here you go, that’ll be…” A few seconds of mental math. “Two hundred and fifty dollars.” Francine’s eyes bugged at the number. “Well, I don’t control the price unfortunately and you did get quite a hefty stack didn’t you?” She laughed at her own joke and I joined in a second behind.
“It’s quite all right,” I said trying not to let the sudden sadness of my thoughts show. “Here you go.” Knowing I was going to a government office, I swung by an ATM first to get out some cash. It was still one of the few places that charged extra for using modern payment methods.
And I already knew I was going to spend more than seemed wise. Ideally, I would have stayed for another few hours and combed through the records. At that point I would have needed a tenth of the pages I had.
Bun in Her Oven Page 8