He didn’t seem to notice, or care.
Zach Woods had been one of the main crushes for any teenager who liked boys back in the early 2000s. The frosted tips and bad-boy pout had been too much for mere mortal teen girls to resist. Including her.
She’d been obsessed with his showSecond Chance City, where he’d played a troubled youth who’d fallen for the equally troubled daughter of a state senator. Very Romeo and Juliet. When he’d first come to Hemlock, she’d been certain she was hallucinating.
Then Jonathan had gotten a job building a custom house for him, and they’d hit it off and started planning to expand the business.
Then Daisy had gotten to know him. Or, rather, tried to. He was inaccessible in a way she couldn’t put her finger on. Not unfriendly, necessarily, but she just never seemed to get any closer to him than she had the day they met.
Not that she needed to be close to him.
Zach legally owned half the business—and technically probably more than half the assets—though he didn’t have anything to do with the day-to-day operations.
He was at quarterly meetings, and sometimes even the company Christmas party, but he wasn’t around all the time.
He was handsome. Not a normal kind of handsome. Not the kind of handsome you expected to see when you looked up in a coffee shop in a small town.
The trouble was, even though he’d left Hollywood behind, he hadn’t transformed into a mortal man. He was still too good looking, too impactful every time he walked into a room. There were rumors, whispers, that he was fantastic in bed and rotated women through that bed with the frequency of a man who was still on top of his game.
He was well liked in town, but she knew a few women who worried when their husbands took up a friendship with him. Surely his life seemed more attractive than the average man living in suburban drudgery.
It had proven to be true. Not that sheblamedZach for Jonathan’s infidelity. Jonathan deserved 100 percent of that blame. She didn’t evenwant to cast any blame on Amberly, who was young and hadn’t been married to Daisy.
Jonathan was the one who’d been obligated to her. No one else.
Sometimes she wondered, though, how much Zach’s lifestyle acted as dream fuel.
“Hi, Daisy.” The expression on his face let her know he was well aware she would have rather avoided locking eyes with him.
“Morning,” she said.
“I heard you quit,” he said.
It was weird that all she had exchanged about her resignation with her husband was a few texts. She was actually talking toZachabout it in person.
“Yeah. I did.”
“Good.”
He grabbed his coffee off the counter, removed the lid, and looked at it. Then he blew across the top of it, the steam cascading over the side. He put the lid back on and raised his cup to her. Without another word, he walked out of the coffee shop. She had forgotten to ask him what she’d wanted to.
Good?Was that all he had to say about that? Good. Was it good?
It was good. It was good because she couldn’t keep doing everything for Jonathan. It was good because she needed to have a little bit more dignity. It was bad because she had serious concerns about his business imploding if he didn’t find somebody competent enough to do his books. After all, her kids were dependent on their dad having that business ...
She grabbed her own coffee, which had now gone cold. The way Zach saidgoodmade it seem almost like—
The door opened, and it wasn’t Nora who came in, but Soraya, her blond hair up in the same sort of bun she’d been wearing yesterday in the hospital, the scarf wrapped around her neck almost comedically large. She was wearing big sunglasses and did not remove them when she came inside. She was looking out of sorts, to put it mildly.
She lowered the glasses slightly and saw Daisy and moved quickly across the room. “I’m going to order,” she said.
Then she fluttered to the end of the line and stood there, antsy and bouncing lightly on the balls of her feet.
A couple minutes later, the door opened again, and Nora walked in.
It was fascinating to Daisy the way Nora had kept her high school look and evolved it. Like a latter-day goth who had realized that eventually she would have to style herself to get a job. Her hair was still a shade or two darker than her natural color, long and straight, her bangs as blunt as her manner. She had a nose ring and rings on every finger, her nails painted a dark-cherry color. In high school, she’d had a sticker on one of her binders that said:I’m only wearing black until they make a darker color.
She seemed to adhere to the same philosophy now.
