Chapter 24
24
Natalie
I sleep well.
Thanks, Big Bob.
And Preston.
The next morning, we meet in the conference room to debrief.
I beat him there by about thirty seconds, but it’s enough that when he walks in, he draws up, startled—before he hides his surprise.
“Thank you for being prompt.” His voice is a morning-rough baritone. Between the gruffness and the formality, something tightens in my low belly.
We’re going to pretend nothing happened. Not in the hot tub. Not on either side of the wall afterward.
I hate it, and I like it.
Also, I like the suit. It’s linen again, and so help me, I want to rub myself all over it.
All over him.
We sit down a healthy distance from each other—the hot spring having established that anything less is unsafe.
“What’s next?” he says.
For a split second, my mind goes somewhere else, and then I realize he’s talking about The Plan. Our Plan.
“Let’s map out what we have.”
Keeping our safe distance, we do it. He prints a blank week schedule, and we copy onto it everything we’ve come up with so far. It’s more than I thought, and it’s satisfying to see.
Some of the vendors have already reached out to suggest additional offerings, so we add those in. And I’ve thought of a few new things—there’s a pottery painting shop in Bend that also does Wine and Paint nights.
“And we could do Bingo and darts,” I say.
“You made fun of Bingo,” he says, eyebrows raised, the corner of his mouth turned up.
I kind of wish he wouldn’t do that. It reads differently now. Like a tease. Like an invitation. Which I know it isn’t.
Unless it is.
“I needed to give you a hard time,” I say.
The smile deepens, the dimple showing.
Gah.
I try again to convince him about axe throwing.
“No,” he says. “Find something else.”
“We can make it safe.”
“No,” he says, expression so stern it dissolves something in my nether regions.
I cross my arms. “Okay, smarty pants, then what? We need”—I count—“at least ten more programs that are compact enough to test at a summer festival but ongoing and popular enough to flesh this out.” I point to the calendar.
“You’re in charge of bringing the fun,” he says. “I’m the spreadsheets guy, remember?”
“You can do this. Come on—it’ll be good for you. Let’s brainstorm. Throw some stuff out. You liked the Jell-O wrestling.”
He rolls his eyes, scowling. “I didn’t.”
“It’s not so hard,” I coax. “When you need a break from work, what do you do?”
His mouth opens. Closes. Opens and closes again, before his jaw hardens, enough to tell me what I should have already guessed, a moment before he says it: “I work out.”
“That’s tragic, Preston.”
He scowls. “It’s what I need to do.”
To best my grandfather, he doesn’t say, but now I know that’s how the sentence ends.
The things Preston’s grandfather said to him, about how it would end badly with his ex-wife and about how he’d never succeed in New York—those things hadn’t been only gauntlets thrown down.
They’d hurt Preston deeply. His grandfather’s lack of support and faith.
He’s wrapped his whole life around that hurt and refused himself anything good until he proves his grandfather wrong, like that will undo the words and the hurt, too.
I hope he’s right. I hope it will. Because I don’t like the idea of Preston hurting, not at all. I hate it so much, it clenches my stomach.
I think of him laughing in the Jell-O pit, before he wasn’t laughing anymore. He’s wrong. He can have fun. He just needs to let himself.
“I have an idea,” I say. “I’m calling it Operation Fun.”
He looks startled and slightly…terrified. Which is further proof that he needs help desperately.
“Basically, we’ll figure out how to make you have fun again.”
He raises an eyebrow. “Good luck with that,” he says dryly.
“Did you just make a self-deprecating joke?” I ask, feigning astonishment.
“I do make jokes. Just like I do sometimes apologize.”
But he doesn’t sound pissed. He sounds wry and, again, self-deprecating. And it’s…charming.
“Okay, so here’s what I’m thinking.” Ideas flood my brain as I look at him, immaculately dressed, buttoned up, a softball pitch to the part of me that lives to make other people have a good time. “We figure out what would be fun for you, with a little trial and error. We can throw out ideas?—”
“We’ve already established that when it comes to ideas about what’s fun, I’m stunted.”
“Not stunted . Just…out of practice.”
The corners of his mouth turn up, and there I go again, melting. For a guy who kissed me just for fun and then told me that was all it could be.
Come on, Natalie. Focus. “We try a bunch of things out, and in the process, maybe we get your mind opened up for brainstorming and help ourselves out with the planning process.”
“Okaaaay…” He still looks apprehensive, but he nods.
“What are you doing tomorrow?”
“Tomorrow?” he squawks, which makes me laugh.
“Yes, tomorrow ,” I say. “As When Harry Met Sally says, ‘When you find something that might be fun for you, you want the fun to start right away.’”
“I don’t think that’s a real quote.”
“It applies, though, don’t you think? And also, aren’t you the one snapping your fingers to try to hurry up this whole operation?”
“True,” he concedes. “I was going to do some work tomorr?—”
“Uh-uh-uh,” I caution, waving a finger at him.
“I’m free,” he amends. Those unruly mouth corners are doing their thing again.
Then he frowns, his brows drawing together, and looks down at his watch. “I need to get going.”
He closes his laptop and stands.
“I’ll text you the deets for tomorrow,” I say.
He rolls his eyes—I think at the word “deets”—then raises a finger. “Two rules.”
I raise my eyebrows. “Rules? Okay.”
“One. I’m paying.”
I open my mouth to protest, but he glares, and I stop.
“Fair,” I say. “Since I’m pretty sure your net worth is many powers of ten higher than mine, and this is your fun.”
“And two…” He’s walking backward toward the door as he speaks. He reaches it, puts a hand on the frame, and rakes his gaze over me from head to toe. Every cell in my body shifts subtly to point itself in his direction.
“No more kissing.”
He vanishes out the door.