Page 8 of When I Fall In Love

“You know how this works, right?” she says.

“How what works?” Jana is only looking out for me, but doesn’t she get it? Keeping busy is the only thing keeping me going.

“If you don’t take the rest you need, your body is going to force you to take it at some point.”

“Yes, yes. I hear you.” I glance at the time on my phone. It’s already five twenty. “I’ve got to run.”

“See you tomorrow.”

I speed out of the boardroom and take the stairs two at a time to the second floor of our offices. Melanie, the PA I share with other senior legal counsel, waits for me, her purse already hooked over her shoulder.

“I need to be at my mom’s place in half an hour,” she says.

“Shit.” I give her arm a squeeze. “I’m sorry, the meeting dragged on and on and I wasn’t aware of this new meeting.”

“Your realtor scheduled this one. The person is already waiting in the small board room by reception.”

“The realtor?”

“I’m not sure. Something to do with the farm in Vermont. A Mr. Collingwood? That’s all I got over the phone from the woman who phoned from Vermont,” Melanie says with a hitch of her shoulders. “Try not to climb him like a tree, will you? I want to… so badly.”

“Eh… Okay, thanks. Go. Go!” I shoo her away with my hand as I head in the opposite direction.

Climb him like a tree? The last thing I want to do is to climb my unexpected, unwanted half-brothers. Either of them. Not that I would know them if I were to walk past them in the street. I haven’t seen either Collingwood brother in more than sixteen years, and at that point we didn’t even know we were related.

Oh, Mom. All those secrets you kept are coming home to roost. Mom’s deathbed confession included the news that my brother and I would inherit Collingwood Farm in Vermont. She inherited it six years ago when Old Collingwood passed away and never said a peep about it. The side note that we are Old Collingwood’s illegitimate children? That one came out of left field, and I still can’t think about it.

Work. Just think about work. It’s a safe zone.

And now I need to deal with my half-brothers, who, without a doubt, want their share of our inheritance because they think we have no right to it. The Collingwood brothers are both lawyers too. Weird how that happened. One thing is for sure: their ambition wasn’t driven by the need to pull themselves out of poverty. They’ve been sitting easy all their lives what with Lady Collingwood inheriting money from her father, who owned a glass factory in Boston. Just thinking of Lady Collingwood—and she was no lady, mind you—makes my skin crawl.

I shake my head as I walk down the corridor, glancing through glass walls to see who is still at the office to save me in case someone wants to inflict grievous bodily harm on my person. The office is still buzzing as everybody here works long hours. They’ll come running if I scream.

With a deep breath I step into my office and put my laptop down. I take a quick glance in the mirror and straighten my fitted cream jacket and cigarette trousers. The sage green silk button-down is demure and now I wish I’d worn something fit for the courtroom and, well… war. Something all black and menacing.

I want to sell Collingwood Farm to the highest bidder and walk away. Let my past rest at last. Be done with Vermont and its people. Be done with turning every cent five times over, finally buy my own place in the Bay area, and know that I have control over that side of life—have a home nobody can take away from me.

When I get offered a partnership, I want to pay my way in with cash. And then at long last I could dictate where I spend most of my time. Hopefully not only on corporate mergers and acquisitions, but also on running a pro-bono wing for the company, something it doesn’t have and desperately needs. My reason for becoming partner has shifted over the past few years, but since Mom’s death, my need for change has amplified. It has shifted from being the standard goal of every bright-eyed and bushy-tailed young lawyer in a big law firm, to a vehicle to make real changes in other people’s lives.

But first there’s Collingwood Farm. I finally gave Kyle the go-ahead to put the farm on the market. That decision took me five months to make, but Kyle pushed. He needs the cash for his start-up, and the sooner the better. I’m not sure how the Collingwood brothers learned of the sale, but that one of them is here tells me this isn’t going to be a pleasant ride. Nothing about this is easy and having to deal with this too isn’t bringing me the closure Mom intended. Nope, it’s more like ripping off a band-aid from a cut that needed forty stitches.

With one last swipe of my fingers through my long brown hair, I bolster my courage and, armed only with my phone, I walk down the corridor to the small boardroom situated close to reception.

Through the glass wall I see the man sitting at the oval table, working on a laptop as if he belongs here. He hasn’t looked up yet, but my feet slow as the uneasy dread of an unwelcome surprise spirals in me, tighter, ever tighter. His forehead, the slope of his nose, those high cheekbones, those lips… the sun-kissed skin of someone who spends every minute he can outdoors are all so familiar and foreign at the same time. I blink. This can’t be happening.

He looks up and sees me frozen mid-stride, half a yard from the door to the meeting room, dumbstruck and stupid. His blue eyes widen as he stands slowly. He closes his laptop screen as he straightens completely to his full, magnificent height.

Climb him like a tree? Oh my God, yes. The boy I knew and loved and mourned has grown into this… this… I swallow and blink again. This to-die-for hunk. Hunter Logan was gorgeous as a teenager, but I never imagined he would grow into adulthood looking like… this. Part of me still lives in the past we shared, and the other part isn’t allowed to think about the future we never got to have.

Yet here he is, my Hunter, thirteen years later than when he’d initially promised. Good thing I stopped holding my breath a long time ago.

I step up and open the glass door, fixing a fake smile on my face in the process. He circles the table to meet me before I can sit down. I need to sit down. Soon.

“Beth Anderson,” he says, his voice deep and sure as he holds out his hand.

This is so formal for us. But how else? I don’t want to touch him. I don’t want the heat of his skin against mine. I don’t want to feel the rush of desire through my body like I used to when he touched me. I have no choice though. We’re both adults here, so I put my hand into his. As our fingers fold around each other’s palms, his much bigger hand swallowing mine, our intense high school relationship flashes through my mind’s eye. “It’s O’Neill. Beth O’Neill.”

“Of course,” Hunter says as he pulls away.

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