Winning Back Her Heart

Bo let her walk him all the way through every design idea she had until he asked the hard question. “What’s your budget for the project?”

Toni pursed her lips. She wore a touch of lipstick now. He liked that. “I don’t want to ask Dad for money. I don’t want him touching his retirement for this. So my budget is tight.”

“Budgets are always tight around here. It’s been a rough couple of years. We know how to do tight.” He was making a point to use we, not I, as if this were a Car-San Construction decision. It wasn’t, not really. This could never be anything but personal.

“I’m meeting with the bank tomorrow before Mari’s shower, but near as I can tell, this is what I’ve got to work with.” She pulled in a deep breath and pointed to a printout of a spreadsheet.

Bo hid his reaction. Calling the number at the bottom of that spreadsheet barely doable was a compliment. Truth be told, it was closer to unrealistic. Jake might have had another, less kind word for the low figure on that paper. Something like nuts.

Toni made the mistake—or the masterful tactic—of gazing at him with those mesmerizing green eyes. “I plan to be on this job as much as you, doing every bit of labor I can to keep costs down. I’ll skimp in places when I absolutely have to, but I’m ready to reach for what I really want.”

It happened just that quickly. Or maybe he just stopped lying to himself that he’d hadn’t already decided to take the job. Oh, sure, it made a lot more sense to hightail it down to Florida where she couldn’t hurt him again, but it was too late for that. Hearing what she wanted, the unsteadiness in her voice, the emotion of taking over Redding’s—it all made it impossible to say no.

He couldn’t bear the thought of any other contractor being involved. He was doing this job. It was a fitting last job to do in Wander Canyon before moving to Florida to start over. He’d gladly put in twenty-hour days to meet her schedule and maybe even absorb some of the costs on his own to help meet her budget.

He was doing this job. And doing it right.

Just this once, Bo allowed himself to invoke their history. “I’ll do it. You’ll get exactly what you want, Toni, at the cost you can pay. I owe you that much.”

For a moment, he thought she was going to hug him. She certainly looked glad, even grateful. But after a moment’s hesitation, she held out her hand for a professional handshake. And that told him everything about where the lines were drawn between them now.

Chapter Four

“That’s the last of them.” Toni set down the final heavy suitcase in her old bedroom only a week later. “I’m officially moved in. June 1 is the start of my new life back in Wander Canyon.”

Dad hugged her tightly. “I guess that makes June my favorite month. I’m so glad to have you here.” He looked at the trio of enormous suitcases now resting beside the handful of boxes Toni shipped a few days ago from New York. “I’m still amazed how fast you could make this happen. If it weren’t for some help from Pauline and Hank, I’m not sure I could have had your room ready this fast.”

Toni liked hearing how much other people in Wander, like Hank and Pauline Walker, the groom-to-be’s father and stepmother, had pitched in to take care of Dad. But he was right; it had been whiplash fast—and startlingly easy—to extract herself from New York. What did it say that she was able to dismantle six years of her life in eight days? She’d found someone to sublet her apartment in forty-eight hours. “It was so easy I wonder if any of the past six years meant anything at all.”

“It did. You had to test your wings out there in the big city, I suppose.” Dad eased himself into the rocking chair in the corner of her room. “But I doubt it was that easy with Ms. Collins.” He watched as Toni began transferring things from the suitcases to the bedroom closet.

She recalled the shock on Faye Collins’s face when she told her boss she was leaving Hearth. “That was a bit tougher.” She’d expected Faye to take it poorly, but the woman had seen it as a personal betrayal.

“After all I’ve done for you, you up and abandon me?” Faye had yelled, loud enough for the whole office to hear.

“I hoped she wouldn’t hold me to the standard two weeks’ notice,” Toni told her father. “But she let me leave that day.”

That wasn’t the whole truth. Faye didn’t let Toni leave that day—she’d demanded Toni clean out her desk within the hour. “You were already taking too much vacation time for this wedding business,” Faye barked, throwing open the door to her office. “I don’t want you working here another hour. Your precious vacation time starts this minute. Take it all and go.”

“I know I hurt Faye by leaving so suddenly,” Toni admitted to her father, not wanting to get into how ugly things had gotten between Faye and herself. She did feel bad about that. Faye had been a powerful—if extremely demanding—mentor. She’d always said how much she’d seen Toni as the daughter she’d never had. That was a balm of sorts after the loss of her own mother, and perhaps Toni had personalized their working relationship a bit more than was wise.

“Were things going well at Hearth?”

Toni sat down on the bed. “They were for a while. Everybody envied my job.” Everybody outside Hearth, that is. Most people within the organization knew how difficult Faye was to work for and the kind of hours she expected of Toni. “People always said how fortunate I was to have someone as influential as Faye Collins take such a liking to me. At first, I thought so, too. I mean, who becomes Faye Collins’s personal assistant right out of college like that? She’s been on dozens of magazine covers and talk shows. I was kind of starstruck.”

“What changed?”

Toni thought for a moment. “Me, I suppose. She was turning me into a version of herself, and I realized I didn’t want to be that. I wanted to show New York what they were missing from the mountains. Turns out, nobody missed the mountains except me.” She ran her hands along the stitches of the quilted bedspread her mother had made.

“Maybe I didn’t change as much as I just remembered who I was and what I wanted.” She looked at her father. “Faye was pretty heartbroken that what I wanted wasn’t to be her protégée anymore,” she ventured. “I do feel bad for blindsiding her like that.”

Dad eased himself up off the rocker and came to sit beside her on the bed. “Sometimes the things we choose to do have a high cost. People get hurt. You do what you can to keep the hurt small and heal it, but that isn’t always up to you.”

Toni wondered if Dad was talking about Faye or Bo. The fact that his words could have applied to either left a sting in Toni’s chest. Toni Redding, heartbreaker. That’s not who she wanted to be.

She dared to ask, “Do you think I’m doing the right thing, Dad?”

Her father gave a soft smile. “I think you’re doing a big thing. Whether or not it’s right, well, that’s only for you to answer. And I don’t think you’ll know for a spell.” He took her hand and gave it a reassuring squeeze. “But I sure am glad you’re giving it a try. And that you’re here.”

“And the store?” He’d seemed to come around to an enthusiasm for what she was doing, but her own doubts made her ask over and over.

“You’re a Redding,” he replied. “You’re making a new Redding’s. How could that not work out?”

A whole host of ways, Toni thought. “Bo and I start in the basement stock room tomorrow. I guess we’ll find out.”

Bo’s stomach was in knots as he shouldered conduit and coils of wire off the back of his truck. First day on the job at Redding’s. With Toni. He was trying to pretend this was a job like any other job. It wasn’t working.

As he grabbed his toolbox, he caught Don Redding’s wary gaze out the store window. The man hadn’t spoken fifty words to him since the day Toni left, which was a clever feat in a town as small as Wander. They even went to the same church, and he’d managed to give Bo a wide berth for all those years. What did he think of this plan of Toni’s? Or his role in it?

You hurt my baby, Don’s furrowed brows seemed to say from the brightly lit window bay. He was momentarily glad Toni had gotten her stunning green eyes from her mother and not Don. When God was handing out eye color, He stuck around for a double shift at the Reddings’. It had always made him wonder why the trademark color for Redding’s was red. Sure, Irene and Toni had red hair, and the color was built in to the name, but if you asked him, it was distracting jade-green eyes that made a Redding woman so hard to ignore. And impossible to forget.

He was ten minutes into this job, and already it was harder than he’d counted on. Some corner of his heart wanted to square off at Mr. Redding and shout, “Yeah, well, don’t forget, your baby stomped on my heart!” He knew that was both stupid and useless. He and Toni were going to have to find a way past that if this job was ever going to work. All three of them would, in fact. He’d figured he would find a way to make peace with Toni, but he hadn’t remembered he would have to make peace with Don, as well.

“You’re here.” Toni came up behind him with a pair of coffees and a large bag from the Wander Bakery. He wondered what was inside. She probably favored scones or some other high-brow pastry these days. “You’re early.”

The surprise in her voice pricked at him. Yes, I’m grown-up and punctual now. Truth was, early wasn’t hard to manage when you barely slept. He was never anxious about jobs, but he’d been up all night worrying about this one. The construction aspects of this job were tricky enough, but the real challenge of this project had nothing to do with any blueprint.

Bo admitted no more than “Yeah,” then added, “Much appreciated,” as he lifted his coffee from the cardboard tray Toni carried.

She nodded toward the white paper bag as she pulled the shop door open. He noticed again that the door—in fact, lots of the storefront—was badly in need of a paint job. “Bear claws.”

So she did remember his favorite. Bo wasn’t sure what to read into that, if anything. Yvonne’s bear claws were so good he decided not to care. A little sugar and a lot of caffeine would go a long way to helping ease things this morning.

Toni waved a bit too cheerfully at her dad as he stood in one aisle restocking some shelves. “We’re starting in the basement,” she called, barely slowing down in a beeline toward the cellar stairs.

They’d emailed several times and talked on the phone twice during her final days in New York, creating a flow chart of how the renovations would progress in order to keep half the store open the entire time. The conversations had been clumsy at first, but gradually they slid into a cautious partnership. It wasn’t hard, given that she knew exactly what she wanted and he was determined to give it to her.

But face-to-face this morning, launching into the actual job, the awkwardness roared back. Toni in Wander was all real, all difficult and all permanent. Neither one of them would be able to easily run away from however this turned out. But that won’t matter much if I’m in Florida. Is that what this is showing me, Lord? That it’s time for me to leave Wander? Bo lobbed the question Heavenward as he followed Toni toward the door at the back of the store that led to the cellar.

They had agreed to start on the wiring in the basement because it made sense, but as Toni barreled down the cellar steps in front of him, he caught on to her real motivation. She was hiding.

Toni was in no hurry to navigate the maze of their first day while working together under her dad’s glare. Good, because he wasn’t, either. Hiding in the basement seemed as good a tactic as any. And the bear claws? He never could figure out how Toni kept such a figure when she could stress-eat better than anyone he’d known.

Bo took a fortifying sip of blissfully hot and strong coffee, slid the coils of wire off his shoulder onto the floor, and looked Toni straight in the eye.

Man, he was going to have to remember not to do that.

Instead, he inclined his head toward the store floor above them. “I thought you said Don was on board with all this.”

She avoided his stare, digging into the bag instead. “He is.”

Bo gestured again toward the staircase behind them. “Then what was all that about?”

She pulled out a bear claw and took a sizable bite. “All what?” It was entirely too cute how the flaky pastry garbled her words.

Toni may have been gone for six years, but he could still read her like a book. She talked vision and confidence, but she was as nervous as he’d ever seen her. He chose not to call her out on her false confidence, just raised a questioning eyebrow as he pulled his own bear claw from the bag.

“Dad’s completely on board,” she asserted.

“Then why are we hiding in the basement?” He wanted to see if she would admit the reason. It dropped like a stone in his gut when he realized it was very possible he was the reason. It wasn’t that Don wasn’t in favor of the renovation. He just wasn’t sold on the renovator.

“It was your idea to start with electric.”

It wasn’t, but that wasn’t anything worth clashing over. Not now when they had a thousand things ahead of them primed to start any number of arguments. Renovations were hard enough without the onslaught of history still tumbling between them.

Bo pulled a flashlight from his toolbox and began following the maze of wiring running across the cellar beams as he ate the bear claw. Just get into it. Once you’re doing actual work, it will get easier. Besides, he didn’t need any fatherly approval to make this job succeed.

He chose a diversionary tactic. “Is Mari ready for the big day?” Bo squinted at a pair of ancient connectors and pretended this was a job like the hundreds of others he’d done in his career. Jake usually handled electric, but he was only going to pull Jake into this when absolutely necessary.

Toni gave a small, tight laugh. “Of course she’s not ready. Mari’s a perfectionist, and she’s going crazy trying to manage all the details.”

Good, he’d gotten her talking. He handed Toni a roll of drawings Jake had sent over, being careful that their hands came nowhere near touching. “Is Wyatt helping?”

She managed another laugh at that. “Depends how you look at it. Is he calmer than her? Absolutely. But I think Wyatt would be happy passing out popcorn on the church lawn if he ended the day married to Mari.” Toni cleared off a worktable and rolled out the drawings. “He’s good for her. And she sure deserves to be happy after everything she’s been through.”

Bo wondered, had Toni had any serious relationships in New York? Given how fast she’d transplanted herself back here, he was going to guess no. But he certainly wasn’t going to ask about her love life any time soon.

His examinations led him to the prehistoric fuse box, and he gave a low whistle. “Job one, right here.” He pulled open the cover and began peering at the innards, glad to see a tangle that would keep him busy for most of the morning. The thing was a mess. Not unsafe, but certainly not up to code, and far too small for what Toni had planned for the store.

He poked around the fuses for a minute until a sharp “Okay, look,” came from behind him.

He set down the flashlight and turned to face her.

She stood with her hands on her hips. “So this is a bit weird, I know.”

A bit weird? Bo managed what he hoped looked like a calm shrug. “Doesn’t have to be.” It became immediately apparent that wasn’t the best response.

“But it does have to be professional. I just want to be clear that this is a business relationship. Clear margins.”

You mean clear boundaries, Bo thought to himself. So she’d been worrying about this, too. The knowledge of her anxiety over how their mutual history could cloud things over only sharpened his radar. It was as if the air between them could either harden or soften, but it wouldn’t be up to him. After all, she was the one who’d called him. She was in the driver’s seat here, and the way her chin jutted out told him it had best stay that way.

“Absolutely,” he agreed, because it seemed the safest thing to say.

Toni crossed her arms over her chest. “No cozy chats, no remember whens.”

She wasn’t drawing boundaries—she was throwing up twenty-foot walls. Given how much time together this job would take, would that even work? Maybe Peggy and Jake were right, and there was no hope for redeeming things with Toni. Maybe being this close to her really was going to end up as round two of the worst heart-stomping of his life.

“Look, I know you just want a friendly, effective, working partnership that gets the job done.” The words tasted surprisingly sour to him. Still, he knew that’s what she wanted to hear. Making peace with Toni meant starting from where she was. And where Toni was, right now, was behind a whole moat of anxious stay-aways.

“Yes, exactly.” A bit of the rigidity left her.

“Okay, then, an effective start would be to move things off those shelves over there so we can get up into that ceiling.” He made a mental note to use we whenever possible.

Because he had a different vision for the Redding’s renovation. Insane as it was, Bo didn’t want to just build a Toni a new store. Deep down, he was determined to build a new bridge. One that stretched over the years and crossed the distance between Toni and himself.

If he had to swim that moat to do it, he would. Or drown in the attempt.

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