Chapter Two
I guess I should have expected to see Royal—King—when I got to Willow Cove. I knew he likely still lived here, and I knew he would be on the boardwalk at some point because that was where he spent all his time back when we were… Well, I figured it would happen before long, but I didn’t expect to see him in the bakery of all places. He hated that place! I was sort of banking on him avoiding Kingston’s until I had a chance to find my footing, even if his uncle owns the place.
After King kicks me out of Bill’s bakery, I spend the morning sitting on the beach and ignoring Cecily’s repeated calls. I hung up on her suddenly at the sight of a shirtless King, and she hasn’t left me alone since. But I don’t think I’ll be able to explain why I’ve been off balance ever since realizing that the well-toned man of a man showing off his muscly torso in the bakery this morning was Royal Kingston.
My best friend doesn’t know King exists, and I’d like to keep it that way. Some things are better left in the past, and King is the source of my biggest regrets. A girl doesn’t easily talk about the man she left behind in the worst possible way.
Goodness, but I forgot how warm it can get in South Carolina, and more than likely my morning on the beach is going to leave me red and tender, but there’s really nowhere else for me to go. Willow Cove is small on a good day, and when I spent summers here as a kid, I was always either in the bakery with Bill or on the beach with King. The bakery isn’t an option, so the beach it is.
I didn’t exactly make a plan before I came here, so I don’t have a place to stay. Nor can I easily afford a room in the Coralberry Cottages after draining my checking account to pay for the gas to make the drive from New York and rolling into town on fumes.
If Bill can’t help me, I’m not sure what I’m going to do. This journey was a Hail Mary.
It’s almost noon before King finds me watching the waves from the end of the boardwalk, and I’m genuinely surprised he actually came. With the way he glared at me—not that I can blame him—I expected to be waiting on the boardwalk until his uncle closed the bakery later this afternoon.
King rests his elbows on the railing about a foot from me without a word, his eyes on the ocean and his jaw tight. And wow, does he have a jaw. The last time I saw this man, he was a gangly teenager with barely a sign of facial hair, and the man next to me is…not that.
He’s still got his mop of dark hair, though he’s cut it slightly shorter on the sides so it doesn’t curl over his ears anymore, and his brown eyes are as bottomless as ever. His face isn’t as round as it used to be, full of angles and edges, and scruff lines his cheeks in a way it never did before. He looks like someone took hold of his eighteen-year-old self and, like clay, molded him into a man.
I gotta admit, they did a good job on him. I always thought he was cute, but grown-up Royal Kingston is certifiably gorgeous.
“Are you done?” he growls, glancing at me from the corner of his eye.
My face flames. “Can I talk to Bill now?”
“No.”
“I get that you’re not happy to see me, King, but I really need to talk to him.”
“Why?” He finally looks at me, turning his head to give me a full view of his face. Now that I’m seeing him in the sunlight, he looks tired. Haggard. Like he hasn’t had a good night’s sleep in weeks. “Why are you so desperate to talk to Uncle Bill?”
I know him well enough to know that he’s not going to do anything until he gets an answer; this man can be almost as stubborn as me. But I’m not used to this hardened version of him, and the truth would be a whole lot easier to admit if he was still the happy-go-lucky guy I used to know.
Taking a deep breath, I grip the strap of my purse and shift my eyes to the gentle waves as they wash in. “I need a job.” That’s greatly understating it, but it’s about all I can manage right now.
“So you came to a town of three thousand people?” He lets out a short bark of a laugh. “Smart move.”
“Bill always said there would be room for me at the bakery.”
“New York wasn’t quaint enough for you?”
A little gasp escapes me, though I shouldn’t be surprised. Bill must have told him where I ended up, and I can’t help but wonder how much King knows about my life over the last ten years. Does he know about my boyfriend dumping me on national television? I really hope not.
Frustration builds inside me, leaving me feeling buzzy and unsettled. There’s petty, and then there’s King holding a grudge for a decade.
“Look,” I say, turning to face him and hoping I can come across as confident when I feel anything but. “My job in New York took a turn I wasn’t equipped to take, and I always loved my summers at Kingston’s. Willow Cove felt like a good place to land until I figure out what my next move is.”
“Temporary,” he mutters and stands up straight so he can put his hands in his pockets. The gesture makes his arms look enormous and accentuates his broad chest. “Look, Georgie, I don’t know what you were hoping to find on this little adventure of yours, but you and I both know you’re not meant for a place like this.”
There’s a lot of undercurrent in his words, things he probably won’t say out loud even though he likely wants to.
I sigh. “I don’t have a lot of choices right now, King.” Or any choices, really. I just spent the last two weeks trying to find a place for me that wasn’t bottom rung, and I came up empty. Turns out, when you’re tossed out of a successful company without warning, people tend to assume the worst of you. “Can I please just explain things to Bill?”
Clenching his jaw, he looks down the boardwalk, which has slowly started to fill with more people. It’s not quite summer, so Willow Cove isn’t swarming with tourists yet, but it will be. And soon. Bill will need all the help he can get.
“You can’t talk to Bill,” he says slowly.
My face heats again, this time with anger. “Seriously? You can’t just—”
“He died, Georgie. Two months ago.”
All of my fight leaves in a whoosh of air, leaving me dizzy enough that I have to grip the boardwalk railing. “What? He’s gone?” Disbelief shoots through me as I try to understand. Bill wasn’t even that old, and he was always so lively. Getting up early in the morning to bake, spending the afternoons out in the surf, going for runs in the evenings… He can’t be gone. He was a staple of this town and one of my most favorite people in the world, which suddenly feels a lot less bright.
What am I going to do now? He was the first person who made me believe I could forge my own path in life instead of accepting whatever plan others expected of me. He made me feel strong and confident and brave.
I need his pride in me more than ever right now, but all I have now is sorrow knowing I’ll never get the chance to talk to him again or even thank him again for looking out for me all these years. His phone calls over the years were sometimes the only thing that kept me going.
With a little grunt, King turns and starts heading back down the boardwalk.
“Wait,” I gasp, “where are you going?” He can’t drop something like that on me and walk away! It’s hard enough to process Bill being gone, but King’s uncle was my only chance at taking the next step in my career unless I want to start back at the beginning. I don’t know if I have another ten years in me just to get back to a point where I can be proud of something I’ve built with my own talents.
King doesn’t look back. “I’m going to work, Georgie. Some of us have jobs.”
“But you’re going in the wrong direction.” The bakery is the other way.
Though he glances back, he doesn’t say anything else as he continues down the wooden walkway that makes up Coral Berry Boardwalk. It’s the biggest tourist destination in Willow Cove outside of the many islands off the coast that can be explored by boat or floatplane. The boardwalk looks so familiar but so different at the same time, and my brain is having a hard time reconciling the Willow Cove of ten years ago with the one I’m in now. I think a part of me expected it to be the same as it was when I left.
Taking a set of stairs down to the beach, King doesn’t stop walking until he hits the old surf shop where he used to work. Only, it’s not so old now. As I approach, everything looks like it’s only a few years old instead of falling apart. It’s actually a warm and welcoming place—King always thought that about the old shack as well. He always said the surf shack was his second home, a place where people could be brave and become something they’d never been before. A sentiment he learned from Bill.
“I can’t believe you still work here,” I breathe, watching him open the big window and prop the double doors open to let the breeze in. “Old Man Skewer must be eighty years old by now.”
“He’s also dead,” King replies as he flips on the lights. Jack Johnson starts playing overhead, and he grabs a navy shirt from one of the racks and switches out the bright pink one he was wearing before. This one is a lot more flattering than the other, clinging to his skin like a glove. “Passed nine years ago.”
“Oh.” Then I see the logo on his shirt and the colorful words “King’s Surf Shop” front and center. “You own the place now.”
He nods once. “Bought it before Skewer died.”
“How?” He would have only been nineteen at the time.
Letting out a bone-weary sigh, he folds his arms and pins me with a sharp look.
I do my best not to wither. “I’m guessing you own the bakery now too?”
Before he can answer, though I’m not sure he would have said anything, his eyes jump to the open doors as a customer walks in, wide-eyed and eager.
“Whoa, look at this place! This is legit!”
King plasters on a smile and greets the customer with all the warmth he’s failed to give me this morning.
I shuffle over to the corner with all the t-shirts, looking at the many designs lined up along the wall. One of them, with its palm tree and stick-figure person with a surfboard, looks like it was drawn by a little kid, and it’s instantly my favorite. It looks like it’s a crowd favorite as well, as it has the lowest inventory out of all of them. It has a very King feel to it.
As surprised as I was to see him in the bakery this morning, I’m not surprised that he took over the surf shop. He’s always been happiest on the water, and he started teaching surf lessons for Old Man Skewer when he was thirteen. King’s a natural born teacher, and I can’t help but picture him now, straddling a board in a form-fitting wetsuit with a broad smile on his face as he helps other people find joy in riding the waves.
It’s strange, but I’ve missed his smile more than anything over the years. Like Bill, he has—or maybe had—the kind of smile that could brighten even the gloomiest of days.
Trying not to get lost in thoughts of what could have been, I lean my hand on the t-shirt display, but it collapses under my weight and sends me tumbling to the floor. I shriek, protecting my head from the avalanche of wood shelves and polyester shirts, but it’s over in three seconds flat.
I might just stay here. If the humiliation doesn’t kill me, King probably will.
“Georgie?” His voice is muffled through all the shirts.
“I’m fine,” I squeak back.
“You need some help?”
“Nope.”
“Okay then.”
I feel his footsteps through the floorboards. He’s literally walking away from me! Groaning, I lift myself onto my elbows and start army-crawling free, muttering curses under my breath. I’m pretty sure the last decade used up all the good fortune for my lifetime, leaving me with nothing but tragedy from now on.
And to think, at one point I thought I was pretty lucky in life. I had a great apartment, a promising career, a loving boyfriend…
Now I have none of those things and nowhere to go, and the only man who might help is about as likely to come to my aid as he is to give up surfing.
By the time I get free, King is ringing up his customer and chatting away like the carefree people-person I remember. Sitting myself on the floor, I start grabbing shirts to refold. He was right when he questioned my decision to come here. Outside of the summer season, Willow Cove is a sleepy little town with not a lot going on. It’s not like Manhattan, where my days were full to the brim. I spent all my summers as a teen here with my parents as they did marine research for the university they worked for, but when I turned eighteen, I was so excited to go anywhere that wasn’t here.
Graduating high school opened up the world to me, and New York was this big, magical place with endless opportunity. I was lucky to find my first job in a bakery a block from Central Park, even luckier a few years later to be working on a day when a network exec was looking for fresh talent. She put me in a competition I wasn’t qualified for, and by some miracle I made it to the top three and met Lane. He was cute, and his passion for baking was intoxicating.
After the competition wrapped up, he asked me out. We bonded over puff pastry and fondant, and he shared my dreams of owning my own bakery, suggesting we make one together. We were already suited romantically, and he thought we would be great together professionally as well.
I helped him build a baking empire, complete with a TV show and franchises, and he and I were going to take on the world. At least, we were until he decided out of the blue that he wanted to take it on without me. Nothing like a little live television to spice up a breakup, am I right? It’s not like I poured my soul into our franchise…
“And then I took her on a floatplane at sunset,” King says, his deep voice cutting through my reverie.
“That sounds incredible!” the customer replies, apparently enthralled.
I’m probably not allowed to be jealous of whichever woman got such a romantic date with King, but I am. He did that with me, once upon a time, and he has always been a romantic. Definitely not the type of guy to stage a public breakup for the views. For all his gruffness this morning, I can still confidently say that King would never humiliate me, no matter how hurt and angry he might be.
“We ended up on this tiny little island right as the sun was setting,” King continues, “and since I’d been carrying the ring in my pocket for weeks, I figured that was as good a time as any.”
I gasp, my stomach doing a flip. The woman I’m jealous of is me!
The man on the other side of the counter whistles low. “I’m not sure I can top that.”
“Oh, you can.” King’s eyes meet mine, his expression falsely nonchalant. “See, when I asked her to marry me, she panicked.”
“No!”
“Yes. And I get it. The proposal came out of nowhere. She needed time to process. But for her, that meant forcing the pilot to fly her back to Willow Cove without me.”
“Wait, she left you on the island?”
King nods, still looking right at me. “The plane came back for me later that night, but not until after she packed up and left town.”
“For how long?”
“About ten years.”
The man laughs uncomfortably. “That’s rough. Maybe I’ll keep my proposal nice and simple. Nothing that’ll scare her off.”
“That’s a great idea. And I’m sure you’ll have better luck than I did. Thanks for coming to King’s Surf Shop!” King smiles and waves as the guy heads out. The instant he’s gone, King’s smile drops and his eyes jump to me.
I try not to scowl at him, but I’m pretty sure my attempts get lost in the feelings of guilt that bubble up. I already spent plenty of time feeling guilty over the way I left things, and I don’t need more of it now when I’m still reeling from the news that Bill died. “That was a fun story,” I grumble.
“That was a true story.”
“I didn’t think Coop would take that long to go back for you.”
“Yep, that makes it all better.” He comes over and starts lifting all the wood plank shelves, popping them back into place with ease. “You really shouldn’t be back here, Georgie.”
He’s probably right. “I had nowhere else to go.”
“What about your parents?”
I keep my eyes on the shirt I’m folding. “You know I love my parents, but if I go crawling back to them, they’ll smother me with love and pie and try to set me up with some accountant who will provide me with a cushy, quiet life.”
“The horror!”
I ball up a shirt and throw it at him, though I can’t blame him for his sarcasm. He lost both his parents before he turned fifteen, so I really shouldn’t complain that I have both of mine. “I thought I might find a fresh start in Willow Cove, you know? Away from it all.”
The thought makes me tired. All the hard work of the last ten years of my life was taken away from me in an instant, leaving me craving something stable and familiar, something that wouldn’t make me a burden to someone else. Something like Kingston’s, where I always felt like I was a part of something magical. Thoughts of that bakery were the only thing that kept me sane the last couple of weeks, knowing I would have a soft place to land as everything in New York crumbled.
I could go back to my parents’ house, but now that they’re both retired, there’s only so much they can do to help me get back on my feet. Being biology professors didn’t exactly set them up with wealth, so I’m going to have to rely on myself going forward. I haven’t even told them yet that I had to leave New York because they would probably try to give me a chunk of their limited retirement fund.
To my surprise, King stops rebuilding his shelves and sits on the floor next to me. Though he keeps his gaze down at the shirts in front of him, I know his focus is really on me. “Bill talked about you all the time, you know.”
I smile, wishing he would look at me. “I bet you hated that.”
“With a passion. He was always proud of you.”
I sense a ‘but’ in there, but I’m too afraid to ask. Too bad for me, King keeps talking.
“But I don’t know what kind of fresh start you’ll find in a place like this. Willow Cove is too small for a big city girl like you.”
He’s probably right, but summer is coming quickly. This town gets crazy in the summer. Or, it used to. Maybe all that has changed over the last decade. “Like I said, it would just be temporary.”
Actually, he’s the one who said that, and if I had my way, it wouldn’t be temporary at all. At least, I would stay long enough to get the bakery thriving and under the right manager. That could take months, maybe even a year, and then I would hang on to it and use the profits to start something else in a bigger city. I made a whole plan as I drove down here.
“I was really hoping to take over the bakery for Bill,” I say carefully. Something tells me I’m going to have to tread carefully here.
His dark eyes search my face for a moment. “Sorry you wasted a trip.”
“I’ll buy it from you.” Those words jump from my mouth before I can hold them back. Buy the bakery? With what? My savings account is enough to keep me fed for maybe a year, but that’s about it. I still need to find health insurance and a place to live, neither of which will come cheaply. I was banking on the bakery being a gift.
Yeah, I had an awesome job within a multi-million-dollar company, but all my money went to my apartment and to the lifestyle I adopted alongside Lane. I never thought I would lose it all.
King watches me for a beat, studying me intently before he folds his arms. “You want to buy Uncle Bill’s bakery?”
No. “Yes.” Shut up, Georgie! “I know you don’t want it.”
“How do you know?”
“You always hated that bakery. You complained about it every day.”
“A decade ago.”
Okay, so maybe he has a point, but I can’t imagine this man has changed that much over the last ten years. He might be grown up and manly now, but I’d bet the old Royal Kingston is still in there. The one who never failed to get so annoyed when I’d spend all day with Bill at the bakery and then shut up when I offered him a snickerdoodle or a cherry tartlet fresh out of the oven. I’ve always been able to persuade King to do things; I just need to find the right motivation.
“Well?” I reach forward and take hold of his hand. I try not to let it hurt too much when he pulls away without hesitation. “It might take me a day or two to get the loan figured out, but I’ll buy it and take it off your hands. I get the bakery, you get a bunch of money. Win win.”
He’s considering it. I know he is. King could never resist a quick buck, and that bakery is probably worth a decent amount. Granted, I have no idea if I could get a loan, but that won’t stop me from—
“I can’t.” King pushes up to his feet, leaving me in a heap on the floor. “Can’t sell it to you, Georgie. It’s a family legacy.”
I jump up as well, even though I’ve folded maybe ten shirts in total, which is nothing compared to the pile still waiting. This is more important. “Are you kidding me? No one loved that bakery as much as I did. Is this because I refused your proposal?”
“Did you refuse? I remember you saying a whole lot of nothing.” He moves to the other side of the store and grabs a surfboard from the rack where they’re all lined up.
Again, he’s right, and we should probably talk about the whole proposal thing instead of arguing about the bakery, but my mind is fixated on this and won’t let me stop pushing. “King, please. I’ll pay more than it’s worth.”
“Doesn’t matter.”
I follow him out the door and watch as he rests the board against the outside of the shop like some sort of display. “Come on.”
“No, I…” He grits his teeth, folding his arms once more as he turns to face me. “I literally can’t sell you the bakery. Or even give it to you. Uncle Bill did something weird with his will, and the bakery has to stay in the family.”
“Oh.” The fight drains out of me as I consider that. Is that even a thing someone can do? I don’t know enough about law to really question it, but King seems genuine. “That seems a little…” Stupid. That’s what it is.
King shrugs. “It’s Uncle Bill. What did you expect?”
I expected him to leave me the bakery, like he always said he would, but I keep that to myself. He probably decided I was thriving up in New York and didn’t need it. After all, I never gave him a reason to believe otherwise.
“I could hire you to run the place,” King says, but before I can even consider the idea, he cringes. “I can’t afford you. Not without dipping into my profits from the surf shack, and…” His eyes roll over me. “Not doing that. You’re too fancy.”
I can’t decide if his assessment of me is a compliment or an insult. “I can lower my salary expectations.” But even as I say that, my mind starts running through all the updates the bakery needs to be successful. I’m pretty sure the salary from working a whole Willow Cove tourist summer would barely be enough to cover the costs of the badly needed renovations. There’s no way I could afford making those changes unless I’m actually owning the place and have the profits at my disposal.
King narrows his eyes. Back when we were dating, he had this habit of reading my mind. It was always cute and endearing, but right now I don’t like the way he seems to be seeing the dollar signs running through my head.
“Can’t you find some sort of loophole?” I ask weakly.
He huffs a laugh. “So you can change everything about Uncle Bill’s bakery?”
See? Mind reader. I grimace. “I wouldn’t change everything.”
“That’s not what you said to your friend this morning.” Rolling his eyes, he heads back inside and drops down to continue folding the shirts I left behind.
I’m not making myself sound great. I know that. But I spent the last year butting heads with Lane, trying to make our relationship work, until he decided our personalities clashed as much as our opinions on the best way to make buttercream. He was too hard-headed to listen to my ideas, and I endured it because I thought our relationship, both romantic and professional, was worth the concessions. It clearly wasn’t.
He not only dumped me on TV but also strong-armed me out of the bakery franchise on the technicality that it’s his name on the ownership documents.
I need this. Working with Bill at Kingston’s over the summer after I turned thirteen was the first time I ever felt like I had any sort of say in my life. One, my parents were busy with their research and didn’t ask how I spent my days when we were in Willow Cove, so they had no idea I was in Bill’s kitchen. And two, baking was something I was good at. Something that brought excitement to my life. The rest of the year was all about school and grades, but summer?
I took that passion and did everything I could to make a career out of it, and Lane took it all away in a moment, pulling the rug out from under me.
No one can plan for something like that.
King and I spend the next few minutes folding shirts in silence, the air thick with tension. I’m still not completely over the shock of seeing full-blown adult King, and I’m sure he wasn’t planning on running into me, of all people. I don’t know what to do now or where to go, and I hate that. I like having a plan. A direction. This compass-less life I’ve been living the last couple of weeks has left me feeling like I’m drifting out to sea.
And I’m terrified of the ocean.
“I wish there was a way to help you,” King says after a while. It seems to take a lot out of him to speak the words out loud, but his mama raised him to be a good man. Now that we’ve settled a bit, it’s obvious that that side of him is coming out. “But Uncle Bill was clear in his will. It has to stay with the Kingstons.”
“But you’re the only…” My words trail off as the realization hits me way later than it should have. He’s the only Kingston left. First his dad, then his mom, and now Bill…
King is entirely alone.
He looks up and meets my gaze. There’s sadness in his expression, but it’s not like my epiphany is news to him. He knows very well that he’s alone, and he almost seems to be okay with it. I’m not sure if I believe him. I knew him when his mom died, and I know how deeply he feels things. Losing Bill must have hurt him so much.
“Sorry,” I whisper.
He shrugs. “If I could give you the bakery, I would, but short of adopting you into the family, I don’t—”
“That’s it!” I accidentally toss a shirt at him again because of the idea that just popped into my head.
He catches it, nothing but confusion in his face. “What? Adopt you? Last I checked, you’re a grown woman with two very much alive parents, Georgie.”
Maybe there’s a way we can both win here, at least temporarily. He wouldn’t have to be so alone for a while. “Not adopt, per se, but similar. It’s a way to get me into the Kingston family.”
He’s still not getting it, one thick eyebrow high on his forehead as he stares at me like I’m talking crazy.
I am talking crazy. Absolutely. But it might be my best option, and I don’t have a lot of those.
I see the exact moment it clicks, and while I expected him to dislike the idea, I hoped for better than complete and utter disgust. His eyebrows shoot down, his jaw clenches, and for half a second he looks like he might throw up.
Then his features soften as he calms. Considers. And I hold my breath as he opens his mouth to say, “Absolutely not. If you wanted to marry me, you should have done that ten years ago. Time for you to leave.”