Page 29 of All Because of You

Yes, this guy . . . maybe he was worth trusting.

“Madison?” Her name drifted from his lips, caressing her cheeks before floating across the ocean on the wind.

She bit her lip as she looked at him. Swallowed hard. “I was your pen pal, Evan.”

Yep, that was definitely surprise in his wide eyes. “What? How do you know?”

“Because I showed up that day we were going to meet. I saw it was you. And I thought . . .”

His hand lifted to tuck a strand of her hair behind her ear, but his eyes never left hers. “You thought what?”

“I—” Madison licked her lips. Man, this was harder than she’d thought it’d be. All those years of believing him to be one thing, when maybe she’d been wrong. “I was about to approach you when your friends came in. Roxy said something that made me think it was all a mean joke. So I ran. And when you tried following up with more letters, I couldn’t fathom why someone would be so cruel. Why someone hated me so much.”

“What? Really?” The anguish in his voice tore through her, and she wanted to kick the stupid, insecure girl she’d been. How different things might have turned out.

She broke eye contact with him, turning her head the other way as she pulled her knees into her chest. In the distance, but closer than before, puffs rose from the sea. Another pod of whales. The constant.

Breathing in deeply, Madison looked his way once more. “I’m sorry, Evan. It’s just, after the way your friends treated me and the way you . . .”

“The way I let them.” His lips twisted into a grimace. “You have nothing to be sorry for, Madison. I was a complete waste of space back then. Half the time, I was drunk, so I don’t have much more than hazy memories of most of those years. But I do know that my pen pal—you—were the one person I was honest with, about everything. And when you didn’t show up, I thought . . . well, actually, what I thought turned out to be accurate.”

“Which was what?” Without thinking, she reached up, cupping his cheek, aching to soothe the pain clear on his face.

He shrugged. “That my pen pal saw it was me and decided I wasn’t worth her time after all.” Though he tried to crack a smile, she saw past it to the hurting teen he’d been.

To the man who still wondered if he was good enough. Worth fighting for.

Worth staying for.

She hated that she’d hurt him. That he’d hurt her. That they’d hurt each other. But maybe it wasn’t too late to heal the wounds of those hurts, to try again. To rebuild.

“We aren’t the same people we were back then, Evan.” Madison snuggled into him again, relaxing her cheek against the soft fabric of his sweater as the ocean danced below. “I’m choosing to believe that, and I hope you can too.”

Chapter 8

The promotion was slipping through Evan’s fingers faster than Javier Baez stealing home.

According to his buddy in HR, a flood of applications for Denise’s replacement had come in—some of them outside hires who were extremely well-qualified. But Evan had a plan. He only hoped it would be enough to convince the city council to give him a chance.

Taking a deep breath, Evan pushed open the door of City Hall’s conference room. Most of the city council members were there already. Bud Travis, lounging in his worn green windbreaker, nodded as Evan entered. The antique-store owner Kiki Baker West chatted amiably with Doug Doyle, a slick forty-something realtor who owned several of the buildings downtown. Travel agent Rosa Diaz had already informed Evan she would be out of town and couldn’t make the last-minute meeting, which just left—

“I sure would like to know what this meeting is about, son.” Evan’s father breezed through the door, dressed in a three-piece suit despite the fact it was casual Friday. “And why it had to happen ASAP.” He quirked an eyebrow and slid into his self-designated seat at the head of the table.

Evan closed the door behind him. “Thank you all for coming on such short notice. I know you’re busy and have a lot going on, and that meeting on a Friday afternoon is probably the last thing you feel like doing, so I’ll make this as quick and painless as possible.”

He moved to the front of the room and felt four pairs of eyes on him as he turned on the projector hooked up to his laptop. “As you are aware, Hole-in-the-Wall Hardware is set to reopen soon, which means the agreement with Herman Hardware is no longer on the table.” The screen behind him flickered on, revealing a presentation with a blank first page.

His dad’s frown was pronounced, while Bud Travis’s grin didn’t hide his glee over the turn of events. The other two just nodded.

Evan continued. “They aren’t the first chain to consider opening a location here, but they’re certainly the largest. It’s no secret that our projections showed how they’d have been a boon to the economy—and quickly—but we’d still need several similar deals to help things get back to where they were before the earthquake. Which got me thinking.”

His finger hovered over the button that would bring up the first slide, and he swallowed his nerves. He’d met with Alex several times this week to check and recheck the numbers, so he trusted the truth behind what he was saying. And while he’d spent much of his free time in the evenings helping Madison ready her store for the grand reopening tomorrow, Evan had gone down the rabbit hole with this idea during work hours, diving deeply so he understood all the implications and potential pitfalls.

“In light of this, and with a desire not to rely on outside forces so much to get our tourism and economy back on track, I’ve been considering some other options. There are grants, et cetera, and if we win them, they’d have a cumulative effect. But I want us to think bigger.” Evan flipped to the next slide:The Christmas on the Beach Festival.

“A festival?” Kiki’s voice perked up.

“Yes. One with live music, food, games, a tree lighting ceremony, and fireworks over the water.” He’d been sitting there on the rocks whale watching with Madison last weekend, holding her, soaking in her warmth against him—still reeling from the news that she’d been the pen pal who had made him feel so accepted all those years ago—when he’d allowed his gaze to wander down toward the sandy beach. Baker Park was acres big, and the community developer in him asked why the town had never held a festival there. “I’m not going to lie. It would take a lot of work, and the entire community would need to get on board with it. Businesses would need to contribute services and products, and we’d have to gather a committee to organize it. But I think it’s something people could really get behind.”

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