Chapter 7
Chapter Seven
Jessica couldn’t say what the chef prepared. She didn’t know if the food was too salty or not flavorful enough.
She was overheated, overstimulated, and about to lose her mind.
Because Trevor was working her last nerve trying to get her attention.
He wasn’t being rude or childish. No, he was charming and funny. He was delightful.
So much so that no one noticed what he was doing.
Except her. Because that man knew exactly what to say to stir her up, to engage her. Even worse, every time their gazes collided, sparks flew.
Ignoring him was exhausting.
Yeah, she got it. She should’ve moved on long ago. Getting closure should’ve been a simple thing, just two friends talking through what went wrong.
He explains his side. I explain mine.
We hug it out, and all is peachy.
But she just couldn’t do that. Not in front of Jasper, Chris, and Darby. Her emotions ran too high.
Besides, she was working.
This is a job.
My reputation’s on the line.
For the past hour, the others raved about the food and listened with rapt attention as the rosy-cheeked chef described his cooking ethos and told stories about each dish. He was as captivating as he was talented—and he even had a great temperament. Which was rare for a chef.
After the servers brought out a selection of side dishes, the chef stood in front of the table and rubbed his hands together. “How’s everything so far?”
“Couldn’t be better,” Chris said.
“I’ll be honest. Food’s always been more like fuel for me, but this…” Darby gestured to the plate in front of her. “Your cooking might turn me into a foodie.”
“We appreciate you coming out here,” Jess said. “I know it wasn’t easy.” He’d had to pack up his food and knives, travel by two different modes of transportation—car and ferry—and cook in an unfamiliar kitchen.
“For this opportunity, you bet I’ll take my traveling tasting show on the road.” Hákon grinned. “Now, you said no dessert because you’re looking to hire a pastry chef…” Both servers came out of the kitchen with platters loaded with treats. “But my wife trained at the Cordon Blue in Paris, and she threatened me with a month of sleeping on the futon if I didn’t offer you a taste of her magic.” He looked at Jess questioningly. Is this all right?
She smiled. “You should’ve mentioned she was a pastry chef when we talked. We’ll add her to our list.”
“Does she have her own bakery?” Chris asked, but his attention was on the array of pastries the servers set down in the middle of the table.
“Oh, wow.” Jess took in the Napoleons, lemon tarts sprinkled with confectioner’s sugar, slices of chocolate mousse cake, and colorful petit fours. “These look amazing.”
“No, she works with me.” The chef’s smile expressed how proud he was of his wife and how much he enjoyed sharing a space with her. “Our kitchen’s tiny, so she does her work at night and in the early mornings, and I do mine during the day. She’s the yin to my yang.”
Chris bit into a creamy éclair, and his eyes squeezed shut. “Unreal.”
“You like?” Chef asked.
Chris made sounds of pure delight, and everyone laughed.
“I’ll be sure to tell her.” When the two assistants came out of the kitchen, loaded with insulated bags, the chef swiveled around. “Now, I don’t mean to be rude, but we have to skedaddle. There’s a storm coming, and we need to make the ferry back to the island.”
Chris got up. “Let me walk you out. I’ve been so busy eating I haven’t had a chance to talk about my vision for this place.”
After the group left, Jasper said, “We should hire him.”
“He’s definitely got the attributes we’re looking for.” Notice how I didn’t address the quality of his food? That’s because I couldn’t taste anything.
I’m obsessed with Trevor Montgomery.
You couldn’t help but look at him. The combination of charisma and physical beauty… The man was magnificent.
He’d filled out so much over the years. Broad shoulders, muscular chest, arms, and thighs. Tattoos that made her want to pull up his sleeves and explore.
His greatest appeal, though, was his sincerity. Because that smile was not fake. Deep inside, this man was a well of happiness. He radiated all the goodness brimming over in his soul.
But he belonged with someone else. He hadn’t been hers in a very long time. “He’s the real deal. I talked to his staff.”
“You did?” Jasper asked.
She nodded. “You can’t hire someone until you get the dirt. References are curated, so they don’t carry much weight. We want to hear from people who’ve worked for him.”
“How do you find them if they don’t work there anymore?” Darby asked.
“You follow the trail. Putting his and his restaurant’s name in search engines always leads to conversations, reviews, and people who used to work there. And Hákon is beloved by everyone and produces outstanding food.”
“What about the pastry chef?” Trevor asked. “Do you trust a husband and wife working together?”
She knew he didn’t care about the answer. He just wanted her to acknowledge him. Which was unfair. Cruel, actually. “If they’ve done it successfully so far, I don’t see why not.” Because looking into his eyes unearthed so many damn memories.
When he’d smile at her from across the classroom. A look of anticipation for the fun adventure they had planned for that afternoon. Or, later, after they’d become physical, a promise of what his hands, mouth, and tongue would do to her.
Of him bracing his hands on either side of her head, watching her intently as he drove into her.
Oh, damn him . She had no choice but to look away. It was just too painful. “But I leave those decisions to Chris. All I can do is source options.”
“You’re good, you know that?” Jasper asked.
“Well, thank you. That’s very nice of you to say. Of course, I’ve had lots of experience. There’s nothing more important than who you hire. The wrong vibe can sink a resort.”
“How long have you been doing this?” Trevor asked.
And bingo . He’d asked just the right question to get the direct eye contact he wanted. “I got my first job in hospitality twenty-six years ago.” She watched him make the mental calculation.
Yes, that was the same year you bought a home in Calamity—our dream—and moved your two-year-old son into it.
A son who wasn’t mine.
So, let’s stop pretending we can ever be friends, okay?
But her attempt at a withering look didn’t pan out as she’d hoped. Because he nodded and said, “Do you spend your time traveling from one job to another?”
Darby nudged him. “She just opened her own resort. Chris told us at breakfast.”
“That’s right,” Jess said. “But to answer your question, no. I rarely take consulting jobs.”
Darby seemed subdued, and she couldn’t help wondering if it had something to do with Emil. It had to be, considering the woman wasn’t touching her fiancé this morning.
Jess didn’t see any flirtatiousness at all.
“Where’s your resort?” Trevor asked.
And here it comes. She had no choice but to say it. “Calamity, Wyoming.”
His fork clattered on the plate. “Are you serious? You live there?”
His shock was almost insulting.
Did you think you were the only one who got to live our dream? “I do.”
“I live there too.”
“Yes, Trevor. I know.” And with that, she was done with the conversation. “Anyhow, I hope you got some ideas for your menu from this tasting.” She stood up. “Try that lemon cake. It looks delicious.”
As she fled the dining room, her heels clacked on the floor, and white noise filled her mind. A flurry of conflicting emotions made it impossible to identify exactly what she was feeling. Anger, definitely.
No, it’s not anger.
It’s hurt.
I’m hurt.
And she couldn’t stand carrying this pain anymore .
Of course I know where he lives.
I’ve searched the internet countless times, greedy for every morsel of information I could get.
And him? He’s been filming movies, raising a son, and getting engaged to race car drivers.
I stopped existing to him the moment he walked out the door.
As she neared the lobby, Chris and the chef’s voices grew louder, and she didn’t have the composure to talk to them. So, she made a quick turn down a hallway. Out of sight, she leaned against the wall and closed her eyes.
Shaking, she crossed her arms over her chest in a hug-like gesture.
How did she stop feeling this pain?
I beg you to release me from it.
“Elzy.”
Dammit. She didn’t hear his footfalls because this section was carpeted. She lowered her arms and pushed away from the wall. “What?” Unfortunately, her tone came out more plea than exasperation.
Trevor’s scent filled her senses. And no, it was nothing like the boy she remembered who’d only used bar soap and deodorant. This version of him smelled expensive—and she didn’t know why because it wasn’t cologne.
“Let me guess,” she said. “You bring your own fancy soap wherever you travel?”
“My what? Soap? No. I use whatever’s in the hotel.”
“This hotel hasn’t operated in ten years. There are no supplies in the rooms.”
“I don’t know.” He grew flustered. “I used whatever was in the shower. It must be Darby’s.”
We’re talking about soap now. Awesome . “What can I do for you, Trevor?”
“Nothing. I just…want to be near you.” He stood there as jittery as a boy finally talking to his crush. “I want to…” Grabbing the back of his neck, he blew out a breath. “Can we just talk?”
She sighed. Here’s your chance to get that closure. And yet…
She just couldn’t do it. She couldn’t look into his eyes and not see devotion and lust. For whatever reason, she needed to preserve that part of her past. Hold on to it. It’s all I have of him . “I’m afraid this trip is all business for me. Maybe when we get back home, we can meet for coffee, okay?” Over my dead body . But hopefully, it would make him go away.
“No.” He stepped closer. “Look, for whatever reason, we both wound up in this hotel in Iceland, and I’m not going to waste the opportunity. I get it. You’ve moved on. It was a long time ago. But I don’t believe for one second the hurt I’ve caused you is entirely healed.” He came so close she could feel the heat of his body. “Call it guilt—call it whatever you want—but this is my chance to make things right.”
“You can’t do that, Trevor.” It was his vulnerability that did it. Made her stop running. She’d always had the sense he’d moved on and never looked back, but there was no denying this man was as upset as she was—and that meant something.
It meant it hadn’t been easy for him. That he had regrets. And she wanted to hear him out. She just did.
Okay. You win, Amber.
I’ll get the damn closure.
If it would get this trauma out of her body, she’d talk to him. “But if you have something to say, please. Go ahead.” She gestured to him. Talk.
But he didn’t do that. He watched her with a strange expression. Was that yearning? Or was she imagining it?
Of course you’re imagining it, you idiot.
My God, you’re a hot mess.
He lifted a hand, as though he might touch her.
No . She froze. Fight or flight kicked in.
Because she longed for his touch. More than anything, that was what she missed.
Come on. They’d been inseparable. They couldn’t keep their hands off each other.
I miss that.
I need that.
But he wasn’t hers anymore, and if he touched her right then, she would hurl herself into his arms and beg for more.
And that snapped her out of it. Because she would never do that.
But he seemed to sense her turmoil as he pulled back and rubbed the back of his neck.
It left her feeling as disappointed as she was relieved.
No, relief is good. We don’t want to unearth longing.
We just want to let him go.
He was just so… familiar . Beneath skin that had aged from years of filming under a Scottish sun and dark hair now threaded with silver, she still saw the boy she’d loved with all her heart. The boy she’d thought was her soulmate.
And she couldn’t stand it. “Why are you just standing there? You wanted to talk. Talk.”
“You’re so different.”
He’d dropped a lit match at her feet, and she burst into flames. “You think? You mean I’m not the same girl who trusted with her whole heart? Who loved with her whole heart? Who believed every word the man she married said to her? Wow, Trevor, I’m sorry if I somehow changed when, forty-three minutes after hearing my husband tell me I’m his best friend, his lover, his peace, his motivation, his inspiration, his North Star, and the love of his life, he walked out the door and never talked to me again.” She punched the air with her fists. “You think that might fundamentally change a girl?”
Anger sparked in his eyes. “I tried to talk to you again, remember? And you blew me off.” He held up both hands in an apologetic gesture. “That doesn’t change what I did, and I’m sorry, Elz. I’m so sorry for the way everything turned out.”
“You’re sorry for the thirteen movies you made? For the son you had with another woman?”
He shook his head with conviction. “No. I can’t be sorry for my son. He’s the best thing I’ve ever done. But I am sorry for the way he was conceived, and I’m sorry for hurting you.” He reached for her, but she jerked away. “I’m sorry .”
That was it? After exposing herself so completely—letting him know she’d memorized his stupid, empty vows—all he could say was, “Sorry?” “Well, cool. Apology accepted.” She shouldered past him.
But he caught her upper arm. “No. You’re not running away.” He was so close the warmth of his breath gusted on her cheek. “In all these years, our paths haven’t crossed. Not once. Until now .” Gripping her shoulders, he turned her to face him. She allowed herself to be handled as easily as a rag doll. “Listen to me. I have missed you every minute of every day. I dream about you at night. You have never, ever left my heart. And now that we’re together, we have a chance to?—”
“To what, Trevor? You’re getting married .” She wrenched free of his hold. “Does Darby know I’m ‘still in your heart’? Does she know you dream about me? If not, you should tell her. She deserves to know this little fact about her future husband.”
The man looked tortured. Well, good . Because it was killing her to stand this close to him and hear him say things like You have never, ever left my heart.
With a fiery cocktail of rage and desperation burning inside her, she didn’t know whether she wanted to beg him to tell her how he could’ve left her so callously or punch him in the balls so hard he dropped to his knees.
But the bastard had a steel rod for a spine. “No,” he stated firmly. “She’s not part of this. We need to talk, just the two of us. When I left, I knew I’d hurt you. I knew you were angry, but I never thought it would end us. Do you think I’d have gotten on that plane if I’d known you’d never speak to me again? I thought you’d yell at me, but that we’d get through it.”
“Well, then, you were delusional.”
“Maybe. Or maybe I was desperate to manage the kind of problems a twenty-year-old had no business fixing.”
“Oh, you figured that out, huh?”
“I realized it after my parents died. And believe me, that was a tough lesson to learn. I fucked up, Elz. No question about it. But we’re here now. We have a chance to?—”
“No. The only thing we can do is dredge up a past we can’t change. Nothing you say will ever fix the pain I live with every single day of my life.”
His eyes turned glossy, and his lips pressed together. “You’re the only woman I’ve ever loved, and to know I hurt you that deeply…” His eyelids fluttered shut, and he took a slow breath. But when they opened, he radiated a steely resolve. “I think you’re wrong. I think talking can heal us both. Can we start by getting to know each other again? I want to know how your life turned out. There’s nothing about your personal life on the internet.”
“That’s because it’s no one’s business.” He didn’t get to know anything about the life he’d chosen to leave. “My story is a privilege for the people close to me, who’ve been there for me. You are not either of those things.”
She would never expose herself to this man again.
“This isn’t going to work,” he muttered.
“Now, you’re catching on.” She sounded so snarky, so detached, when really, it made her unbearably sad that he’d give up so easily.
“That’s not what I mean.” His tone was strong, confident. “When I left, I believed I was doing the right thing. I thought you’d get it when I paid off the farm and your dad’s debt. That everything would fall into place when I bought us a ranch in Calamity.”
“You bought that ranch for yourself. And your son.”
“If I wanted what was best for my son, I would’ve built a house in Riverton so my parents could help raise him. But I chose Calamity because I never gave up believing we’d find our way back to each other.”
“How, Trevor? By magic? Don’t feed me bullshit lines from a movie. Because I never heard from you.”
“That’s not true, and you know it. I wrote you letters. I flew back home. You know that. You know how hard I tried to talk to you.”
Mortification washed through her as she remembered how childishly she’d behaved. “I don’t know what this has to do with having a baby two years after we broke up. Can you see how your words sound empty when your son is out there in the world? You said I never left your heart, but Trevor, you had a baby .” While I was still curled up in my bed bawling my eyes out. “You had sex with another woman.” Her voice sounded raw, but that was because each word came tearing out of the deepest reaches of her soul.
“You want to know that story?”
“More than anything.” She regretted the words the moment they came out of her mouth, but being around him threw her back to the girl she used to be.
Honest, blunt.
Reckless and impulsive.
“Okay.” He gave a curt nod. “I borrowed money to come home after the first film wrapped. When you wouldn’t talk to me, it broke me. I only had a few days before I had to get back on set, and I was out of my mind. I needed to talk to you, Elz. I had to make things right. Living without you was unbearable.”
She wished she’d been mature enough to talk to him back then.
But she hadn’t been.
“I thought if I could give you back the eighteen hundred dollars, you’d see I was doing this for us. For our future. But you refused to see me so, the minute I got back to Scotland, I took a job in a bar. The cast was still living in a guesthouse at that point, so I had to sneak out, but I did it. About a week in, I got hammered.”
“You don’t even drink.”
“I know. But you’d blown me off. I didn’t know if you’d ever talk to me. I couldn’t…” He let out a huff of breath, pain ravaging his handsome features. “I was in agony, Elz.” With a shake of his head, he got back on track. “Anyhow, these women came in for a hen night.”
“A what?”
“A bachelorette party. They recognized me from the set. It’s a tiny town, so it wasn’t a big surprise. I don’t know how I thought I’d get away with working there. They were all having a great time, flirting with me like crazy, but I wasn’t interested. This one woman didn’t want to party, so she hung out at the bar, and we started talking. I told her my story, and she said I was an absolute fool for putting money over love.”
You were.
“She told me eighteen months was too long, and that I should quit filming and go back home. I couldn’t stand it, the pain of knowing I’d made a fatal mistake, that I might’ve lost you for good, so I took a shot, and it dulled the ache. And then, I started pounding them. I got obliterated. And somehow, during that night, I had sex with her.”
Hearing it was like a fist punch to the heart. “That’s my point. You had a girlfriend eighteen months after we broke up.”
“No. I never saw her again. I don’t even remember hooking up with her.”
It didn’t relieve the ache, not one bit. Because he’d still touched another woman. He’d still made a baby with her. “Okay, but you didn’t quit filming, and you didn’t come back to me.”
“Oh, but I planned on it. First, I had to finish out my contract. After that second film, I was going to quit and come home to you. In fact, my suitcase was packed, and I had my boarding ticket in my hand. I was walking out the door to head to the airport when I got a call from my agent. A man claimed his wife had slept with me and had my baby. They’d planned on raising the kid as their own, but since she died, he didn’t want it.”
“ It? He didn’t want it? That boy was his son.”
“Believe me, I know. In any event, I had to stay and take the DNA test.”
“Of course.”
“And that’s how I found out I had a son.”
“You never saw her again after that night? She didn’t come back to see you?”
“Never saw her again. Didn’t know she was married.” He sighed. “Barely remember the night.”
“Well, I don’t know what to say.” He’d altered their history, and it was disorienting. Because one slight shift readjusted the entire picture. One tug unraveled a fabric of emotions she’d stitched together over three decades.
He must’ve seen it in her eyes because he grew excited. “We have so much more to talk about. I know you’re busy, but what about tonight? After dinner? Can we sit down and talk?”
“I just don’t see the point. Trevor, stirring up all these memories?—”
“But they’re not memories. We’re clearing up the stories we’ve told ourselves to make sense of things. Now, we can get to the truth.”
“Okay, but then what?” she asked. “You’re still getting married.”
“Elz.” The pleading in his eyes confused her. He had something he wanted to say.
What? What is he not telling me?
“I don’t want to talk about Darby right now.” He said it urgently, like he was dodging something. Sidestepping. “We need to stay focused on us.”
“There is no us. And as long as you’re still engaged, I’m not comfortable talking to you.”
He was hiding something from her, and she didn’t like it.
She didn’t like any of this. Because being this close to him stirred up memories and feelings. She was susceptible to him in a way she couldn’t explain.
Trevor was compelling. He was exciting . Reckless and impulsive. He got a call from his agent, and he walked out the door. And right then, after bumping into her in Iceland, he declared she’d never left his heart.
He got so carried away he forgot all about his fiancée.
Joel would never do that. He’d remained on such good terms with his ex-wife that he was staying with her for Christmas, just to take care of their adult child.
Joel’s a good, steady man.
I’m in a good place. I like my life.
And I’m not going down this road with Trevor Montgomery again.
She put her mask of professionalism back on. “I’m glad we cleared the air, but I have to make some calls.”
“Elzy, don’t go. Just wait. Talk to me.”
And that was it right there, wasn’t it? All the years of pining for this man, and for what? “Sorry. I don’t wait for people anymore.”