The Fortune Cafe (20 page)

“You will,” Carter said. “That’s something I figured out about you quick. If you decide you’re going to do it, it happens. So work doesn’t stand a chance. They should give you the keys to the Duchess now because that’s a done deal.”

“I already have the keys to the Duchess.” It had been a fast kiss, like he hadn’t been thinking about it, so that was good. Right? She wasn’t sure. Random kisses, even hair kisses, seemed like a bad idea.

“Then they should give you the crown and scepter or whatever it is you get when you’re the boss of the Duchess. A special RFID badge? What is it? It’s a crown and scepter, right? Say it’s a crown and scepter.”

“It is, but my boss never wears them because they don’t go with his suit.” Maybe that hadn’t been a kiss. Maybe the wind had ruffled her hair again, and it felt like a kiss. But how did the wind make a kissing sound? She straightened, too fidgety to lie down anymore.

“You okay?” Carter asked, cracking an eye open to check on her.

“Fine. Except for not. I’m really stressed about work.”
And about you kissing my hair.
“I think I liked it.”

“Sorry, what?”

Her cheeks heated. She couldn’t believe she’d said that last part out loud. She’d meant she’d liked him kissing her hair and
that
was the problem.
Focus, girl.
“Nothing, just saying I’m glad I like my work.”

Work. She’d let Blake dominate her work-life balance, and it hadn’t balanced at all; the wedding had gotten her attention, and the Duchess got what was left. She had to flip that, at least until her job was under control.

When she put all the pieces in place, luck had a way of happening. When she got distracted, let things get too spontaneous, everything went sideways— it rained bad luck. She caught herself reaching for her necklace again. “You think I should call Spyglass again?”

“You called her two days ago, right? I think she’ll let you know when it’s done.”

That would have sounded so condescending coming from Blake, everything underscored with an unspoken but obvious “duh.” But Carter’s tone was reassuring, and it made her want to burrow into him and soak up more of his mellowness.

Hold up. Bad idea
.

As much as the last three weeks with Carter had been fun, she didn’t need the double awkwardness of getting caught up in some emotional rebound with a neighbor she couldn’t avoid when her emotions inevitably flamed out, plus having her career fall apart due to lack of focus.

Carter was a cute guy. A really cute guy, actually. And if she quit distracting him, she’d leave him free for someone else to swoop in and snatch him up. In fact, her friend, Ally, had hinted more than once that Carter seemed pretty dateable. Maybe she should hook them up.

She pictured them together and wrinkled her nose. She couldn’t say why, exactly, but something about it was off. It was the same sense of something being not quite right when she was eating chicken at a nice restaurant and it had been grilled too close to where they’d cooked seafood. Blake had always said she was imagining the fishy flavor, but she always asked the server, and she’d never been wrong yet. The picture of Ally and Carter in her mind had the same tinge of not-quite-rightness.

Wait. Did she think that because she wanted it to be herself in the picture with Carter? She gave that mental image a whirl. It looked totally normal in her head, and she frowned.

“You must have some deep thoughts going on in here,” Carter said, startling her with the feather-light touch of his finger grazing the furrows between her eyebrows. Her eyes flew open to find him propped on his elbow and smiling down at her. His finger moved down to trace the frown tugging down her mouth. A devilish impulse to catch the tip of his wandering digit between her teeth and see what he did parted her lips, but before she could see what would happen, her phone shrilled, and she shot up.

“Hello?” she said, aware of Carter’s gaze on her profile.

“Hi, this is Jolie at Eveline’s Bridal. Your dress is here, and we’re ready to schedule you for a fitting.”

Lucy’s chest tightened. “I canceled that order a couple of weeks ago. I canceled my whole wedding.” Keeping her voice steady as she said it felt like walking a high wire without falling.

She listened to clerk’s flustered apology on the other end that sounded as if it were coming from way below her perch on her high wire. Yes, she understood that she would still owe the cost of the special ordered dress, but they could attempt to sell it on consignment for her if she would like to do that. Yes, she would like to do that. No, there was no way she would be wearing that dress. No, Jolie didn’t need to apologize for the call.

She hung up and scrounged up a smile for Carter. “I guess whoever called me last time didn’t leave a note that I’d canceled the order.”

“You still have to pay for it?”

She nodded. “Yeah. They might be able to sell it to someone looking for a deal.”

He rested his hand on her back. “I’m sorry. Maybe we should ramp up the Rampage?”

She straightened away from his hand and climbed to her feet, fighting hard to keep her balance— emotionally and otherwise. “Carter—”

And whatever he heard in her voice shadowed his face as he climbed to his feet too.

She continued anyway. “You got me through the worst of it. The Rampage was a success, and now I need to focus on work. You made it possible for me to hold on to the status quo, but I really need to push ahead. I’m getting to the point where all this spontaneity is starting to go from being helpful to getting me off track. Not that it hasn’t been amazing,” she rushed to add when a flicker of hurt flashed in his eyes. “But the healthy thing for me to do is to take control of my life again. Besides, think of all the free time you’re going to have now that you don’t have to babysit me,” she said, hoping to tease a smile out of him.

It worked. “You mean babe-sitting?” he asked, wiggling his eyebrows at her, dirty old man style. He ducked when she swung at him, and he caught her fist, using her momentum to spin her around and pull her up against him. He braced his feet on either side of her skates and steadied her. “Careful there, Sugar Ray. You steady?”

She nodded, surprised by how hard his chest felt against her back. He released her slowly, keeping hold of her hand until he was sure she’d found her feet. She was even more surprised by how much she missed his warmth against her.

“Let’s go,” he said, turning on his skates as easily as if they were his regular Adidas. “Let’s return these before I deposit you back at the Lucy cave.”

She clunked after him, relieved that he hadn’t put up a fight.

Right?

For the millionth time, she reached up to rub her jade and flinched when she found empty space. Carter’s gentle urging aside, it was time to call Spyglass again and see when it would be done. She needed all the help she could get to put her life back on track. Play time was done.

First thing at work the next morning, Lucy went through her wedding to-do list one more time to make sure everything was actually canceled. The call about the dress had been a lot like finding a fly in her morning juice, and she could do without those kind of karmic ripples on a regular basis.

It looked good until she got to the dates for the Mariposa Hotel. She’d canceled the reservation weeks ago, but she hadn’t been able to bring herself to take the vacation request off the Duchess calendar. She hated the symbolism of it. What should have been a week of celebrating with friends and enjoying her new husband would officially become another week in the office.

She closed the to-do list. Soon. She would delete the time off request soon. Just not today.

Today was about pulling work out of a downward skid. It was about working smart and seeing problems before they could arise. It was about working so hard that it compensated for her missing luck. It was about making it happen. And with a final deep breath, she dove right in to fill some of the gaps that had opened on the Duchess event schedule.

That night and every night for the next two weeks she fell into bed like she’d been wrung out of energy and dropped there to dry. Some nights she dragged herself out to the balcony to see if Carter was around. She only saw him twice. Based on their conversations, he was winning life.

She rattled off a long list of new events they’d booked, new hires she’d made, new problems she’d solved.

He described some ridiculous thing he did that day that sounded more fun than anything she’d done all year, minus the weeks of the Rampage with him.

She refused to let it distract her. The progress at work had been clear and steady, but setbacks kept cropping up— a flower vendor who had decided on an unreasonable rate hike or an event liaison who was more interested in booking personal dates with tech guys than booking events for the hotel.

At the end of her first week of Operation Break the Slump, it had all come pouring out during her nightly call to her mom. “I don’t get it,” she complained, hating that she sounded like one of her mom’s honors students whining about a B. “I’m giving this my full time and attention, and I’m running into problems like I never have before. When is this stupid bad luck streak going to snap? Because I will, if it doesn’t soon. I’m going to lose my mind.”

Her mom had sighed. “You’re still convinced this is all going to be better when you get your necklace back, hm?”

“I know it will.”

“Sweetie, you’re having the same luck you always had. It’s just that before you always expected things to work out, and they did. Now you’re expecting things to go wrong, and they do. The truth is nothing’s changed. You have the same amount of things going right as you do wrong, but your perception is different because of your expectations.”

“But Carter’s luck has definitely improved. It’s not my imagination. Everything used to go wrong for him, and now it all goes right.”

“Ask Carter about his luck some time. See if he agrees with your assessment.”

She’d had to wander out on to her balcony four nights in a row before she’d had the chance. What had happened to the days when he’d hang out here waiting for a glimpse of her? It would have been a lot more convenient if he’d kept that up. She was smiling at the inner three-year-old that seemed to be controlling all her emotions when Carter’s door slid open, and he settled into the deck chair on his side.

“It’s good to see you smiling,” he said. “Let me in on the joke?”

She shook her head. “I was just being lame.”

“Not possible.”

“I have a random question for you. Do you feel like you’re having a run of good luck right now?”

He shrugged. “No more than usual.”

“But didn’t you feel like you were having a ton of bad luck last year?”

“Nah. I was having a lot of bad days, and now I don’t. But that’s what happens after a tough breakup. It’s hard to see anything as going your way for a while. Doesn’t mean the rest of the stuff in your life is better or worse, but when the biggest thing in it becomes a total wreck, sometimes it’s hard to realize that the rest of it is the same as it always was.”

She straightened and fixed him with the unwavering stare her mom had always used to pry secrets out of her when she was a kid. “Has my mom been coaching you on the phone?”

That startled a quick head shake out of him. “What are you talking about? I haven’t seen her since she left after... you know.”

She eased back into her chair. “You can say ‘breakup.’ I’m not fragile.”

“Okay. So what made you ask if I talked to your mom? I promise to tell you if she’s trying to check up on you.”

“Don’t worry about it. It wouldn’t bother if me she did.”

He stood and walked over to lean on his rail. If she did the same thing, they’d be face to face. Her cheeks heated. Stupid. This is what came of not having a fiancé around to kiss regularly.

She cleared her throat and stood up. “I’m sure she won’t call you. Have a good night, Carter,” she said, slipping through her door.

She closed it on his soft “Wait, Lucy-Lou” because she didn’t need to stay outside any longer and wonder how soft his hair felt or if his biceps were as hard as his chest had been. She climbed into bed and fired up her laptop, determined to get a jump on the next day. Her mom was right; if she expected glitches to happen, they wouldn’t surprise her, and if she expected them to work out, they would. Now she just had to figure out all the possible glitches, and since she couldn’t think about them
and
Carter’s hair, she pushed Carter out of her head.

The new approach helped the second week. Every time something went wrong, she tried to think of it as a problem that would solve itself, no biggie. And even though sometimes those problems did in fact turn into biggies, or none of them solved themselves, they did get solved. Eventually. After she finally managed to replace the conference that had canceled for September with a different event that grossed almost as much on the food and beverage service, the general manager stopped by her office to compliment her.

By the third week, she’d hit a groove. Her job didn’t have the same feel of lighthearted fun like it had before her necklace had broken, but she was starting to crave the feeling she got when she finally worked through a particularly knotty problem. It was like a huge post-workout stretch, but inside her brain.