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“Lauren Keller,” Blake drawled, his Southern voice full of happiness. She wanted to lean into it and borrow it just for a little while. “As I live and breathe, I did not expect to get any sort of texts from you.”

Her irritation soared and solidified. “Did you get my latest one?”

“Yes, ma’am, and I can’t forget what you said. It’s right here in black and blue on my screen.”

She wandered over to the window that overlooked the Gulf, trying to come up with something clever to say. Something to flirt back. Something to save her dignity. “I just…I’ve had a rough couple of days, and I don’t want to go to the wedding alone.”

She couldn’t say the rest of what ran through her mind. Lauren was exceptionally skilled at only saying what needed to be said and holding the rest for later. Or for never. For herself, when she was safe and in the privacy of her own home.

Now, though, she felt adrift, and she really needed something or someone to tow her back to shore. “So I thought maybe me and you…it’s not a date. And if you weren’t going to go to the wedding, that’s fine. I can find someone else.”

“Who?” Blake asked, but the word wasn’t harsh. “Who else would you ask?”

She didn’t know, and her silence said as much.

“I was planning on going,” he said. “I don’t have a date, and I don’t have a girlfriend.”

“I’m not interested in either,” she said, the words,Ask him about a jobrunning through her mind. She kept them contained too. Blake Williams would not be the first person she told about losing her job. Oh, no, he would not be first.

He chuckled, and she could just see the sandy-blond man’s face. Those dazzling eyes that had caught her attention the first time they’d met, three summers ago now.

“Will you be at the Fourth of July fireworks this year?” he asked.

“Yes,” she murmured. She’d gotten up and showered this morning. Added a few items to her strategy, and one of those was to get back to Hilton Head very soon. Her flight left tomorrow morning, in fact. Today, she’d check out here, drive back to Sweet Water Falls, go to lunch with Cherry, and then start packing up her house. Whatever she could do today would get done, and she’d make a plan to do the rest after the wedding.

“Can we sit together?” Blake asked.

“Yes,” Lauren said, when she really wanted to tell him, “I’d like that.” But such soft words would reveal too much about how she felt about him. Too much about how much she’d thought about him in the past twelve months.

“Can’t wait,” he said. “If you want, we could try dinner again.”

Lauren smiled to her dim reflection in the glass. “Let’s see how the fireworks and then the wedding go, okay?”

“Hey, I’ll take that,” he said with another light chuckle. “It’s not a no.”

No, it wasn’t a no, and Lauren said, “Good-bye, Blake,” and ended the call. She turned back to the small table in the room, which held her strategy. She picked up the pen and bent over the notebook.

At the top she scrawled MY SEASIDE STRATEGY and underlined it three times.

Then, way down at the bottom, leaving lots of room for a dozen more items after “sell house in Sweet Water Falls,” and she added “Go to dinner with Blake Williams.”

Straightening, she looked at the sparse list. While it wasn’t much of a strategy, it was a start, and every project she’d ever began started at zero.

This just happened to be a complete rebuild of her life, instead of a client’s portfolio, and the stakes felt so much bigger than ever before.

* * *

“No, that one’s mine,”Lauren said a couple of days later. “Yours is the blue one.”

Bea looked at the chair in her hands, which was also blue, but navy. “Are you sure?”

Lauren took the oversized camp chair from one of her very best friends. “Very sure.” She nodded to Grant, Bea’s husband, as he juggled a myriad of things. “He’s already got yours, Bea.” How nice for her that she had a handsome man to help her carry her blanket, her cooler, her beach bag stuffed with licorice, nerds ropes, and sweet mint gum.

Lauren had to do all of that herself, and she shouldered the chair by the rough strap and reached for her own tote bag. Hers was light gray and contained her tablet, her eReader, and a paperback book. No notebook of strategies. Not tonight. Tonight, she just wanted to see what happened.

She loved Independence Day as much as anyone could, and while she didn’t wear a lot of red, this year, she’d braided her hair back into two Dutch braids, both tied with a patriotic red ribbon. She wore a blue-and-white striped shirt with her denim shorts, and a white pair of strappy sandals. That way, she’d gotten in all the colors without having to wear the flag.

So many people did that, and she didn’t mind how it looked on her. She simply liked being a bit more subtle.

Source: www.allfreenovel.com
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