Millionaire Hero (Freeman Brothers 4)

Part of me was tempted to pick up my phone and call him, but I stopped myself. That wasn’t enough. This was another one of those situations when my mother’s voice showed up in the back of my mind, and I knew she was absolutely correct. If she were here, she would tell me this was a face-to-face situation. Sometimes in life, phone calls just won’t do. Breakups, invitations to special events, bad news, and apparently apologizing for walking out on a man telling me he loved me.

All situations that warranted going to the effort of actually talking to him.

Getting down the coffee, I let out a sigh and went to the bathroom for a shower. Much like my deep thought session in bed that morning, the shower was one of those points in the day when I could do a lot of procrastinating. It was the perfect opportunity to keep avoiding the uncomfortable and potentially disastrous conversation ahead of me.

Just because Nick told me he loved me the day before didn’t mean he was still in a warm-and-fuzzy mood. I knew I wouldn’t be. If I had been the one who had opened up to him the way he opened up to me and he had just gotten up and walked out of the house, I would be furious. That was no reason to believe he wouldn’t feel the same way.

To stop myself from whittling away the rest of the afternoon in the shower, I made the water just too cold so I would get out fast. I got dressed, made myself presentable, and left. My original plan was to head directly to Nick’s office. Then I remembered what Minnie told me about raising her sons.

A brief detour brought me first to the florist to pick up some flowers for Nick, then to my favorite donut shop. That part might have partially been because I was starving.

One of the two bakers who co-owned the shop was behind the display case when I walked in. He stood up, wiping glaze off his fingertips on to a bar towel hanging from his belt loop. He grinned at me.

“Hey, Bryn,” he said. “Need a little afternoon pick-me-up?”

“Yes, but I’m actually going to be getting a box. Probably a dozen,” I said.

“Pregnancy working you hard, isn’t it?” he asked.

“If only that was all I was trying to deal with right now,” I said.

“Well, I just finished up a couple of new batches and stocked the display case. What sounds good to you today? I’ve been working on a few new flavors and just introduced a couple of seasonal options,” he said.

I walked up to the glass display case and leaned over to look at the meticulously arranged rows of pastries. From shimmery pink icing covered with multicolored sprinkles to decadent Boston cream just starting to ooze out of the back of heavily ganache-covered rounds, they all looked delicious.

“Do you have something that says, ‘I’m sorry I rebuked your declaration of love’?” I asked.

Anthony tilted his head to the side and looked up for a few seconds. “Fresh strawberry with cream filling?”

“Okay. How about ‘I think I might feel the same’?”

“Death by chocolate all the way,” he said. “And let’s just throw in a few more flavors to cover any of the other emotions that could come up in that conversation.”

A few minutes later, I parked near the investment firm. Clutching the box of assorted filled and ring donuts in one hand, and the bouquet of daisies in the other, I took a deep breath and walked up to the office.

I didn’t even get the chance to prepare myself or come up with what I was going to say as I walked down the hall to Nick’s office. As I approached the last door to the building, I saw that both he and Peter were standing in the lobby. They looked up at me, and Nick’s eyes went wide.

Bracing myself for however he was going to react to me showing up, I opened the door and walked inside.38NickBryn was just full of reactions I wasn’t expecting. After spending the better part of the workday fuming over the way she’d acted the night before and the fact that I hadn’t heard from her, there she was. I would have been pleasantly surprised just to get a phone call from her. At least it would have been a step. This was more than a step. This was a full-blown gesture.

Our eyes met as she walked across the lobby to me. My eyes fell on the flowers she was carrying. Never in my life would I have thought I would be the one getting flowers from somebody. That was my go-to move for apologizing. And I had to admit, it felt pretty good. My mother knew what she was talking about, and she had taught all of her sons well. It was always the way I apologized, and it always would be. It was effective as hell.