Champagne and Lemon Drops: A Blueberry Springs Chick Lit Contemporary Romance (2 page)

"We lost another client yesterday," Oz said,
not looking away from the TV.

Beth froze. "A big one?"

Oz slowly nodded. "Moved their business over
to Ed's."

Beth held her breath. Lately it seemed as
though the town was favoring the new accounting firm in town rather
than the staid and true offices of Reiter & Son. Which was
downright unneighborly of them.

"How did your dad handle it?" Despite Dr.
Nesbit telling Barney to take it easy, he wasn't the kind of man to
step aside and let Oz do things his way or within his own
timeframe. Barney was constantly telling Oz on how to run the place
via emails, phone calls, and even going as far as sending Oz's
mother to check up on the place and deliver instructions.

Oz fished in the pocket of his worn dress
pants and handed Beth a set of keys.

She frowned at the gift. "Aren't these your
father's work keys?" She met Oz's brown eyes momentarily before he
sank further into the couch, his gaze back on the screen in front
of him. "Did you lock him out so you could get your work done?" She
smiled at the thought of Oz finally taking a stand against his
father and booting him out.

After a long pause Oz replied, "He
resigned."

"What? How can he resign? He owns half the
business." Beth stared at the warm keys weighing heavy in her
hand.

Oz shrugged, his expression darkening.

Beth leaned back against the couch and
watched Oz's favorite team get tackled, two yards from a touchdown.
Was Harvey for real, or was this one of his games to make Oz do as
he wanted? And if he was actually resigning, what would cause him
to leave the business he'd built up over the past twenty-five
years? Surely it couldn't be the heart attack. He was supposed to
be coming back to work in two weeks. He wouldn't just give it all
up. There had to be something she wasn't aware of.

"Life's too short." Oz sighed heavily and
wiped his face with a rough hand.

"Yeah, I know." Her
thoughts immediately jumped to her late mother as they always did
whenever anyone used the expression. Her mom used to pop a lemon
drop candy in Beth's mouth, any time of day, and chirp:
Life's too short to wait for the right moment.
Get it while you can.

By the time her mother passed away, her dad
had been long gone for eleven years and wasn't too keen to step in
the unfamiliar daddy role as his work took him all around the world
in a perpetual quest for new oil. Their gran had taken the girls
in, moving them all into the big apartment over the corner store
whose owner supplied the girls with free day-old donuts and Beth
with an extra ten pounds she never seemed able to lose. She reached
over and snagged a lemon drop out of the bowl she kept on the
coffee table and waited for Oz to explain why he thought life was
too short. She'd learned over the past eight weeks that if she
probed him too much he'd act like a clam being chased with shuckers
and a pot of boiling water.

Oz stared at the photo of the house Beth had
glued to the cover of her scrapbook and sighed. "He delivered full
ownership papers this morning."

Beth grinned and perched on her knees,
facing him as she hugged the scrapbook. "You mean you own all of
it? Oh my God, we should celebrate! Think of all the things we can
do with the business as full owners! All those ideas you've had
over the years. You'll make more money and we'll be able to have
kids right away. This is so great! We can do it all, Oz." Her smile
faded as Oz's expression remained grim. "What? What's wrong?"

His jaw clenched and he drew in a long,
controlled breath, giving his head a brisk shake. "Nothing."

"Oz, what? He just gave you this amazing
business that you rock at, but you look like he gave you an
embalming business and told you to go at it." She softened her
tone. "You finally have him out of your hair."

Oz snorted.

"We're Team Wilkineiter, remember?" She
laughed, trying to lighten the mood with their bowling league
nickname, which combined their last names Wilkinson and Reiter.
Wilkineiter (verb): to meet and conquer. "Tell me what's going on
in that handsome head of yours so we can conquer whatever it is."
Oz leapt off the couch like an uncoiled spring when she reached to
touch a lock of his hair.

"You wouldn't understand. Your father
doesn't expect anything of you. None of the postcards he sends come
with strings attached. You still get to live your life however you
want."

She squelched the sting of anger that
swirled up at the mention of her father and his abandonment. "So do
you."

"It's hard to disappoint someone who doesn't
care and is never around."

Beth sucked in a sharp breath and carefully
set her scrapbook aside. She headed to the kitchen, ignoring his
apology. She ate last night's leftovers straight from the container
before checking the clock and hurrying back to the living room.
Leaning over Oz, she gave him a light peck on the lips.

"Better hurry or you're going to be late for
work," she said, wondering if that was a silly thing to say to a
business owner.

He looked up at her, his eyes dark. "What
would you say if I said I wanted to trade it all in?"

She eased onto the couch beside him, knowing
she'd be late for her afternoon shift, but wanting to hear him out.
"Trade what in?"

He glanced around the trailer. "Everything.
Move. Start fresh with everything. Hold off on getting married. Go
explore. Find new jobs. Live off of nothing?"

Start fresh with
everything
? "Hold off
getting married?" Her pulse picked up as fear surged through
her.

"Yeah." He caressed her hand, a hopeful look
in his eye. "There's no rush."

She lined her scrapbook with the coffee
table's edge. "But... everything?" She had a cousin who had waited
to have kids and now, not even at thirty years old, her cousin was
looking at in vitro in order to have kids. What if it was a genetic
flaw? What if she waited and missed her chance? She swallowed hard,
watching Oz pace in front of the TV.

He turned to her, taking a
bold step forward, blurting, "I need to change. I need to break
out. I need to..." He pulled his shoulders up, hands bunched at his
chest like he was about to break into song, but couldn't remember
the words. "I need to
move
, and I'm... I'm
trapped."

"Move away from Blueberry Springs and
trapped by what?" What the heck was he talking about? Oz loved
their nosey little town, nestled in the middle of nowhere,
protected by a semi-circle of mountains and rolling meadows. How
could he feel trapped when this was where his family was, his new
business, and where they planned to raise their kids?

Oh
shit
. Her stomach lurched as the
word
trapped
circled in her head. It was her. Somehow, despite their mutual
talk about their future, she'd made him feel this way. Wedding
plans, starting a family, building a home. She'd blindly moved
ahead not realizing he wasn't quite in step with her. How had she
missed it? It was the one thing she'd promised she would never do
to a man. She'd seen the way her dad ran from their family and the
way Oz ran from Mandy when she'd faked a pregnancy to keep him from
leaving. And somehow she'd gone and trapped him.

Shit, shit, shit on a
stick. She was everything she'd ever dreamed of
not
becoming.

But how? He said he wanted the same
future.

"Maybe not trapped," Oz said. "More like
blocked. Like when you can't move where you want to in Chess and
you have to wait for the other player to move so you can. Except
I'm tired of waiting."

"Trapped and blocked are
the same thing." She closed her eyes.
Tired of waiting.
Waiting for
what?

"No, it's not," he said. He held her eye and
she looked down at her hands, twisting her ring around her finger.
Blocked or trapped—neither were words a woman wanted to hear from
her fiancé. "What if I wanted to change my life? What if..."

Alarm zinged through Beth like lightning.
"Yes, of course." Anything to make sure he didn't feel trapped or
blocked. Those words equaled losing, and she couldn't lose Oz. She
just couldn't. "Let's make some changes." She stood up like there
was something she could do now like rearrange the living room.

Oz paced the small room, making the floor
creak. "What if this isn't our life? Our true life?" He stopped and
turned to face her. "What if we want different things, Beth?"

Wait a second. This wasn't going anywhere
good. Not at all. "I don't understand." Her breathing hitched up in
her throat as she waited for him to reply.

"You have dreams. I have dreams...
somewhere. I don't know who I am."

"I'm following my dreams," she replied
carefully. "And you're an accountant. You own a whole business
now."

"A business I never wanted."

Beth's head tightened and she perched on the
edge of the couch, eyes closed, trying to slow her thoughts. She
needed to start at the beginning and work her way forward. "You
don't like accounting?"

He gave a coarse laugh and shook his head.
"I hate it. It's my dad's passion and now he's saddled me with it
because he thinks I need to grow up."

Her shoulders relaxed. His dad had him
feeling trapped, not her. But he hated his career? When did that
happen?

Oz continued, "He's trying to trap me into a
stable life—a life he thinks I should have. Not the life I
want."

Beth tried to hold herself together. Stable
life. Career. Marriage. Kids. Her stomach took a nasty swoop.
That's what she wanted.

"I thought you wanted marriage and kids?"
she asked in a whisper. They'd had piles of conversations about
having kids and how much he wanted a whole gaggle of them. Who the
hell was this man? And who was the idiot who conked him on the head
and made him forget who he was? She was going to give that idiot
the worst nipple twisting in the history of the world. "What the
hell, Oz?"

Oz sat beside her and took her hand. He
stared at the television, thinking for a second, before turning
back to her. "I don't know who I am, Beth. I can't have kids if I
don't know who I am. I can't wake up ten years from now wondering
if I made a wrong turn. I can't do that to you. I can't keep on
putting one foot in front of the other if I might be going in the
wrong direction. You need to be able to marry a man who knows who
he is."

"I don't understand. What do you need? What
can I do?" Beth tried to block out the thought that he might not
love her the way she had thought.

He sagged into the couch. "I don't
know."

"Well, sell the business. Find something
else." Her voice tightened as she said, "We can wait to have
kids."

Oz pushed a hand through his hair. "I can't
sell it."

"Why not?"

"If I sell in the first five years all
proceeds go to my dad."

"But you own half! You guys were
partners."

"I don't own my half outright because I've
only worked off about a quarter of my half. So, if I sell now I get
about twelve and a half percent. If I wait five years, I get it
all."

"Five years is a long time when you're
waiting to get what you want." Boy, she knew that one. "If you
don't want the business, sell it. Like you said, Oz, life is too
short." Her heart stuttered at the idea of upheaval. Of Oz starting
fresh in a new job with no vacation time and the possibility of
them having to move if he couldn't find something suitable in town.
Of having to make new friends and finding a new hospital to work
in. It was terrifying. She finally felt as though she had the
beginnings of a real home and a family here in Blueberry Springs.
She didn't want to toss it all up in the air. Not for something
that sounded and felt so uncertain.

But if she was with Oz, it would be worth
it. Anything would be worth it.

Oz took her hands in his. "I love you, Beth.
You know that, right?"

"Of course, I do. And I'll love you no
matter what you decide to do with your life. If we have to move,
then we move. I'm here with you."

"I don't know if I can do this."

"I'll be right there with you. It'll be
okay."

"No." Oz's eyes grew wet and Beth's face
heated from a fight or flight reaction. "I can't put you through
this. I think..." He grabbed her hands and held them tight. "I
think I need to do this alone."

***

Oz sat hunched on their couch, his knees
jiggling up and down. He wouldn't meet her eye for longer than a
split second. Beth stared at the framed photos that sat three deep
on the shelf above Oz. The two of them looked so happy up there. So
in love. Not like real life, or at least not the real life Oz was
revealing.

"A break," she repeated, trying to make it
sink in. "You want a break." She knew she'd said it a hundred times
already, but her mind refused to cooperate and accept the concept.
Seriously. What idiot has conked her perfectly good fiancé over the
head causing this mess? And what the hell had gone wrong with their
relationship that she was unable to see?

Gently, Oz said, "You can't raise happy kids
in a happy family if you aren't happy and don't know who you are.
You can't pin your life on someone else's happiness. I've got to
figure out who I am." Oz muted the commentator who was laughing
uproariously at his cohost who had just predicted that the underdog
team would sweep the cup out from under the favored contender. "A
month. Maybe less. I don't know. I just need to figure out what I
want, you know?" He arched his brows and gave her a hopeful look
that made her want to give in.