“Yesterday,” he said, then released a humorless laugh. “Gaurav keeps calling me with questions about the new project he and Craig are working on. I’ve been offering advice long-distance. He says it’s been really helpful.”
“Those phone calls?” she guessed.
“He tells me to come. He tells me Seattle is wonderful. Then he tells me about some bug in the code that they can’t get rid of. I tell him to send me the code. I don’t think it’s against company policy, since Pacific Dynamic expects me to join the team. But I figure out the bug and get rid of it, and Gaurav is ecstatic.”
“Maybe you ought to bill the firm as a consultant,” she said.
She meant her comment as a joke, but he took it seriously. “I should.” With a final squeeze, he released her shoulder and headed down the hall to the bathroom.
She watched him vanish, imagined him stripping off his sweatpants and stepping into the shower. She pictured the hot water sluicing across his lean, beautiful body, steam rising above the curtain. She took comfort in the fact that he hadn’t sounded happy about leaving. But that comfort was small. He was still going to leave.
Get more clients, she ordered herself as she returned to his bedroom to brush her hair. He would leave, and she would stay busy—hopefully overseeing the renovation of the Town Hall building—and maybe they’d stay in touch for a while, until the distance became too difficult to span.
They’d no longer be two. She’d learn to get by as one.
Chapter Eighteen
The election was ridiculously close, but by eleven o’clock that night, the town posted the results on its web site. Davenport’s design had won by twenty-seven votes.
Will had taken Brianna out to the Lobster Shack for dinner to distract her, although the tactic hadn’t been all that successful. She’d checked her phone every ten minutes, hoping for the results to appear. “The polls don’t even close until eight o’clock,” he’d warned her. “Stop looking.”
“I can’t stop,” she’d said. “One of these times, I’m going to click on the website and the results will be posted.”
“Not for a while. Enjoy your lobster roll.”
As delicious as their lobster rolls were, she clearly wasn’t enjoying hers. She wound up giving him half, and since he’d spent several hours that afternoon hauling empty bottles from the tavern to the recycling center, he’d been hungry enough to polish off that extra half-portion. Even when empty of liquid, crates of glass bottles were heavy.
He and Brianna returned to his house after dinner, but she wasn’t in the mood for sex. He couldn’t blame her. He wasn’t really in the mood, either. He had decided a while back that he would remain in Brogan’s Point long enough to see how the vote went, and then he would head out west to his new job. When he’d made that resolution, he hadn’t realized how attached he would become to Brianna, how easily he would get used to her presence in his life. How comfortable he felt with her—so comfortable that sitting beside her on the sofa in the den, watching a superhero movie while she compulsively checked her phone—satisfied him almost as much as getting naked with her.
He had hoped her proposal would win the town election. If it had, he could have left her on a high note. She would be so busy with the Town Hall renovation, along with her new clients, that she wouldn’t even miss him.
He would miss her, of course. He’d miss her like he’d miss an amputated limb. But he would go to Seattle, where Gaurav promised to introduce him to scores of beautiful women, and maybe he would discover that Brianna really wasn’t the one for him, after all. This would just be a passing interlude in his life, a span of a couple of months when he’d been in limbo, neither here nor there.
The tavern would survive without his help. It had survived before he had moved here after giving up his apartment in the city, and it would survive better with its new inventory software. It would survive even better if his mother expanded her offerings. He’d had a good time introducing her to a few fancy cocktails. She would never admit it, but she had liked that Dark-and-Stormy as much as he’d liked mixing it for her.
When he’d been a kid, helping out at the bar after school, he had hated working there. Of course, he hadn’t been mixing drinks then. He’d been sweeping, loading the dishwasher, doing only those things a seventeen-year-old boy was allowed by law to do. But standing behind the bar concocting delicious drinks, and schmoozing the customers, and listening to funky old rock music on the jukebox, and watching his mother pretend she wasn’t going all moony and swoony whenever Ed walked through the door…
Yeah, he’d liked that. Loved it, in fact.
“So,” Brianna said, her eyes dry but her voice gruff. “Rollie won.”
“The town lost,” Will said. “He’s going to jack up the price once ground is broken, and then everyone’s going to be pissed, but it’ll be too late.”
Brianna gave him an unreadable look. “You don’t have to cheer me up,” she said.
He snorted. “As if that were possible.” His arm looped around her, he drew her to him and kissed her lightly. “I wish I could. But at least you’ve got those other clients. That house by the marina you were telling me about…”
“The Victorian. Yes, I have that.” Her tone was dreary, as if she thought that job was a consolation prize. “I think I’m going to go home tonight, Will. I just…need to be alone.”
“Are you sure?” He didn’t want her to leave. They had so little time left; he wanted to spend every minute of it with her.
But she didn’t want to spend it with him, at least not tonight. “I’m sure,” she said, pushing to her feet and crossing the room without even looking at him.
Maybe she was crying, and she didn’t want him to see. Or maybe she was fuming, and she wanted to spare him her temper.
Or maybe she knew they had so little time left, she might as well get used to the fact that they weren’t going to be together much longer.
He couldn’t blame her. But it hurt. It hurt like hell to watch her walk away.
***
After a night of insomnia, he rose early, slugged down some coffee, and drove to the center of town. A couple of solitary joggers were running laps around the town green, but it was otherwise quiet. Town Hall didn’t open for business until nine. At seven, the place was dark, the dawn light casting the building’s pillared façade into shadow.
It was a fine building. The town would benefit from a newer, bigger municipal center, without ad-hoc basement storage facilities and elevators crammed into nooks that had never been intended for that use. But this building was solid. He would hate to see it knocked down. Surely it could be put to a different use.
He remained on a bench on the green, across from the Town Hall, watching as the sky grew lighter, the sun brighter. Traffic gradually picked up along the street bordering the green. The two joggers left, and three more joggers appeared. He studied the building and thought.
At exactly nine o’clock, he rose from the bench, climbed the stairs—stairs that failed to comply with the Americans with Disabilities Act, he reminded himself—and entered the building. He walked down the long, shabby corridor to the anteroom outside the town manager’s office. The forbidding woman with the silver hair and the scary eyeglasses glowered at him from her desk.
“Is Ms. Cassini in?” he asked.
“Do you ever make an appointment?” the woman retorted.
“I’m not good at that, no,” he conceded. “I’d like a few minutes of Ms. Cassini’s time.”
“Her time is valuable.”
“You can bill me.”
The woman looked, if possible, even more forbidding. Obviously, she didn’t find him amusing. She shoved away from her desk and stalked through the door separating the anteroom from the town manager’s office.
Through the closed door, Will heard muffled voices. After a minute, the silver-haired woman emerged, glowering. “You can go in,” she said, evidently quite annoyed.<
br />
Will gave her a sweet smile and entered Diane Cassini’s office.
“Hello, Will,” she greeted him pleasantly.
“Your assistant didn’t want to let me in,” he said, motioning with his head in the direction of the anteroom.
“Thanks to you, your mother ordered in some delicious Chardonnays at her tavern,” Diane Cassini said. “You’re welcome here any time.” She gestured toward one of the visitor chairs across the desk from her seat.
Will settled into it and crossed one denim-clad leg over the other knee. Should he have dressed better? Khakis instead of jeans? Maybe a tie? He hadn’t been sure what he was going to ask for until he’d arrived at the town green, until he’d thought it over as the sun rose, gliding up from the horizon and brightening the sky above the town.
But he was here, and he was welcome. “I saw how the vote went yesterday,” he said.
She nodded, her smile bright. “It will take a few years, but I’m going to wind up with a much nicer office,” she said.
“What’s going to happen to this building?”
“No decision has been made yet. The board of selectmen will hold meetings on it. We’ll examine our options.”
“Here’s the thing,” he said. “I have an idea I want to run past you.”
***
Brianna didn’t hear from Will all day. Nor the next day. Was he angry with her because she had walked out of his house the night of the election? Or was he too busy packing and getting his car tuned up for his long cross-country drive? Was he too busy saying goodbye to his mother and soon-to-be step-father and his high school friends, and figuring out where in Seattle he was going to live?
She told herself she didn’t care, but it hurt. She tried to convince herself that losing the vote to Rollie, with his deceptive specs and his sleazy social-media promotion—someday, she’d have to find out if he’d been posting as Peter Grogan—hurt more than losing Will, but she knew it didn’t.
The thing was, she’d never had Will to lose. They’d enjoyed a fling. An amazing whirlwind encounter that had never been meant to last. Their romance was no more than a single three-minute rock-and-roll song in the grand scheme of things.
Michael tiptoed around her, kept her coffee mug filled, and said little. She worked on the Louvelle kitchen, brainstormed designs for the Cappilletti renovation, and emailed her concept for the Victorian expansion to the Silverbergs. She seethed but refused to sulk. Anger was easier to handle than depression. Her anger was directed at herself, anyway. She had known going in that Will would leave. If only that stupid song hadn’t brought them together, she would never have fallen for him.
And then, three days after the vote, he entered the North Shore Design office. “We need to talk,” he said as he strode to her desk.
Michael glanced up, raised his eyebrows, and watched to see if Brianna needed his assistance.
She didn’t. She didn’t need Will, either. She didn’t need his presence, his beautiful face, his familiar rugged scent. She didn’t need reminders of what she’d had with him, and what she no longer had.
“I thought you’d left for Seattle,” she said, wincing when she heard her voice crack.
“I haven’t left for Seattle.” He planted his hands on her desk and leaned toward her. “I need to hire you.”
He must want her to put that greenhouse window in his mother’s kitchen. If Gus Naukonen was marrying Ed Nolan, she would probably want to sell her house. Some inexpensive updates might be a worthwhile investment to make the house more marketable.
“Fine.” She clicked open a new file on her computer. “What are we talking about?”
“The Town Hall building.”
She flinched. “What?”
“I’m buying Brogan Point’s Town Hall.”
“Buying it?”
“The mortgage application is in. I could probably buy it outright for cash, but given the current rates, taking out a mortgage seemed like a better idea.”
“What the hell are you going to do with that building?”
“Turn it into an innovation center.”
The idea caused her mind to reel. Even Michael, obviously eavesdropping from his desk across the room, looked stunned.
“Like the one in Cambridge, only much smaller,” Will continued. “Why should big cities be the only places where tech start-ups can incubate? It’s clean industry, exactly what towns like Brogan’s Point need, especially with fluctuations in the fishing industry. The building is beautiful, and it’s centrally located. And I like the irony of a lot of high-tech R-and-D going on in a hundred-year-old building with pillars on it.”
Will looked so excited, so animated. Brianna knew she was gaping at him, but everything he said sounded amazing.
“Once we start renting out suites and floor space in the building it should pay for itself. But even if it doesn’t, I’m willing to subsidize it.”
“From Seattle?”
“No. I’m staying here.”
If she hadn’t been clenching her teeth, she was sure her jaw would have dropped. “In Brogan’s Point?”
He nodded. His smile was tentative, his eyes searching her face, evidently trying to measure her reaction.
She wasn’t sure how to react. That he was staying in Brogan’s Point was wonderful, but he wasn’t staying for her. He was staying because he had a vision of what to do with the Town Hall building. A thrilling vision, but that was what would keep him in town. Not her.
“What about your job in Seattle?”
“I’ve negotiated an arrangement to consult for them. I can contribute to my team—Gaurav and Craig—long distance. I’ve been doing that for the past two months, anyway. Only now I’ll charge them. I’ve got you to thank for that idea.”
She smiled weakly. Wonderful. He was thanking her.
“As for the Town Hall building, it still has to be updated for accessibility and all that. I think we can use a lot of your original design for the renovation. The side entry, the elevators, the solar panels. We won’t need quite as much additional space, but the interior will need to be reconfigured. Probably rewired to accommodate lots of computers, heavy WiFi demand, and of course all those mini-fridges and coffee makers. I’m figuring on at least a dozen office units, maybe fifteen, of varying sizes. Flexible, so companies can expand if they need more space. And we’ll want some sort of communal space, too, so workers can gather and share ideas. To tell the truth, I think this will be a better use of the building than keeping it a municipal office. Davenport’s building will be designed to suit the town’s specific needs—which are a hell of a lot different today than they were when the Town Hall was built a hundred-whatever years ago.”
“You like his design better than mine,” she accused Will.
“I think his design will work well for the town. Overpriced, but customized for what they need.”
“You would have voted for his design.”
“I couldn’t vote.”
“But if you could have, you would have voted for his design.”
Will shrugged. “I’m not going to lie to you, Brianna. I won’t ever lie to you. So yes, I would have voted for his. I think the town needs a forward-looking Town Hall. But that doesn’t mean your design was bad. It was terrific. You can adapt the design, and we’ll turn the old Town Hall into something really cool.”
Whatever points he might have lost for voting for Rollie’s proposal, he gained for being honest with her. He did like her design, but not for a Town Hall. For something else, something he had his own plans for. Something he thought was really cool. “So you’ll…what? Be a landlord?”
He laughed. “I’ll manage the building. Who knows? Maybe I’ll launch another start-up. I enjoyed the last one, except for eating all those ramen noodles. I don’t have to worry about being poor anymore.” He studied her face. “What do you think? Are you interested?”
“I…um…”
“Yes, she’s
interested,” Michael shouted from his desk. “But you’re not getting a discount on our fee just because you’re her boyfriend.”
Laughing, Will bowed in Michael’s direction. “I would never ask for a discount,” he swore, then turned back to Brianna. “I am your boyfriend, aren’t I?”
Again, she was at a loss for words.
Michael made a big production of rising from his chair and marching to the door. “Ten minutes,” he said. “Work it out.” He crossed the threshold and shut the door behind him.
Brianna stared at Will for a long, silent moment. She wondered how many seconds of those ten minutes she wasted gazing into his dark eyes, remembering every evening they’d spent together, every night, every damned moment. Remembering the day they’d met, when that song played on the jukebox.
He must have been remembering the same thing. “I can’t do this alone, Brianna,” he said. “Two can make that dream so real.”
“It’s your dream, Will,” she said.
He cupped his hand under her chin, his gaze so forceful she could feel the heat of it, deep in her soul. “What’s your dream?”
To have your love. To be your love. “For you to stay in Brogan’s Point?” she half-asked.
“I can make that dream so real,” he said. “I was going to leave, Brianna, but I can’t. I can’t leave you.”
“Well, then.” She sighed. She loved the warmth of his hand against her skin, the nearness of him, the passion in his words. “Where are you going to live?”
“My mother is planning to move into Ed’s house. I was thinking I’d buy her house from her and do some updates.”
“A greenhouse window in the kitchen?”
“For starters.” He leaned across the desk and touched his lips to hers. “But if you’re living there too, you can’t charge for the renovations.”
“I think we can work something out,” she said.
“Me and you,” he murmured, quoting the song. He kissed her again, a longer, deeper kiss. A kiss so enchanting, Brianna didn’t even hear Michael’s return. And when he announced his presence by loudly clearing his throat, she didn’t care.
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