Page 16 of The Sweet Life

“Thanks, Kendra. We could have waited, though,” he said, reaching for the file.

“I didn’t mind. It’s better for me to keep busy.” She looked from him to Sage, who was accepting a mug of coffee from her mom. “It’ll be a lot for you guys now that you’ve inherited the farm, Alice’s legal practice, and the house on Ocean View Drive. I’m happy to stay on.” She glanced at Sage, who stood frozen with the mug halfway to her mouth. “I’m sorry. I guess I shouldn’t have read the will. It’s just that I was making sure it was her last—”

“Don’t worry about it, Kendra. It’s fine.” Jake managed to get the words out despite his shock as he read the will.

“Did she just say Alice left everything to us, as in you and me?”

He nodded. “She left us Max too.” He glanced to where the cat slept on the couch by the window. After Jake had gone out for tequila and food—including ice cream for Sage—he’d picked up Max. The cat had barely moved from the end of the couch where Jake had put him yesterday afternoon. It was as if Max somehow knew Alice was gone.

Sage slowly lowered her coffee mug onto the table. “I don’t understand why she’d do that. She knows we can’t be in the same room together without fighting.”

“I’m sure Alice believed we were adult enough to deal with this, Sage. We’re in our thirties, after all.” He held her gaze. “We didn’t fight last night.”

She gave him a withering glare.

He rolled his eyes. It wasn’t as if he’d said they’d made out last night with her mother and Kendra standing right there. He’d said they didn’t fight.

But it looked like Sage had already moved on from worrying about him oversharing. She had her hands clasped to either side of her head, turning in a slow circle. “How are we going to deal with all of this? It’s too much. We’ll have to manage things at the farm until we can sell it, and who other than Alice wants to buy a lavender farm? It was on the market for more than a year before she bought it.”

This was a side of Sage he’d never seen before. Even as a teenager, she’d been in control. Nothing threw her, and this was definitely throwing her. He opened his mouth to tell her to relax, then thought better of it and glanced at her mother for help.

Gia looked as surprised by her daughter’s reaction as he was, but at least she knew what to do. She reached for Sage. “Just breathe, honey. It’ll be fine. I know it’s a lot, but you don’t have to do this alone. We’re all here for you. Aren’t we, Jake?”

“Uh, yeah. Sure. Don’t worry about anything, Sage. I’ll handle everything.”

Those big, leaf-green eyes narrowed at him. “What do you mean, you’ll handle everything?”

Chapter Six

Mommy’s home…” Sage made a face as soon as the words came out of her mouth. What a ridiculous thing to say, she thought as she closed her apartment door behind her. Almost as ridiculous as the high-pitched voice she’d used.

It wasn’t as if she could take Alice’s place in Max’s heart, or as if she even wanted to. She just wanted to give him a happy life. She owed that to Alice.

Slipping off her shoes, Sage shifted the bag from the pet store in her arms and placed her keys in the ceramic bowl on the console table. She called out again, this time using her normal voice while trying to sound cheerful and upbeat instead of exhausted and sad.

“Hi, Max. I’m home. I picked up some special food for you. The staff at the pet store said it’s the best.” It had better be for what she’d paid.

She walked from the white marble entryway into the open-concept space and froze. The couches’ cushions and throw pillows had been tossed around like a mini-tornado had touched down in her living room, while books, paperwork, and a vaseof fake flowers were strewn across the cream-colored area rug. Someone had ransacked her apartment.

At the thought of who that someone might be—a former client’s ex who’d promised retaliation against Sage once he’d been released from prison—the bag slipped from her arms. She cringed as cans of cat food noisily rolled out of the bag and onto the hardwood floor, alerting whoever had broken in to her presence. Then again, she’d pretty much done that when she’d called out to Max. Heart pounding, she stood perfectly still with her palm covering her mouth, listening for sounds that she wasn’t alone.

When all she heard was the galloping of her heart, she slowly lowered her hand, patting her blazer’s pockets for her cell phone. Then she remembered that she’d forgotten it in her rush to get Max settled before heading to the office. It was somewhere in her apartment. She needed to find her phone, and she needed to find Max.

Running on tiptoes into the kitchen in search of a weapon, she slid on the paper towels covering the white-and-black-tiled floor. In an effort to stay upright, she grabbed the corner of the granite-topped breakfast bar, noticing as she did so that the paper toweling had been shredded, and not by her toenails. She straightened, surveying her tossed living room with another culprit in mind. Her gaze stalled on the side of her couch.

“Max,” she muttered as she scooped the paper towels off the tile floor, placing them on the breakfast bar before heading to inspect the side of the cream-colored couch that Max had used as his personal scratch pad.

She got distracted by the distant ringing of her cell phoneand followed the sound down the short hall. She needn’t have worried about Max being bored when she was at work, she decided while stepping around rolls of unraveled toilet paper. Clearly, he knew how to amuse himself.

She tracked the ringing phone to the cat bed at the foot of her bed, digging it out from under the fuzzy throw she’d added to make Max feel at home. The phone stopped ringing, and Max gave her the side-eye from where he lay curled in a comfy, cozy nest of bedding that he’d created for himself. Her comforter would never be the same.

Apparently ticked that she had the audacity to interrupt his sleep, Max growled at her.

“I’m not impressed with you at the moment either, buddy,” she said, opening her phone with her face. She frowned as she scrolled through her missed calls and redialed Jake. “Hey, what’s up? You’ve called like fifteen times.”

“Yeah, because you never answered or called me back,” he said, sounding as ticked at her as Max. “You weren’t in a good place when you left. I was worried about you.”

She sighed. He was right. She’d still been in shock about Alice, and then to learn she’d left everything to Jake and Sage… It had been a tough way to start the day. She ignored the thought that waking up in Jake’s arms had not been a tough way to start the day, until it had gotten awkward.

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