Page 29 of Stirring Up Love
2) $200,000 is absolutely worth Finn being off-limits, considering he was off-limits the second he showed up in town bashing my sauce.
Simone:
3) I’m not going into business with him. He sucks.
Alisha:
But you already agreed to the deal. On live TV. In front of millions of viewers.
Simone:
I want to bring jobs to Hawksburg, not open up a bunch of generic barbecue restaurants across the U.S.
Meg:
I get that, but you could make a boatload of money. Just think what you could do for our community if you’re at the helm of a major corporation.
Alisha:
And they’re not telling you to close the Hawksburg location.
Simone:
No, they’re just asking me to give up half my company. If I take the deal, it will be without Finn.
Alisha:
How do you plan to screw Finn out of the deal??
Meg:
Sounds a lot less fun than keeping him around. Just saying.
Less fun? Granted, maybe she’d begun to look forward to their weekly back-and-forth at the farmers’ market. But giving up half her restaurant? Turning her dreams over to a man who kept thwarting her plans? The opposite of fun and games.
Simone exited out of the thread without replying. With Alisha’s wedding in less than a week, she’d be in for a slew of questions from friends and family once her plane landed. No need to start the torture early.
And Pops. Oh gosh, what had her grandpa thought when he watched her accept a franchise deal that would rip the heart out of Honey and Hickory? He wouldn’t know she’d only said yes to buy time. A no would’ve been final, but this gave her a week to figure out a solution.
Heartsick, homesick, and needing distance from the situation, she tossed her phone facedown onto the freshly made hotel bed. But visions of black light inspections had her retrieving it a second later. A thorough swipe with a disinfecting wipe rendered the phone germ-free and innocuous, but she couldn’t say the same thing for her thoughts, which suffered from worst-case-scenario-itis.
Not surprising, given the unimaginable outcome of the taping yesterday. In the space between commercial breaks,The Executiveshad turned the opportunity of a lifetime into her own personal hell.
Franchise her restaurant? The opposite of the Hawksburg-centered growth she envisioned. Work with Finn Rimes? Gag. Barf. Yuck.
She’d rather ... well, Meg was spot on about what she’d rather do with Finn if she’d met him under other circumstances. But Simone didn’t gloss over history or let go of grudges. That kind of forgiveness left people weak and vulnerable. Exposed.
All of which she’d been last night on the show. Lordy, she’d underestimated Finn. Between the messy hair and the boyish grins, she’d let herself think his arrival in Hawksburg was nothing more than a cosmic coincidence. Turned out he had sinister plans all along. He’d come to scope out the competition. Spent the summer gathering intel and planning his assault.
She shoved the phone in her purse. Six months to prepare, and now she only had seven days to concoct a plan to keep Finn’s greedy pawsoff her company. The producers had set up a video call for a week from today to get footage of Finn and Simone signing the deal.
Which meant by the time Alisha walked down the aisle this weekend, Finn needed to be a tiny, insignificant dot in the rearview of Simone’s life. A tight deadline to figure out a plan, especially since Alisha’s bachelorette party would cut into her timeline. But she wouldn’t rest until she found a way to cut him out of the deal, refused to let his impassioned plea in the studio lot sway her.
So what if she had heart palpitations whenever he stepped close? If the scent of pine and fresh rain that clung to him like fog on a mountainside left her swooning and delirious, all the more reason to stay away. Partnering with a man who triggered mysterious side effects would be downright dangerous.
But her visceral reaction to Finn might have had a logical explanation. For a homebody two thousand miles outside her comfort zone, any familiar face was bound to spark a response. Even after living in Chicago for the better part of a decade, she still felt disjointed away from the rolling hills and tilled fields of Hawksburg.
Falling into the familiar pattern of sparring with Finn on set had all the comfort of running into an old classmate at the airport. Except she’d never wanted to reach out and pull a classmate close like she had in the close embrace of darkness last night, when the yearning in his eyes outdistanced the question on his lips.
