Page 76 of A Secret Chance
“I thought so,” Mayor Smythe said. And like nothing ever happened, she moved onto the next order of business on the agenda.
Lauren slipped out of the council chambers and rested on one of the hard wooden benches in the hallway. She didn’t know what would happen next, with the head of the corporation under arrest there was no way that the development would move forward.
Logan and Charlotte appeared in the hallway and rushed to sit with Lauren. “Holy shit,” Logan said. “Can you believe that just happened?”
“This day has been insane,” Lauren whispered. “I have to get out of here.”
“Want to go for lunch?” Charlotte asked.
“I can’t eat anything,” Lauren pressed into the bench to push herself to her feet. The emotion and drama of the meeting had finally caught up with her and she knew that she wouldn’t be able to keep any food down.
“I’ll go get the car,” Logan said. He patted Lauren on the shoulder, leaving her in the empty hallway with her sister.
As the door closed behind Logan, Lauren’s face crumbled. She sat back down on the bench, her face in her hands. Charlotte sat down and pulled her in close. “What’s wrong?” Charlotte asked. “This is a good thing, isn’t it?”
Lauren didn’t know where to start. “Oh, Charlotte. How did everything go so wrong?”
“Wrong?” Charlotte rubbed Lauren’s back.
“I fucked everything up.” She managed to get the words out and chased them with a sob.
“No, I fucked everything up.” A deep voice echoed in the hallway. Lauren paused, her face still in her hands.
“What did you do, Baxter?” Charlotte pulled Lauren in closer to her. Lauren parted her fingers, the fluorescent light from the hallway filtering in through her fingers and then she let herself look up at him.
Baxter Caldwell, Junior was standing at the end of the hallway, his hiking boots covered in snow. He strode down the corridor, “I broke a promise to your sister,” he said. He knelt down on the floor in front of Lauren and wiped away her tears. “I promised you that I would never make you cry.” He took Lauren’s hands in his. Charlotte squeezed her shoulders. “I’m going to leave you two alone. Are you okay?” she whispered. Lauren sniffed and nodded.
“I’m sorry, Lauren.” Baxter squeezed her hands. “Can you forgive me?”
Lauren looked into his blue eyes and squeezed his hands back. “No,” she whispered.
She stood up and followed her sister’s path out of the hallway and down the front stairs of the town office.
“Wait, Lauren.” Baxter burst out of the building behind her. “Can we talk?”
Lauren broke into a light jog, but the boots she had borrowed from Charlotte didn’t provide much grip and she ended up doing a high-speed penguin waddle through the snow on the sidewalk. Baxter easily caught up with her. “Lauren.” He was breathing heavily and held onto her bare arm. “Is there somewhere we can go and talk? I don’t want to leave things the way that we did. You have to admit, you kind of dropped a bomb on me.”
“On you?” Lauren pulled her arm from his grip. “What do you call that?” she pointed to the town hall. “You changed the plans. You lied to me. Was this your plan? To catch me off guard, get me into bed, and then do the old bait and switch with the development plans?” The blood coursing through Lauren’s veins was boiling, but her teeth were chattering.
“You’re freezing.”
“I-I-I’m not,” she chattered.
“Come with me, somewhere warm.”
“N-n-no. You had your chance to talk and you ran.”
Baxter sighed. He pulled off his jacket and draped it over her shoulders. “I know. I regret that. But come on, you just told me I was a dad. I think that I was in shock. But now I’m back, and I want to talk to you about, well, everything.”
“Why did you send your father in to do your dirty work?”
“Ahh,” Baxter smiled.
Lauren looked away, knowing that his smile had a certain way of melting her icy resolve. Baxter held up his hands in front of her. “Do you see any handcuffs?”
Lauren squinted her eyes at him. “No.”
“My dad took over the project. I couldn’t let him ruin your town. Our town.” He reached out to hold both of Lauren’s hands, rubbing his thumb on the back as she trembled in the warmth of his grip. “Our daughter’s town,” he whispered.
