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Callie Williams tugged her purse strap high across her chest, and squared her shoulders. She was going to march right into that bank, look the loan officer in the eye, and tell him exactly why she deserved a small business loan. She had the business plan—which she’d been working on for the last four years, day and night, until her hair fell out—in her professional looking leather briefcase. Her usual messy mop of copper curls was straightened and pinned back into a sophisticated bun to the point of pain, and her makeup was clean and understated. Thank heavens her best friend Maeve’s sex-goddess friend, Sally, had been on hand to throw out the five-year-old Dollar Store eyeshadow—which Callie had bought back when she’d actually given a flying squirrel if she looked good—before Callie made herself look like a killer clown. Her not so svelte, post-baby, currently-carbs-are-life body had been another issue she’d needed help covering. She was lumpy in all the wrong places, and she could definitely use a little more sun. Pale and plump. Not a good combination. She was wearing her most professional get up, care of Sally’s closet—thigh-hugging black pencil skirt, frilly cream-colored button-up silk blouse, and sky-high heels that Maeve said made her legs look “killer”. She’d much rather be wearing loose, worn jeans, a worn-in t-shirt three sizes too big, and her shit-kickers, but if she showed up to her appointment looking like a homeless country bumpkin, Mr. Wells, managing loan officer of Jackson Key Bank, would turn her out on her ear before she even said a word.
The meeting with Mr. Wells lasted for thirty minutes, and Callie left his office feeling a little less anxious than when she went in.
She could do this.
Her phone pinged.
Maeve: Did you get the loan?
Callie: Don’t know yet. He has to go over the business plan.
Maeve: Did he seem hopeful?
Callie: He did, but i’m not going to get my hopes up.
Maeve: Why not? Also, don’t you think it’s weird that we spell out all our words and use proper punctuation…even in texts?
Callie giggled, loving her friend to pieces for her inexplicable ability to lighten any mood. Callie needed that now more than ever. Her future was now in the hands of a potbellied man with a bad comb over.
This was her one chance to make something of herself…something her daughter would be proud of. Something she could be proud of. It didn’t hurt that she’d be a business owner and finally get off state welfare, which had been a goal since she’d first gotten that blessing and curse of an EBT card.
No, she wasn’t ashamed of being on food stamps—it kept her daughter fed, but she didn’t want to rely on the hard-earned money of others to support her small family. Lord knows Lexi’s father would never send a dime of money—and she wouldn’t take it now if he did. She didn’t need him now. She’d needed him ten years ago when she was a newly graduated eighteen-year-old, struggling to come to terms with a tectonic shift in her axis.
Lexi’s father had been a twenty-three-year-old with a dazzling smile and drool-worthy body, who’d come in to her beachside town to celebrate being drafted into the NFL. He’d said he’d graduated college early and was taking advantage of the time off before training began in the late summer. They’d met a bonfire. For her, it had been love at first sight.
He’d been her first kiss, her first love, her first…everything. She’d handed herself over to him with the wistful romantic hopefulness of a naïve virgin. Too young and inexperienced to see the truth hiding in plain sight.
There were flags everywhere.
He never introduced her to his friends, never called her—only texted, and he never talked about his family. They’d spent three months meeting in secret. Not even her family knew about her clandestine love affair with the sexy, older man. It was forbidden, which made it all the more incredible. She’d foolishly thought they’d been falling in love, happily planning a future together, where she’d attend the University of Florida since she’d earned a full ride there, and he’d play for New York. Eventually, she’d follow him once she finished her degree in English Literature. She was so in love, she just knew they could survive a long-distance relationship. They were meant to be.
He hadn’t agreed.
It had all been a lie.
She groaned, hating how stupid and foolish eighteen-year-old Calliope Williams had been. Twenty-eight-year-old Callie Williams, single mother, had to get that loan. She couldn’t depend on anyone else to make her dreams come true.
Cheers & Chapters, a combination wine tasting room and bookstore, was her dream.
Callie: No. We’re too cool for abbreviations and silly emojis.
Maeve: I think it makes us the least cool people we know.
She smiled down at her phone and opened the door, hurrying out and into the now blistering afternoon sun.
“Oomph!” she grunted as she slammed into a wall that smelled of cloves and sun tan lotion. “Goodness, I’m sorry,” she blubbered, pushing the hair that had come loose from her bun out of her eyes.
Dang her and her inability to multitask.
“No need to apologize….”
She jerked and looked up…and her heart stopped.
Taller than her five-foot-five by a good foot, with shoulders as wide as a doorway, the man before her was quite possibly the most gorgeous man she’d ever seen. Bright eyes as glittering and blue as the Caribbean Sea, a smirk that showed off a straight white smile and two sexy dimples. His dark hair was cropped close to his head, which only seemed to emphasize the startling symmetry of his beautiful face.
A face she hadn’t seen in ten years.
Ethan Brass. Ten years older. Ten years bigger and handsomer. Ten years harder and more filled out. Ten years richer and fancier, with his designer jeans that fit over his thick thigh muscles, and his tight designer t-shirt that stretched over his well-defined, bulging biceps and sculpted pecs, and snuggled up against his narrow waist and hips, highlighting the cut abdominal muscles flexing beneath.
