Be Mine(50)

He also had a diamond ring in his sock drawer. He’d bought it two days ago, when Darcy thought he’d had to go down to the city to handle a fictional problem with their liquor license.

“I hope I’ll be able to get back for that,” Darcy said, snapping him out of his happy thoughts.

“You have to come back. It’s what you’ve been working for.”

“No, tonight’s what I was working for. Everything’s set. Everybody knows their jobs. From here on out, it’s you and Karen.”

The glow dissipated and he stepped around her. “Come out back with me.”

She followed him through the kitchen and into his office. He took a deep breath as he closed the door, trying to figure out what he needed to say not to ruin everything.

“What’s the matter with you?”

He turned to face her, leaning back against the door. “That’s not the first time you’ve made reference to maybe not being here for Valentine’s Day. I don’t get it. Why would you work so hard and then not be here with me?”

“I have to go home. I’ve been gone over a month and I have a life there. I have a job and I have bills that need to be paid and plants to water. I have no idea how crazy it’s going to be.”

“What about us?” He kept his voice low, but the words were a deafening shout in his head. “Is there going to be time for me anywhere in there?”

He saw the temper rising in her face. “What is it you want from me? I’ve been here over a month and when I got home I’ll barely be unpacked before I have to leave everything again and come back. I’ll try. That’s all I can do.”

It wasn’t enough. He straightened up and opened the door. “All right. Maybe I’ll see you then. Maybe not.”

“What did you expect?”

“I expected you to come spend Valentine’s Day with me. Then I expected to take a trip south to see you. I expected we’d figure it out as we went along. And I expected to be more of a priority than watering your f*cking flowers.”

“Jake.”

“It’s been a pleasure working with you. Thanks for the help.”





CHAPTER SIX



AND, JUST LIKE THAT, they were done. Darcy watched him walk away, her heart breaking and her mind spinning, scrambling to come up with anything to say that might bring him back.

There was nothing. Maybe because she couldn’t quite figure out how it went so horribly wrong so fast.

Afraid she was going to come undone in front of the kitchen staff, she grabbed her coat off the hook and went up to the apartment, replaying the conversation over and over in her mind.

Maybe she hadn’t expressed herself well. Maybe he’d overreacted. Maybe it was a little of both, but there was no maybe about the fact that they were over. He’d been so cold at the end, his body language totally unforgiving.

She cried for an hour, drenching her pillow in her effort to be quiet in case Jake came upstairs. She never heard him, so either he was very quiet or he stayed downstairs until after she’d cried herself to sleep.

He was gone before she woke up, and she spent the morning packing her car. When the cooks and Karen showed up to start prepping and there was still no sign of Jake’s truck, she said her goodbyes, wished them all luck and hit the road.

It felt as if she were leaving her heart behind. The drive seemed endless as she fought to keep her emotions under control. She’d been right all along. The pain was too much to bear and she should have walked away the day she got there.

She gave herself twenty-four hours to wallow in heartbreak and then she showered, dressed and drove to Jasper’s Bar & Grille.

“Darcy!” Paulie was so glad to see her she gave everybody a round on the house.

The other woman had barely gotten her arms around Darcy for a welcome-home hug before she started sobbing on her shoulder.

“Shit. Office. Let’s go.”

She let Paulie lead her there like a little kid and push her into a chair. Once the door was closed, Paulie got comfortable in Kevin’s chair. “Okay, spill.”

So she spilled. The entire story, from meeting at trivia night to finding out Jake and J.P. were one and the same to the horrible end of the story the night Jasper’s Pub opened. By the time she was finished, she was pretty much cried out, which was good because she’d decimated the box of tissues Kevin kept on his desk.

“You know I love you,” Paulie said. “You also know I’m not good at the whole girl-talk thing, so I’m going to be straight with you. You’re both idiots.”

That surprised a laugh out of Darcy, and she knew she’d come to the right shoulder to cry on. “How did we screw it up so badly?”

“He’s a man and you’re a woman. Trust me, that comes naturally.” Paulie grabbed a bottle of water out of the mini fridge and handed it to her. “Obviously Valentine’s Day’s a big deal for him.”

“It’s a big deal for the pub, yes.”

“And he wanted you to be there with him and you told him you’d see if you could fit it in?”

“He wanted me to be there for the pub. That’s work.”

“Are you sure? It’s the most romantic holiday of the year, and you guys are supposed to be doing the falling-in-love thing, so what do you think it says to him that you don’t really care one way or the other if you spend it with him?”

Darcy picked at the label on the water bottle. “He kept saying I’d worked too hard to miss being there. Why didn’t he tell me he loves me and he wants me to be there with him?”

“I don’t know. Because he’s a guy?”

“Then tell me, Dr. Paulie, why wasn’t it more important to me to spend the most romantic night of the year with him?”

“I don’t know. The female mind is a screwed-up thing. Men are easier.”

“Great.” She drank some of the water just because Paulie had gotten it for her. “We were in work mode and Valentine’s Day has been a work thing. If he’d asked me while we were cuddling on the couch or in bed or something if I’d go back to spend the evening with him, it would have been different, I think.”

“So tell him that.”

Darcy shook her head, blinking back a new wave of tears. “When he walked away, it was like he flipped a switch. It was over.”

“Doesn’t work like that. There is no switch when it’s the right guy. It can be years and then you see him and—bam—you can’t even breathe.”

That’s how it had worked for Paulie and her husband. It had been years since she jilted Sam at the altar, but he’d walked into Jasper’s one day and, as she said, bam.

“I’ll tell you one thing,” Paulie continued. “If you love him and you think there’s even the slimmest chance you might still work it out, you have to be there on Valentine’s Day.”

“Even if he won’t speak to me?”

“He will. Like I said, there’s no switch.”

“It’ll hurt if it’s not enough.”

“It hurts now, right? The important thing is that you let him know he is more important than whatever else you have going on. If it’s not enough for him, we’ll put his picture over the dartboard and have a tournament. But I’m thinking I won’t fire Courtney just yet.”

* * *

JAKE HAD HEARD THAT absence made the heart grow fonder. Now he knew it also gave a guy time to think and realize he’d acted like a total jerk.

On the first day, when he came home to find her car gone and a note on the counter that said nothing but good luck and her name, he’d stayed good and pissed off. The second day the heartache and the missing her kicked in. Day three had brought the first inklings of clarity. And today came the realization he’d totally blown it.

Darcy didn’t know the Valentine’s Day thing was about more than two-for-one Big-Ass Steaks and putting Jasper’s Pub on the map. She didn’t know he’d been working on the right words to say to make her want to stay with him. She didn’t know about the ring. She didn’t know he was going to tell her he loved her and ask her to be his wife.

He’d basically told her she’d worked too hard not to be there to watch happy couples eat their half-price steaks and then totally overreacted when she pointed out she had a life that had been on hold for over a month and might need some of her attention.

And to really top things off, he still didn’t have her freaking cell phone number. Wasn’t that just a kick in the ass?

There was nothing he could do but call the Bar & Grille and hope Kevin would give him the number without verbally taking his pound of flesh first. He’d screwed up, he knew it, and he wasn’t in the mood for a lecture.

“Jasper’s Bar & Grille, Paulie speaking.”