Chapter Eight
I’m always so much happier on the water.
Taking my first student of the season out to try some waves feels like plugging in a piece of my soul that fell out two months ago when the last of my family slipped away. As I straddle the board, giving my student a few minutes to get comfortable on his own board, I tilt my head back and soak up the sun. I’m always eager for summer, when I have enough students to keep me busy and my shop really takes off, but things got a lot more complicated when Bill got sick.
I haven’t had a peaceful moment like this in months, and now that I have a wife, I doubt I’ll have many for a long time to come.
A wife. Georgie. It’s been three hours, and it still doesn’t feel real. And yet…
I can’t get the name Georgie Kingston out of my head, which is going to be a problem even if she has no plans to actually change her name. It’s like she was meant to be part of my family, which for generations has been of the opinion that only the names of the British monarchy are acceptable. Uncle Bill—William—and my dad, Edward, were only a small part of the Henrys and Elizabeths and Charleses that have made up my pedigree pretty much since the first colonizers arrived in what is now the eastern United States.
Maybe that’s why Kingstons don’t live to see old age. It’s our own hubris in thinking we deserve such lofty names.
I always liked the name Royal.
Georgie is the only person I ever willingly allowed to use my first name, and a part of me loves hearing it on her tongue again. I shouldn’t let her, but after our little truce this morning on the way back from the courthouse, my resolve is slipping. Ten years ago, I would have died happy being able to say that Georgie is my wife. Now… Now, I have to make sure I don’t let myself start to think any of it is real. She said herself that she’s not going to last long once she gets the bakery in her name, and then she’ll be gone.
Just like before.
I shake my head and return my focus to the man in front of me. “Okay, Sean, how are you feeling?”
He’s shaking a little as he bobs in the water with me, but the ocean is pretty calm today. Maybe a little too calm to get any good surfing in, but it’s perfect for his first time. “I’m feeling pretty good,” he says, his voice bouncing with nervous excitement.
We spent half an hour practicing his take off on the beach, and he’s been paddling around for a good fifteen minutes to get the hang of moving around on his board. If he’s going to try surfing, now’s as good a time as any.
“Ready to try to hit a wave?” I ask, almost hoping he says no so I can have an excuse to stay out here a little longer. The shop will be open for a few more hours, until the sun goes down, but I’ve got Brody behind the counter. I don’t have any other lessons today, which means there’s nothing holding me back from heading to the bakery and making sure Meg hasn’t murdered Georgie with a cake knife. She wasn’t happy when I left, and I don’t think her anger was entirely directed at me.
I probably shouldn’t have left Georgie there on her own.
“I’m ready!” Sean says with a lot more enthusiasm than I expect, given his hesitation so far. Then again, the guy did jump at the chance to move his lesson to today after I bailed on him yesterday, so he has probably been wanting to learn for a while.
I walk him through the process of getting out to the point where the waves are starting to break, telling him how to feel the waves and know when he needs to start paddling. “You’re going to miss a lot of the waves,” I warn him. “And even if you get up, you’re bound to fall. A lot. Just make sure you fall away from the beach so you don’t get hit with your board.”
He’s got a foam board, so it’s less dangerous than my fiberglass, but I’d still prefer he avoid getting whacked in the head if he falls forward instead of back. When I started teaching lessons as a teen, one of my first students got knocked unconscious by his board, and I’d never been so terrified in my life. The guy was fine in the end, but I’ve been more cautious ever since.
We get in position and face the beach, looking behind us for the next good wave.
“This could be it,” I tell Sean, grinning when he gets in the perfect position. “Okay, start paddling when I tell you, and as soon as you feel your momentum pick up with the wave, stand up. Ready? Go!”
He paddles wildly but doesn’t get up in time to catch the wave. He seems okay about the mistake and simply gets back in position, a little more eagerness in his face.
It takes three more tries before he catches a good one and gets up on his feet, and he rides a few yards before tumbling sideways.
“That was awesome!” I tell him when I reach him. I help him back onto his board, and we get into position again. “Do you feel how you need to balance?”
“I think so.”
After another forty minutes, we head back to shore, and Sean tells me he’s going to recommend me to all his friends the next time they come to Willow Cove on vacation. I smile and thank him, chatting for a few more minutes as I stow his board and help him out of his wetsuit, but I know I’ll never see him again. I rarely do. There have been a couple of people over the years who come back, either for a refresher lesson or to say hi, but outside of the rich folk who have permanent summer houses here, Willow Cove tends to be a one and done destination.
I’m fine with that. Summers get crazy as it is, and the last time I interacted with a regular visitor, I got my heart broken.
With Sean gone, I return to the shop and grab my phone from behind the counter to check my messages, chuckling when I see several texts from Coop asking if Georgie and I have killed each other yet. I’m not going to bother gracing him with a response, especially because I watched him fly off with some tourists not long ago so he’ll be plenty busy for a while.
I know he’s not happy about my decision to agree to Georgie’s plan, but I really hope he eventually remembers that it’s more helpful for me to have his support than blanket criticism. What’s done is done.
“Hey, King,” Brody says as he finishes straightening the wall of snorkel masks for purchase, “I just heard from Lacey, and it sounds like she’s coming back to Willow Cove after all. You’re still wanting another instructor, right?”
I grin as a bit of stress trickles away. “Yes! I would love to have her back for the summer.” I have two other instructors, including Brody, but I was worried we wouldn’t be able to handle everything on our own. Lacey had other plans for her summer between semesters, leaving us one teacher short. Last summer we could barely cover demand for surf lessons with the four of us, and I’m expecting this year to be the same. Having Lacey on the team will keep us from getting overwhelmed. “I’ll send her a text,” I tell Brody and then look around the shop, searching for something to do.
Next week won’t be this quiet, and I should take advantage of this free time while I have it. I’ve set up an appointment with the estate attorney, Mr. Vanderman, but it’s not until three days from now. That’s three days we’ll need to be convincing so he has no reason to think this marriage is a sham.
His wife was in the bakery when Georgie first came into town, which means she witnessed my cold greeting. That’s not going to do us any favors.
“So what’s with the suit?” Brody asks. He comes behind the counter with me, nodding toward the suit I left hanging in the back office. “Going to a funeral or something after work?”
I laugh. Kind of feels like it. “Actually…” Since he’s going to find out eventually, I might as well throw it out there before he hears some convoluted version of my out-of-the-blue wedding. “I sort of got married this morning.”
Brody blinks. Glances at the suit, then at my hand, and back to my face. “How do you sort of get married?”
“I did get married.” I curl my fingers into fists and make a note to talk to Georgie about finding some rings. Apparently our bare hands are feeding everyone’s doubt. “I know it feels like it came out of nowhere, but it didn’t.”
Frowning, Brody grabs a stool and settles himself down, like he’s too confused to stand anymore. “But you weren’t dating anyone. Were you?”
“Technically, no, but—”
“Was it some sort of bet? A dare? Does she need a green card?”
“Whoa.” I hold my hands up, unable to stop the grin that spreads across my face even though my smile seems to confuse Brody just as much as the whole marriage idea. “It’s nothing like that.” Okay, so it’s something like that, but he doesn’t need to know that. “Georgie and I go way back, and we recently reconnected.” That’s a phrase I’m going to get tired of really fast.
At nineteen, Brody would have been too young to ever know Georgie in connection with me back then, but I do know he’s been a longtime fan of Kingston’s Bakery. In fact, Bill’s the one who told me I should hire him when Brody turned sixteen because Brody had been hanging around the bakery for years in between surf runs.
Curious, I ask, “Do you remember about ten years ago a girl who worked at Kingston’s during the summer? She had really curly brown hair and made the best cookies.”
Brody thinks about my question for a moment, and then his eyes light up. “Oh yeah! I thought she was cute.”
I frown. “She was like eight years older than you.”
Shrugging, Brody grabs a rag and starts wiping down the counter. “Still thought she was hot.”
“That’s my wife you’re talking about,” I grumble.
Thankfully, he looks properly chagrined as he looks over at me and turns bright red. “Oh. But wait, that means she’s back in town?”
My response is a mere growl.
“I just mean is she at the bakery again? I haven’t had her cookies in so long.”
Sighing, I nod. “Yeah, she’s back at the bakery. She’ll be running it now so I can spend more time here.”
“Sweet! Think she’ll give me free snickerdoodles if I tell her I work for you here?”
Grabbing another rag, I chuck it at him and then roll my eyes when he laughs. “I guess that’s up to her,” I grumble. “Are you good to close up? I want to go see my wife.”
“Yeah, I can—wait! You said you got married this morning? Why aren’t you on a honeymoon or something?”
This topic is going to get old as well. “Because we have too much work to do. We’ll do something later.”
“Okay, but why didn’t you take today off so you could…you know.” He waggles his eyebrows. “I could have taught that surf lesson, and no one came into the shop while you were out on the water. You could have been enjoying your first day as a married couple.”
I force my mind not to go where Brody’s comment implies. It takes some effort, especially after that kiss I shared with Georgie in the courthouse, which I still feel even hours later. For my own sanity, I really hope I don’t have to get that close to her again, or I’m going to fall right back to where I was the last time she was here. Only, it’ll be so much worse this time.
This time, we’re not teenagers holding hands and stealing quick kisses. We’re grown adults who are legally bound to each other. Georgie is a full-blown woman with curves and full lips and a stubbornness that shouldn’t be as attractive as it is. That courthouse kiss, however short it was, reawakened a part of me that probably should have stayed dead.
“I’m going to the bakery,” I mutter, ignoring Brody’s suggestive whistle as I cross the sand to the stairs back up to the boardwalk.
Though I shouldn’t be surprised, Kingston’s is crowded when I step inside. Most of them look like locals, which means they’re as much here for the gossip as they are for baked goods. Bracing myself, I keep to the back of the lobby and take it all in. Nothing is physically different, but the bakery already feels like it has changed. Something about the smell, the stocked displays, and the satisfied looks on the faces of those who have already been served.
It feels like Georgie.
Before I can stop them, memories of the first time I met Georgie start to surface.
I was twelve and already obsessed with surfing, so I was heading to the beach with a goal to spend the whole day on the water. But I had to make a stop at the bakery because my mom asked me to bring something to Uncle Bill, and I was reluctantly a good kid (and a little hopeful that I could steal some cookies in the process). The plan was to get in and out as quickly as possible, which resulted in me barreling into the lobby and colliding with a girl who had been about to dig into a strawberry cupcake as she walked out.
When I close my eyes, I can still see the way pink frosting spread across her nose and mouth as the cupcake smashed between us, and I swear I still have a bruise from our heads colliding. But once the proverbial dust settled after the crash, while we were still lying in a heap on the floor, my eyes fixed on hers, marveling at how green they were.
She smiled and said, “That’s one way to eat a cupcake, I guess.”
Then she licked the frosting from her lips, and it was the first time I thought about kissing someone even though I was nowhere near brave enough to do it. Thank goodness her parents stepped in, breaking us apart, and Uncle Bill offered them half a dozen cupcakes on the house to make up for my bumbling clumsiness.
By some miracle, Georgie said hi to me the next day when she and her parents visited the beach, and again when I was wandering the boardwalk with some friends. And by the end of the summer, she was spending as much time with me as she did with her family, and I begged for her email so we could keep in touch when she went back to New Hampshire.
Those emails were my lifeblood during the months of the year when Willow Cove’s population dropped to nothing. From the beginning of September to the end of May, I hung on Georgie’s every word and in turn told her everything, talking to her in a way I didn’t talk to anyone else.
She was there for me when my mom died right before I turned fifteen, even if she was hundreds of miles away.
Every June for five years straight, I hung out around the bakery for days until she finally arrived and brought everything back into balance again. I knew I wanted to marry her when I was sixteen because there was no way anyone else could come close to matching her. She was it for me.
I even waited the summer after she left me, a part of me hoping she would come back again and finally give me an answer to my question. Her parents came, but she didn’t, and I told myself to move on.
When Georgie comes gliding from the kitchen with a tray of vibrantly colored cupcakes, including some with pink frosting, my chest grows tight at the sight of her. My wife. The woman I clearly didn’t move on from, which means I’m in a lot of danger right now.
“King!”
I don’t know who shouts my name, but that one word pulls the entire lobby’s attention to me where I’m standing by the door. Even Georgie and Meg, who is at the cash register, look over at me. Meg’s expression is still furious, but there’s confusion and something else in there too. It almost looks like worry. Georgie turns a bright red, which she tries to hide by darting back into the kitchen without acknowledging me.
That’s going to make selling this marriage a little more difficult.
There’s a part of me that has wanted this whole thing to fail from the beginning, but now that I’m standing in the last place that holds pieces of my family, I know deep in my bones that I’ll never be able to give this a half-hearted effort. I need Georgie to keep this bakery alive, and Georgie needs her independence. I know better than to hold her back and stifle her free-spirited nature. Her stubbornness, for all its annoyance, is what has made her so good at what she does, and she can save this place.
She might be the only one who can.
Before I can take a step in any direction, half a dozen people crowd around me.
“Is it true that you and Georgie got married?” a man asks. “Marlin said she’s staying at your house.”
“Have you been secretly dating all this time?” a woman asks, pressing a hand to her heart. She’s one of the teachers at the elementary school and clearly a romantic, with the way she looks like she’s on the verge of a delighted swoon.
“What about her fancy boyfriend in New York?”
I frown at the woman who asks that question. I’m not sure I like the idea of everyone knowing about Georgie’s fame thanks to that baking show and her stupid ex-boyfriend. She never did say why they broke up, but I know the guy was an idiot. According to Coop, he broke up with her on live TV only a couple of weeks ago.
Clenching my jaw, I debate the merits of answering any of their questions and then decide it would be easier to let them wonder. Until we can get the process of transferring the bakery underway, I don’t want to confirm anything that could get us into trouble.
“Excuse me,” I say and push forward, ducking around people until I get behind the counter and through the swinging kitchen door.
Georgie is waiting for me, a wild look in her eyes. She grabs my hands and shifts me a step to the left, and then she bites her lip as she glances behind me. “I’m going to kiss you, King,” she says, and that’s the only warning I get before her mouth is on mine.