“Did you know Ryan was rich?” Gen was standing at the counter at Jitters the next morning, waiting for her skinny vanilla latte. Lacy was bustling around behind the counter, making espresso and steaming milk. The crowd was light this morning, just a few locals chatting over muffins and cappuccinos.
“Sure,” Lacy said, as though it were the most normal thing in the world.
“You knew?! Why didn’t you say anything?”
Lacy shrugged. “I didn’t think of it.”
“You didn’t think of it? How does one not think of something like that?!”
Lacy paused in her work and cocked her hip, one fist planted on it. “I guess I just don’t think of him as this rich guy. I think of him as … as a guy I went to high school with. I think of him as this nice guy who’s good at algebra but crap at chemistry.”
“I wouldn’t say he’s crap at chemistry,” Gen mused. “Quite the opposite, in fact.”
“Ooh.” Lacy waggled her eyebrows at Gen. “So you had a good time last night?”
“I had a very good time last night. I had such a good time that …”
“That what?”
“ … That it might … God.” She blew a lock of hair away from her eyes. “It might change everything.”
Lacy stopped what she was doing and focused all of her attention on Gen.
“What kind of everything?”
“Just … everything!”
“You’re talking about the move back East, aren’t you?”
“I don’t know,” Gen said miserably. “Maybe.”
Lacy finished making Gen’s drink and then, latte cup in hand, she came out into the seating area, took Gen by the arm, and led her to a table. They sat, and Lacy leaned in close to Gen and spoke in a lower voice to avoid being overheard by the other customers.
“You can’t change your career plans for a man,” Lacy said. “Especially Ryan Delaney.”
“What do you mean, especially Ryan? I thought you liked him.”
“I do. He’s sweet, he’s good-looking, he’s nice to his mother. I mean, he wasn’t for me, but he’s great.”
“Then what?” Gen heard the whiny quality in her own voice, but she couldn’t help it. Why especially Ryan?
Lacy clutched Gen’s forearm and leaned toward her. “It’s just … the money.”
Gen pulled her arm out of Lacy’s grasp. “What about the money?”
Lacy got a look on her face that suggested that Gen was either dense or deliberately obtuse. “You have a lot of plans for your career. Plans you’ve gone to great lengths to realize by bringing the artist here. Then you start dating Ryan, and he’s part of the Delaney family.” She said the last part with air quotes. “You think people are going to say, ‘Oh, she changed her plans for the sake of true love’?” She looked at Gen pointedly.
“They’re going to say I abandoned my plans for a shot at the Delaney fortune,” Gen said as the truth of it dawned on her.
Lacy sat back in her seat and raised her eyebrows.
“Oh, hell,” Gen said. “You don’t think that, do you?”
“Of course not.” She waved an arm to dismiss the idea. “I know you. I know you’d never be with a guy if you didn’t have honest feelings for him. I mean, jeez … I know you’ve had a thing for Ryan since long before you knew about the money. But … Look. Let’s forget about what people will think. Okay? What do you want? I thought what you wanted was to rebuild your career—in New York.”
“It was. It is.”
“Then you can’t just turn your back on that.”
Gen looked down at the latte in her hands and blinked back tears.
“But …”
“But what?” Lacy’s voice was gentle now.
Gen plucked a napkin out of the metal dispenser on the table and started shredding it with her fingers. “I’m going to sound like a cliché, but nobody’s ever made me feel like this before.”
The look on Lacy’s face was one of surprise, and, Gen thought, maybe a little bit of jealousy. Not because Gen was with Ryan, surely—Lacy and Ryan had just never connected, had never clicked—but because Gen had found that thing, that spark, while Lacy was still looking.
“I see,” Lacy said. “But, Gen, you’ve just started seeing him. You don’t know yet where it’s going to go.”
That was true, Gen couldn’t deny that the relationship was in its infancy. But it felt like so much already. It felt so substantial, so real.
“What if … What if it’s love?” Gen’s voice was barely more than a whisper.
“If he loves you, he won’t stop you from building your career. If he loves you, he’ll go with you.” Lacy’s features were set, her voice determined.
But would he? Knowing what Ryan had here in Cambria—his family, the ranch, the land that had been the Delaney home for generations—she wasn’t sure. And she wasn’t sure if she could even ask him to.
Gen felt low for the rest of the day, which pissed her off, because a girl should not feel low after the best date—and the best sex—of her life. She thought that Lacy had a point about the money, and about how people would see her if she decided to stay in Cambria to be with Ryan. But who the hell cared what other people thought?
She did, she realized. She cared what other people thought, and she especially cared what Ryan thought. Yes, she’d started dating him before she understood what it meant to be dating one of the Cambria Delaneys. But now that she did understand, would he think she was staying with him because of the family money?
Ryan had admitted over dinner that women had feigned interest in him in the past just to get at the wealth he represented, and she could see that it had hurt him. She knew she wasn’t like that—she didn’t think she was capable of pretending to love a man she had no feelings for—but did he know that? And if he didn’t, how could she make him sure?
She wondered if he was the type to make a woman sign a harsh and restrictive prenup. And if he asked her to, would she do it?
That line of thought made her realize that she was pondering marriage only three dates into what couldn’t even be called a relationship yet. And that realization made her think that somebody really should slap some sense into her.
Who better to do that than Rose?
On her lunch break from the gallery, Gen walked over to De-Vine, where Rose was pouring two-ounce portions of wine for a pair of tourists who were tasting a selection of local offerings. The woman—who appeared to be in her early thirties—was making oohing and aahing noises over a chocolate wine, which, to Gen’s mind, wasn’t really wine at all. Gen knew that Rose agreed with her, but she also knew that the novelty wines—the chocolates, the flavor-infused sparkling wines—paid the bills at De-Vine with an efficiency a good oaky chardonnay never would.
“Hey,” Rose greeted her when she came in. Today, Rose’s hair was hot pink with streaks of purple, and it was hanging loose in a blunt-cut bob.
Gen sat on a barstool a few seats down from the tourists.
“Get you anything?” Rose offered.