Happily Ever Never

7. Lucas

7

LUCAS

“I’m sorry, I believe yesterday you called me crazy.” Serena Lovelace stares at me like I’ve just suggested we drink out of a sidewalk puddle. “You and Brooke are going to... what?”

We’re standing on the sidewalk in front of the Come On You’ve Got to Have a Better Name Than That Inn.

I had the worst sleep of my life last night on a couch meant for a man half my size. I woke up to find a suitcase full of Jasper Whitfield’s clothing next to the couch, which freaked me the hell out. How did it even get there? Elves?

Brooke is looking all well-rested and dewy fresh, which is just annoying at the moment. I bet her bed was comfortable.

In the back of my mind is a constant thrum of tension. I have to get home. I vanished in the middle of a workday on Friday afternoon. I didn’t make any of my calls or return to the office, and my father will have been notified by now.

Deals will be falling apart right and left. By next week, our current clients will be starting to panic. My father will be furious at me. He never wanted to step down and hand the reins over to me, but the stroke left him no other options, and he’s been bitterly lamenting his choice ever since .

I don’t think like a businessman, apparently—at least, according to him. What does that even mean? He can’t explain it. I just don’t have what it takes, no matter how many successful deals I’ve closed.

Oh, I push back sometimes, snapping at him, and then feel terrible that I’ve barked at an old man who lived for nothing but work and now can’t work anymore.

Anyway. We’ll get home today, and I will do whatever I have to, to fix this.

“We are going to bicycle to the town nearest to us, and escape the vortex of crazy,” I tell Serena. “What part of ‘get on a bike and pedal’ are you having a hard time with? Shall I draw you a sketch?”

I have two bicycles, which I just purchased from the Wheelly Good Bicycle Shoppe on Main Street. S-h-o-p-p-e. Again.

I offered to buy one for Serena too. Well, Brooke insisted on it, and she refused to leave town with me unless we at least made the offer to Serena.

However, Serena wants no part of it.

“How far do you think I’d get in these heels?” she scoffs. She’s wearing bright red pumps and a very stylish dress.

“Where did you even get clothes like that?” Brooke asks. “Is there a shop in town that I haven’t seen yet?”

If there is, an unnecessary pe has been added to the end of its name.

Serena shrugs. “There was a suitcase full of clothes in my suite when I checked in. All in my size and style. Apparently in this world, I’m a big-city writer who comes here regularly to the inn founded by my late grandparents, to recharge my creative battery.”

Brooke glances down at her clothes. She’s wearing denim slacks with an elastic waistband, white sneakers, and a T-shirt with a printed picture of a daisy on it. “Why didn’t I get stylish clothes? All I have to wear is what was in the McGillicuddys’ house.”

“This world, this reality, is basically making you step into the shoes of my characters.” Serena shrugs apologetically. “Sorry. Jasper is a flashy, overbearing, billionaire businessman, so he’s dressed accordingly. I’m a big-city author visiting the small town where she grew up, and flashing all the signs of her success. Susie is a small-town girl at heart. Anyway, it doesn’t matter what we’re wearing; my understanding is that we are literally twenty miles from the closest town, which is Carter’s Crossing. And you’re going to bike there?”

“We’re bringing food and water, and I don’t see what the alternative is. Nobody will sell me a car,” I tell her. “And there’s no car dealership in this town, which makes no sense, but then nothing here makes sense. Do you have any better ideas?”

Serena fixes me with her cool gaze. “I already told you my better idea.”

Riiight. We have to follow a bunch of crazy rules from a romance novel. “Well, your ideas are insane and ridiculous, so...”

Serena’s cool gaze melts into a heated glare. Brooke elbows me and I fall silent.

“Are they? Give me the book,” Serena says to Brooke. Brooke pulls it from her purse, or rather Susie’s purse, which is made of straw and has sunflowers on it.

Serena takes the book and flips it open. It looks like a couple more chapters have filled in.

Insane.

“The only-one-bed trope,” Serena says, nodding in approval.

“Nothing happened,” Brooke says quickly. “He slept on the couch.”

Serena shrugs and hands her back the book. “That won’t last long. The couch is incredibly uncomfortable, and you’ll take pity on him.”

“Will I, though?” Brooke shoots me a skeptical look.

“How do you know the couch is uncomfortable? You’ve been in the McGillicuddys’ house?” I ask Serena. “Talk about creepy.” Call me a kidnapper, will she?

Serena rolls her eyes at me. “Well, aside from the fact that you look like you got about two hours of sleep last night, that’s just how I would have written the book.”

Frustration surges through me. I am the master of my own fate, damn it.

Well, I was. Now I’m a man who’s been kidnapped to Pleasantville while his real-life world collapses.

I don’t even know what to think anymore. The one thing I know is that we need to escape this pastel-tinted madhouse.

And when we get back to Manhattan—when, not if!—I am going to schedule an appointment with the best head-shrinker in town. Because none of this could ever have happened.

“I am not listening to this anymore,” I say impatiently. “We’re out of here, Brooke. Goodbye, Green Acres! See you never.” I give a sarcastic wave to Main Street and climb on my bicycle.

I know this is a desperate plan. We’ll have to bicycle for hours, but Brooke and I both work out. I have a gym at the office and I encourage my employees to use it at least three times a week, and Brooke uses it daily, getting work done while she’s on the treadmill—a habit I instilled in her. I think we can do it. Maybe when we get a few miles outside of Green Acres, my cell phone will start working.

“Sure thing. Have fun on your bike ride. See you at the meeting tonight.” Serena flashes me a poisonous smile, then turns and strolls off, heading away from us up Main Street.

Right, the meeting where people would probably throw chairs at me and curse me out for being a bastard for wanting to demolish their downtown, while insulting my fictional drunken father. That should be fun.

Even more reason for us to escape today.

I climb on my bike, and we head down Main Street.

Main Street turns into a highway, which will take us to Carter’s Crossing, eventually.

We’ve only been biking for about twenty minutes when I see a familiar oak tree and crossing up ahead.

“Wait, Huckleberry Lane. We just passed that!” I protest. “Didn’t we?”

Brooke flashes a perplexed look at the sign. “Pretty sure we did, yes.”

“That’s impossible. We’re going in a straight line. There’s no way that we looped back.”

But five minutes later, we are facing downtown. Rage swells up and burns inside of me.

“Let’s just go back home,” Brooke sighs.

“No,” I say stubbornly. “Turn around. We took a wrong turn somewhere.” But we both know that we didn’t.

It only takes us two more hours of driving in every direction possible for me to finally admit it—we’re not getting out of Green Acres.

We finally park our bicycles in front of the Full of Beans coffee shop on Main Street, and Brooke goes in to fetch us two coffees, since I’m persona non grata at every shop on the street. We sit on a bench to eat the lunch we packed. Passersby give us dirty looks, which I ignore.

“My legs are killing me.” Brooke scowls at me. “Look, I’m desperate to get home, I’m freaking out about my parents, but this was never going to work, and you know it. It’s obvious that we should have given up hours ago.”

My legs are pretty sore too, but I refuse to admit it. “Excuse me for having a hard time accepting the laws of unreality here.”

Brooke heaves an exasperated sigh. “Can I offer you up a serving of ‘I told you so’ garnished with some ‘Damn it, my calves hurt?’”

“No, you may not. I’m already fed up, thanks.” I look around, close my eyes, and open them again. We’re still here. “We can’t be trapped here forever,” I grumble, looking down at my half-eaten sandwich.

“We aren’t,” Brooke says. “We don’t have to be.”

I know what she thinks we should do, and I’m not doing it. “Our means of escape can’t depend on Serena’s weird rules.”

Brooke shakes her head and takes a long sip of coffee before answering. “It’s not her weird rules. It’s the story tropes of a romance novel, which are perfectly logical. Certain things have to happen for the story to work. It’s the same for mysteries, thrillers, any kind of genre novel, really. There are story beats that you have to hit. Did you ever read Save the Cat ? Or Romancing the Beat ?” She sees the look I’m giving her. “No, of course you didn’t. I read them because I’m a reading fanatic, and I’m fascinated by how stories are built. They’re guidelines for authors. They explain what needs to happen in a story, for each genre.”

I frown at her, finish the last of my coffee, and toss the cup in the trash can that sits next to our bench. I have to admit, I read mostly nonfiction, and I’ve never given much thought to story rules before.

“If authors follow the same rules, don’t all the books end up sounding the same?” I ask.

She shakes her head. “Not at all. First of all, every author has his or her own unique voice. And every author puts their own spin on how the story is told. Even in the same genre, books are very, very different.”

“With a romance, you always know how it’s going to end, right?” I lean forward, looking at her in puzzlement. “Doesn’t that sort of take all the suspense out of it?”

“If I’m reading a romance, the last thing I want is suspense,” Brooke laughs. “There is an absolute comfort in knowing that in the fictional world, everything will end up okay. We don’t have that certainty in the real world. In romance novels, though, people find their true forever love, and if there are any bad guys, they get what’s coming to them. People learn valuable life lessons that help them come to terms with the past and guide them going forward, and all the problems are wrapped up by the end and everyone gets their heart’s desire.”

She’s smiling as she says it, her eyes shining. That’s her perfect world, and I want her to have that so much it makes me ache, but I don’t think that kind of world can really exist outside of fiction.

We’re sitting so close, and the wind is ruffling her hair, and I want to reach out and stroke a stray strand from her face and finally taste those full, plump lips, and...

No. I lean back, and subtly slide a couple inches away from her.

There are so many reasons that would be a terrible idea. I close my eyes and think of my parents’ fights, my mother throwing my father’s hunting trophies at him, cursing at him, screaming that she hated him, and my father spitting vicious insults at her. He was just as angry and demanding and unappreciative with her as he was with me, and finally, she left. But not before telling me that she couldn’t take me with her, because I reminded her too much of him.

It’s no surprise that my father was the way he was. He was raised by an angry widowed dad whose wife had drunk herself to death. Divorce just wasn’t an option back in her day, so she did what she could to escape my grandfather.

Sheffield men ruin women. They drive them crazy. We’re very good at business; we’re very bad at relationships.

Brooke means too much to me to risk letting myself break her .

“So,” Brooke says, breaking the silence, “are we ready to go find Serena?”

“We are not.” I’m being stubborn and stupid. There’s got to be some other answer, though. Some other way to break this spell we’re under.

“Well, then, I guess we’ll just... sit here? Since you can’t walk into a single business on this street, and it’s about five hours until that meeting starts.”

“I am not going to that damn meeting.”

“Pretty sure you are,” she says coolly. “If I have to drag you there, you’re going, because it’s going to be part of the story development, and I am getting back home to my parents no matter what it takes. I tried your bicycle idea; you can go sit through a meeting.”

We sit there in silence for a few moments. Then she turns to me. “How did you know my dad was in care?”

Well, that’s a delicate subject. “It’s not a big thing. I keep tabs on all of my employees. It’s important that Sheffield Properties never gets any unpleasant surprises about the people who work for us and represent our company.”

“Oh,” she says in a small, hurt voice.

A sharp lance of guilt stabs me.

I just made her feel like she was nothing. Just the way my dad made my mother feel.

“All right, the truth is, I wanted to make sure you were okay,” I say to her. “I just... I wanted to know that you and your family were okay, and safe, so I have my people check in on you. I always know what’s going on in your life.” Like, I know that she isn’t dating anyone and it’s none of my damn business, but it would break my heart if she was. Before Brooke came to work for me, bringing sunshine and light and heat and snark and humor into my life, I didn’t even know that I had a heart.

“You do?” Her eyes widen in surprise.

“I do. Remember when you first came to work for me and you were living in an apartment in a bad neighborhood, and I recommended the apartment building you’re in now instead?”

“Yeah. I remember that.” She nods. “I was surprised I even got my application approved, because my credit wasn’t that great, but you insisted I apply. You made it a work assignment for me.” She laughs. Then her expression turns serious. “Wait a minute. Did you help get me approved for that apartment?”

I smile wryly at her. There are things that I don’t tell Brooke, because if I did, she... I don’t know what she’d do.

But yeah, I secretly co-signed the fuck out of that apartment, and I also secretly pay just enough of the rent that she doesn’t suspect it, but it helps her and her weird blue-haired theater geek roommate afford a two-bedroom in a decent neighborhood in Manhattan.

Overpriced, crazy Manhattan.

We need to go home.

Her family needs her, and my business needs me, and my father needs me, if just to have someone to yell at.

“You know what?” I say.

Her mouth twitches up in a smile. “Probably not. The world is not what I thought it was. But go ahead.”

I heave a very long sigh and stand up. I am very, very rarely wrong—in my personal opinion, anyway—but when I am, I’m man enough to admit it.

I’m also desperate to do anything that will get us out of here, away from all the wrong, impossible thoughts I’m having about Brooke and the way she makes me feel.

“I think it’s time that we go speak to Serena.”