Chapter Forty-Nine Lucky
Chapter Forty-Nine
Lucky
When there was a knock on the door the next morning, I was nervous and excited. As was Chauncy, who barked himself silly. I had even gotten dressed up, put on some makeup, and brushed my hair. My face still seemed a little puffy from all the crying that I had done but it would have to be good enough.
But when I opened the door, it wasn’t Hunter.
It was Rodney Whitlock.
“What are you doing here?” I realized how rude that must have sounded but I couldn’t help myself. I was stunned to see him.
He smiled. “There was something I wanted to show you, if you wouldn’t mind going on a quick ride with me.”
“Uh, okay. Just give me a second.” I didn’t have any other plans. I was just waiting around hoping a crew agent would call me.
“I’ll be downstairs waiting,” he said.
I hurried into Lily’s bedroom and let her know that I was going out for a little bit.
“I heard the front door. Is Hunter here?” she asked eagerly.
“No, one of the guests from the yacht. I’ll explain later,” I said. I grabbed my purse and headed downstairs. I didn’t know why I had thought Hunter might come. I’d asked him to give me space and he was the kind of man who would do what I asked.
I also didn’t want him to lose his job. If he came here, the captain would fire him and Hunter’s parents wouldn’t invest in the center. That was the last thing I wanted.
An expensive-looking black SUV idled in front of the apartment building. Rodney rolled down the window in the back seat and waved me over.
I got in and the driver pulled away from the curb.
“I’m happy to see you but very confused,” I told Rodney.
“This is a big surprise, isn’t it?” he said, sounding delighted with himself.
“And a bit strange. I feel like I should be serving you.”
He laughed. “Not this time.”
“Can I ask where we’re going?”
“Now that wouldn’t be much of a surprise, would it?”
His surprise worked, because when he pulled up in front of my nonna’s old bakery, I was completely shocked. “What are we doing here?”
“Come and see.” He got out of the car and I followed him, intensely curious.
That feeling only increased when he opened the front door and walked into the building.
A wave of memories hit me the second I crossed over the threshold. I hadn’t been inside in years. If I closed my eyes, I could smell the yeast and flour, hear my nonna singing a show tune, my mom telling the twins to get down from the table.
I put a hand over my heart. “Thank you.”
“For what?” He sounded genuinely puzzled.
“For letting me be here again. How did you know this was my nonna’s bakery?”
“It’s amazing what you can find out with a quick Google search,” he said. “Lucky, I want you to open your bakery.”
And I wanted to be able to eat pasta and not gain weight. “I will. When I get the money.”
“No, now. I’m going to invest.”
My heart sped up and I blinked several times. “What?”
“You’re going to open your bakery, and I will be your silent partner, putting up all the capital you need. I think it would make my wife very happy to know that somebody was living out her dream.”
“No, Rodney, I couldn’t ask—”
“You’re not asking. I’m offering,” he said. “The ownership will go into a trust, and when I pass, the bakery will be a hundred percent yours. This isn’t a loan you have to pay back. I’m investing in you.”
“That’s too much.”
He frowned slightly. “It’s my money. I get to decide what to do with it. I don’t have any children, and this is the kind of legacy I want to leave behind. Helping people achieve their dreams.”
My mouth hung open, unable to believe that this was happening. “I don’t want this to be because of Hunter.” I didn’t want to owe Hunter—I wanted whatever happened between us in the future to be because we chose it. Not because I felt indebted to him.
“It’s not for him. It’s for you. Because you’re the kind of person who would stay up all night with an old man letting him talk about the love of his life. I’ve seen how hard you work, how diligent you are, how dedicated, how caring, how detail oriented, how talented. I would be a fool to pass up an opportunity to go into business with someone like you.”
Now I felt presumptuous and a little bit embarrassed. “I don’t really know what to say.”
“I hope you’ll say yes. Although I should warn you, I do have two conditions.”
Unless they involved selling my soul to the devil, which I might seriously consider, given what Rodney was offering, I was going to say yes. “What conditions?”
“The first is that you have to sell those chocolate chip cookies you made me on the yacht because those were incredible. The second is that I want you to name it Lucia’s. That was my wife’s name.”
A shiver passed through me, making my skin break out in goose bumps. “That’s my name. And my nonna’s name.”
It was a common enough name in several countries, so I probably shouldn’t have had this kind of reaction, but it was like my grandmother was personally sanctioning the deal, urging me to take it.
“Then it sounds like a perfect name for the bakery,” he said.
“Yes,” I said. “I’m in.”
“Excellent. I’ll have my team start drawing up paperwork.”
Rodney had a team of people. An actual team, and he had come to East Haven to help me open my bakery.
“You came all the way here just for this?”
“I have some business in New York and made a quick stop to see you. Speaking of, I have to be going to make my meeting on time.” He threw me a key and I caught it. “The building has already been purchased, so this key belongs to you.”
I held it in my hand, turning it, letting the light hit it. It was one of the most beautiful things I’d ever seen.
“‘Thank you’ doesn’t seem big enough to tell you how much this means to me.”
He smiled. “Live your life and be happy. That’s all I can ask in return.” Then he stood there, as if he wanted to add something else and was wrestling with whether or not he should say it. “Things happen in life. People die. Relationships end. Heartache seems inevitable. But grief is the price we pay for love, and Lucky? It is a price worth paying. I would take an entire lifetime of grief over missing one moment of love with Lucia. You should really think about what’s important. What matters.”
Then Rodney left, leaving his nuclear truth bombs behind. My heart was beating so quickly.
I needed to face my fears. I had to believe in Hunter, and more importantly? I had to believe in myself.
Which felt a bit easier to do now that I was standing in my nonna’s bakery.
No, my bakery.
The person I wanted to call and tell was Hunter.
Regardless of what Rodney had said, I knew that Hunter had played a huge part here.
How else would Rodney have known that I was back in the States? I had told him I’d be in touch when I had a more permanent residence again. But he had reached out to me first and asked for my address.
Hunter must have told him.
Which meant that Hunter had found a way to help make my dreams come true.
My instinct was to reach out to Hunter immediately. But after the chaos of both my life and my time on the Mio Tesoro , I needed true clarity. To let myself come to a decision where I wasn’t acting impulsively or glossing over things. I had to take the time to do that, even if I didn’t want to.
If time felt sped up on the boat, it seemed to be going in slow motion in regular life. For the next two weeks, I had nothing to keep me busy, especially not compared to my yachting days. Rodney’s “team” had been in touch, and there were all kinds of bureaucratic hoops we had to jump through before we could start renovating. I did research on some construction companies that I could contact when I got the green light, looked up the best ways to import Italian flour, gave my sisters’ apartment an unnecessary but very thorough cleaning that involved Q-tips and toothbrushes.
Which gave me the free time I needed to think about Hunter. I did what Rodney had encouraged me to do, to figure out what was important and what mattered.
My sisters.
My new bakery.
And Hunter.
I had thought that maybe if I didn’t see him every day, my feelings would fade, but if anything, they had only grown stronger. Missing him was a physical pain that I had all the time. Like a giant splinter had become embedded in my skin and every time I moved or breathed I felt it, throbbing and aching. I realized that I had used the nonfraternization rule like a shield. I had justified spending time with Hunter and claimed that I wouldn’t cross the line into something deeper because of that rule. That hadn’t been the reason why, though. It had been my own fears and insecurities that had held me back. The rule had made it so that I could avoid reality.
I knew that because I’d suffered so much loss—my parents, my grandparents—it had made me desperate not to lose anyone else. It was why I had let my sisters take advantage of me for so long. It was easier to hide than it was to be up front and honest. I had told myself that I didn’t need a romantic relationship, didn’t want one, but it wasn’t true. I wanted to be loved and cared for and to do that in return for someone else.
I was just worried that I’d lost my chance.
There was a Hunter-size piece of my life missing.
I had focused so much on my own hurt, on the way that I had felt betrayed, that I didn’t stop to think things through logically. Hunter had been devoted to me for weeks. Both Georgia and Emilie had pursued him and he’d brushed them off. He’d made his intentions with me clear. He had only wanted me, and I had been so caught up with my own issues that I hadn’t been able to see that.
He wouldn’t have cheated on me. I knew that, too. I fully believed that Emilie kissed him and he had told her to stop and that he was going to report her to the captain.
I also hadn’t considered how Hunter might have been hurt by my actions. By me jumping to a terrible conclusion and not believing him. That had been so wrong of me.
Maybe he wouldn’t be able to forgive me. Maybe I had hurt him too badly for us to move past this. That thought terrified me, too.
I talked to the twins about him constantly. They let me work through everything and examine it from every angle, but their conclusions were always the same.
That Hunter and I were in love and I’d been a complete fool to push him away.
Lily said, “You’ve grown a lot and I think Hunter played a part in that. Loving him and being loved by him, it made you change. It gave you a confidence and a strength I haven’t seen before.”
That was also true. My mind still went to extremes and envisioned the worst possible outcome, but it was better than it had been a month ago. I handled things more easily than I had in the past.
Although I didn’t think that I was handling this Hunter thing particularly well.
The more I thought about what had happened with my firing, the worse I felt. While I didn’t regret coming home to check on Lily, I should have flown back to Portofino and talked things out with him.
“What if he’s moved on?” I asked. “Out of sight, out of mind.”
“I doubt that,” Rose countered.
“He’s not out of your mind,” Lily pointed out.
“Maybe he doesn’t feel about me the way I feel about him.”
“Again, I doubt it,” Rose said. “The fact that he’s giving you the space you asked for? He loves you.”
“You two found something special and you should hold on to it with both hands as tightly as you can. You should call him.”
They were right. Or I desperately wanted them to be right. I did worry that he’d forgotten about me. Georgia texted me here and there but I knew how busy she was. She never said a single word about Hunter. I could have called her and asked if he had replaced me with someone new. The captain would have made her chief stew and brought on a new junior stew. Which meant the new girl would share a cabin with him.
What if he had moved on?
I couldn’t bear for that to be true. Which I also took as a good sign about my true feelings.
I realized that I had made a huge mistake and needed to rectify it. I had to talk to him. I texted and said:
Can we talk?
I waited for him to answer. I calculated the time difference. I knew he was probably working at that moment but I was too impatient, wanting to hear back from him immediately. So I added:
I miss you. Can you call me?
But hours later, I still didn’t have a response. I went to bed that night terrified that I had destroyed whatever it was that we’d had.