CHAPTER 84
maverick
Breakfast ran long, but sitting there with Harley was easy.
Even after the food was gone and the dishes were cleared, we sat there with a cup of coffee just talking.
I caught him up on seven years of Wilde Bay gossip—most of which I got from Eduardo—and he talked a little bit about his life with his daughter over the years.
I could tell he was holding back, but I honestly couldn’t blame him.
I wasn’t exactly divulging my personal details either.
I paid for breakfast, and he didn’t fight me. He did say something along the lines of getting the next one, which made me smile. I liked the idea of having breakfast with him again. I liked the idea that Harley and I could make being friends work.
Hands in my pockets, I walked with him across the parking lot. The hardest part of leaving The Boathouse was always the moping that came with Duke having to leave Millie, and that was why he had a brand-new bone in his mouth.
“Are you traveling back and forth?” I asked, finding ways to extend our time together. Was it silly? Absolutely, but oh well.
“Back and forth between where?” Harley replied.
“The city,” I said. “I know your family’s business is there. I just need to figure out what days I can’t be on the farm to do work. It helps me plan my schedule.”
Correction: it helped Roxy plan my schedule. I hadn’t done my own schedule in years. She had me so damn organized that I couldn’t imagine ever doing my own schedule again.
“I sold my family’s business.”
“You what?” I stopped dead in my tracks, but Duke kept on walking to my truck. Had I heard him correctly? “Did you just say you sold your family’s business?”
“Six years ago, yeah.” He faced me, his expression serious. “My family’s business cost me one of the best things in my life. I wasn’t about to let it cost me my daughter, too.”
I swallowed hard. Did he mean me? That twisted, masochistic part of me wanted to think he did.
Not even because I wanted him back, but because it meant he regretted the way everything ended between us.
That he wasn’t just sorry. There was a difference between being sorry that something happened and wishing you’d done things differently.
One was polite. The other meant the past still mattered.
I shoved those thoughts down. Whatever Harley had meant by that—whether it was about me or not—it wasn’t my business.
“I started my own consultation business,” Harley continued when I didn’t say anything. “It’s small, mostly just something to fill my time. I only take a handful of clients at a time because I don’t need to work.”
“I’d imagine not.” I didn’t know much about his family’s business, but I knew enough to see they made millions. If he’d sold that… yeah, he’d never have to work again. “Good for you.”
“Anyway, I have to go,” he said. “Thank you for breakfast.”
“Anytime.” I meant that.
“This was good,” Harley told me as he walked backward toward his car, each step slow like he didn’t want to leave. “It was good catching up with you.”
“Yeah,” I agreed. “I’ll see you around, Harley.”
“Yeah, you will.” The words came out like a promise. One I realized I hoped he’d keep—and not in a work capacity. “Have a good day, Maverick. You too, Duke.”
I meandered toward my truck with my eyes glued on Harley’s SUV as he drove away. There hadn’t been a plan going into this breakfast. No reconciling expectations. No grand emotional reckoning or groveling apologies.
The only thing I had expected was the awkwardness of walking back into a personal conversation with him.
But the thing was… it hadn’t felt awkward.
Oddly, it felt full of hope. Hope for a future where we were in each other’s lives.
Not in a romantic relationship kind of way, but something reminiscent of the two kids who ditched school to smoke cigarettes and get sandwiches.
I kind of liked the promise of that.