Page 104 of Never Your Valentine

Annabelle

Three months later

* * *

I twist the key and open the door to my building’s new annex. Grant is behind me, wrestling with a hand truck holding eight gallons of beautiful mint green paint. I look over my shoulder to catch him checking out my ass. He grins when I notice him, not at all ashamed. Why should he be? My ass is cute.

We place drop cloths on the floor, laughing when the cloths bunch up and we tangle our hands trying to straighten them.

“We’d better hurry,” he says. “People will start showing up in about ten minutes.”

“Then we should probably pretend we know what we’re doing.”

Yesterday, we taped everything off and painted the ceiling. Today, it’s the walls and trim of the brand-new greeting card business I’m calling Lake & Pine.

I’ve taken the crumbling parking lot next to The Break and turned it into a warehouse and design studio. I had lots of help. Not just Grant, but his brothers, his cousins, our friends, and anyone else who wanted to pitch in. At times, it felt like a whole-town effort.

When it’s finished, I’m going to have my own card printer, a pick-and-pack station, a design space with a gallery wall, and my own office. There will also be desks for my staff. I’m going to hire at least two people. Maybe three. Lia is busting through paperwork to get me incorporated as quickly as possible. I’ve already contracted with a logistics company to move my product in and out, especially the pallets of cards that are going to stores.

All this from one viral moment. My fifteen minutes of fame lasted longer than fifteen minutes once Darla Lee and a few other celebrities started talking about me, and Truly Penrose kept talking about me. The fact that I live in the middle of nowhere, working for myself, somehow made me even more desirable. Pretty soon, publicists started begging me to send cards to their clients. The world’s first celebrity card designer? Yeah, that would be me.

I granted interviews to seven magazines, three TV stations, and sixteen podcasts. I was almost booked on The View, until there was a last-minute conflict and they dropped me. It was just as well, because I have more business than I can handle at the moment.

I’ve kept my longtime fans and they still cheer me on. Every week, I pick a newsletter subscriber at random and send them a bespoke card. They don’t go viral the way celebrity cards do, but they’re the ones I’m most proud of.

Grant helps with the captions. His ideas are sarcastic, hilarious, and so very wrong. He says mine are too nice. We meet somewhere in the middle. Those cards are always the most popular.

“What’s this?” Grant asks, pointing to the lower corner of the far wall where I did some creative lettering. Yesterday, I took my lightest marker and wrote Lake & Pine, built with love. I added my name and the date below it. “We’re going to paint over it anyway,” I tell him. “I was just having a happy moment.”

Grant asks to borrow the marker. I hunt around in my supply box and hand it over. He kneels and adds, and one very proud boyfriend.

My heart sparkles like a sunrise over the lake. I pull him in for a kiss, which is quickly interrupted by the arrival of our first volunteers. June and Lia bring urns of coffee and boxes of donuts to set up on card tables outside, then they grab paint brushes and start cutting in corners.

Felix is next, wearing the grubbiest paint clothes imaginable. An hour later, he’s made himself the unofficial foreman, supervising the moving of ladders, pouring paint into trays and assigning people to walls. By noon, it seems like half of Echo Creek has shown up, and the other half are stopping by to see what we’re doing. Grant takes every opportunity to give a tour. “Her desk will be right there,” he says. “By that big window. Cards displayed along that wall. Desks for her assistants on that side. And me in the background, telling you that I always knew she’d make it.”

At noon, Dove and Roy bring over sandwiches. Grant notices that I’ve got a smudge of paint on my jaw, and he wets a napkin to carefully wipe it off. “That’s one of my favorite places to kiss,” he says, and leans in to show me just how much.

“Hey lovebirds,” Roy calls from across the room. “Less flirting, more painting!”

We break apart, laughing, finish our sandwiches, and get back to work.

Activity swirls around us all afternoon. Ladders shifting, coffee poured, good-natured arguing about primer versus two coats. In the back hall, a radio is playing contractor rock. Sometimes the whole room sings along.

Sophie stops by with a new list of grants we can apply for. Turns out, Ender was wrong about me needing loans to fix my building. There’s state aid, small business assistance, and a whole fund just for women entrepreneurs in Schoolcraft county. Best of all, Ender and his cronies aren’t eligible for any of it. Sophie and I are working on proposals together, since she has a business of her own to nurture, and our opportunities overlap.

She grabs a brush and fixes the terrible job someone did cutting in around an outlet. She does the same around the window frame in my office. Then she starts leveling all the ladders. Sophie’s little brother is here too, and when she tries to pull him off a ladder, he pouts, calling her bossy.

“Hey,” Felix tells him. “She’s not bossy. She actually knows what she’s doing.”

Sophie rears back with a shocked expression. She covers it quickly. “I can defend myself,” she says.

Felix pulls at his grungy cap. “I was trying to help.”

“Trying to have the last word, you mean.” She pulls the ladder over to the doorway and gets a tiny brush to correct the places where someone splattered green paint on the trim.

Felix sighs and hands her a pint of white semigloss, getting offended when she tries to stir it, since he already did.

Grant is standing next to me, watching the show. “Were we ever that bad?”