I missed out on so much…
He jogged up his own front steps and opened the door to a cozy scene.
Maggie Lawrence was curled up on his couch with a book, the silver in her long brown braid bright in the light from the fireplace. A steaming cup of tea sat on the coffee table in front of her.
“Goodness, you’re home early,” Maggie said, looking up at him with a smile. “Did you two have fun?”
He thought he was playing it cool, but he saw the exact moment when she read his emotions all over his face.
“Oh, Ash,” she said softly. “Come and sit. Maya has been asleep for an hour or so. She won’t be bothered if we have a quiet talk.”
Ash was a grown man. He certainly didn’t need to confide in his fake fiancée’s mom.
But she just looked up at him with her beautiful, wise blue eyes, like she could wait all night if she had to.
“It’s not going to work,” Ash heard himself sigh as he collapsed on the couch beside her.
“What’s not going to work?” she asked.
He couldn’t tell her about Allie.
“I’ve dreamed about taking my grandfather’s drinks national since I was a teenager,” he said. “But what the investors want to do…”
“What do they want to do?” Maggie asked.
“Essentially, they want me to advertise a high-caffeine beverage in elementary schools,” Ash told her. “Using Allie’s greenhouse idea as a way in the door.”
“Oh, for heaven’s sake,” Maggie said. “Can you tell themyou won’t do it?”
“I could,” he said. “And they might even agree to it, this time. But with investors, there will always be something else, maybe something worse. That’s how it works. They want to make money, and it’s an extremely competitive market. I didn’t even want tomakehigh caffeine drinks to begin with.”
“So why are you doing it?” Maggie asked.
“You don’t just get to do exactly what you want all the time,” he said, repeating what he’d said to himself when one of his sales team presented the Turbo Tailor idea and the data to back up why it would fly off the shelves and take TBC to another level. He’d been right too. Just the concept was enough to have the investors interested. “In my own life, I live by one set of rules. But to succeed in business, the rules are different.”
“Why?” Maggie asked. “Are things tight for you and Maya? Is that why you have to go national?”
“No,” he admitted. “But it’s always been my goal. It’s why I went to business school in the first place.”
He wanted to carry on his grandfather’s passion and turn it into a legacy. But there was no point talking to her about the inventors of the big beverages in every store today and the men who had made them famous through clever acts of creation, marketing, and distribution. One look at Maggie Lawrence and you knew she wouldn’t give a fig about the idea of seeing his grandfather’s image and his own placed among those others in the history books.
“You have other things to focus on now, I think,” Maggie said, her blue eyes twinkling, so like Allie’s. “And I don’t think you’ll have too much trouble keeping a roof over your head. You’re an intelligent young man.”
Suddenly, he was racked with guilt. Family meant everything to Allie and her parents. How could he have asked her to lie to them?
“You should know about this thing with Allie,” he began.
“It’s not real,” Maggie whispered.
He gaped at her for a moment. How could this sweet woman have guessed that he was scheming with her daughter?
“Her father and I figured it out from the very beginning,” Maggie said gently. “Allie doesn’t keep much from us, and in this town it’s almost impossible anyway. We knew you’d just met. And we knew you were telling everyone a whopper of a story. But we figured you two had your reasons.”
“She thought it was just to help me save face in front of my ex,” Ash said. “She saw that I was hurting. She’s an angel.”
“And why wereyoudoing it?” Maggie asked.
“I couldn’t seem to help myself,” Ash admitted softly. “It feels like something is pulling me to her. And it’s worse now, like I won’t ever be able to sleep again without knowing she’s really mine. But how can she be with someone who would sell their soul?”
