Getting Over It: Sapphire Falls Book Six (15 page)

“Hailey.” He was clearly exasperated. “I have a long way to go to get back to that level. If it’s even possible.”

“But what if it is? With this amazing training program you’ve developed? Think how great
that
would be for your marketability. You rehab, compete again, win…and
then
start the training center. That would be a huge endorsement for your program. Not to mention that
you
need to know that you can come back.”

He was quiet for a few seconds. He sighed. “I don’t think I could win even if I get back.”

“Isn’t the racing about more than winning?” she asked. “Really? Shouldn’t it be? You didn’t win in the beginning but you kept doing it. Because you loved it. Shouldn’t that be the reason you do it, with the winning as icing on the cake?”

He studied her eyes. “You should get this. You like to win too.”

She shrugged. “I do. But taking care of this town is about more than that. It’s about being passionate about something to the point of having to
do
something with it. Like racing is for you.”

“I never thought of it that way.”

Hailey nodded, thinking about her words. It was true. Politics was about having and delivering a message, sharing ideas, focusing people on issues and bringing them together to make decisions that mattered to them and making lives better. Cheesy maybe, but it was true. For her anyway.

“But you’re going to vote as my girlfriend, not mayor,” he said, as if pondering it out loud.

She nodded again. It wasn’t that the training center wouldn’t be good for the town, but he could do that down the road. First, he had to know he could get back into race shape and then ride, run and swim because he loved it, not because of a trophy or medal.

“Wow,” he said softly, once more running his thumb over her lower lip. “You’d better be careful or I might start to think you kind of like me.”

Hailey rolled her eyes and pulled the door open, nudging him through it with a hand on his back. “I have another meeting. I’ll call you later when I have a break.”

His expression sobered at the mention of the
thing
he needed to talk to her about.

Dammit. What could it be?

“Before five,” he reiterated as he left her office.

Thelma breezed into the room, saving Hailey from replying. Or thinking about it again.

Chapter Five

It was ten after five and Hailey hadn’t had a chance to see Ty.

Okay, she
might
have had a ten-minute window where she could have called, but she couldn’t shake the feeling that she didn’t really want to talk about whatever this was.

She was halfway down the front steps of city hall when she noticed Mason Riley coming toward her.

“Hailey.”

“Hi, Mason.” He was out of breath, which was very unusual. Mason wasn’t the type to rush anywhere or get overly excited. He was a genius scientist who preferred plants to people—other than his wife, Adrianne, and their two little boys—and he didn’t get worked up about much besides soil, water and sunshine.

Mason had been a high school classmate of Hailey’s and probably the one guy she should have dated but never did. As opposed to many that she had dated and probably shouldn’t have.

“Adrianne would like you to come to the bakery,” Mason said. “She sent me to extend the invitation.”

Hailey was surprised. The bakery had closed ten minutes ago and Adrianne surely wanted to get home to make dinner and do mom stuff. “Really?”

“She and Phoebe need to talk to you.”

“I saw that they both called,” Hailey said, glancing at her phone. She hadn’t a chance to call back and neither had left a message or texted, so she’d assumed whatever it was wasn’t an emergency.

“Come on.” Mason started in the direction of the bakery, across the town square from city hall.

“Mason, hang on,” Hailey called, following. “What’s going on? Is everyone all right?”

He glanced back but kept walking. “No one’s hurt or anything.”

Okay, well, that was something. “What’s with the vague answers?”

“Adrianne told me to come and get you but not to tell you what was going on.”

Hailey frowned at that. “Why not?”

“Because I’m not very tactful a lot of the time,” Mason said honestly.

He was right. “And whatever’s going on needs to be handled with tact?” she asked.

“Yes.”

“Why?”

“Because you’re going to be upset.”

They crossed the street that separated the square from the strip of shops they called Sapphire Hills.

It wasn’t really much of a hill. Mason and Adrianne lived on the only even-close-to-a-hill hill in Sapphire Falls. But Mason hadn’t wanted to sell his land for the shops and…well, that was another story.

“Mason, you can tell me. I promise not to be upset.”

No wonder he’d been out of breath when he’d met her. He was practically race-walking to the shop.

“No. I really don’t think that’s a good idea,” Mason replied.

“You’re
that
bad at delivering bad news?” she asked. She ran three to five miles a day and she was still feeling a little winded from their walk.

“No, I’m that bad at dealing with people’s reactions to bad news.”

“Really might be because of the way you deliver it.”

He stopped in front of the shop and pulled the door open for her. And gave her a big grin. “You might be on to something there.”

And he’d completely gotten out of delivering said bad news, she noted as she stepped through the door into Adrianne’s bakery.

She forgot everything about Mason and their walk the moment she looked around.

The place was decorated in sapphire-blue and candy-apple red. There were balloons, streamers, tablecloths, more streamers, and blue- and red-frosted cupcakes. Everywhere.

“What in the…” she started.

“Welcome to your campaign headquarters,” Phoebe said, coming forward with a big smile.

A big fake smile.

Which was so uncommon that Hailey thought maybe Phoebe was ill. She never had to fake a smile. Bubbly and energetic were Phoebe’s hallmark character traits. Along with scheming. She always had a plan cooking.

“My campaign headquarters?” Hailey asked. “What are you talking about?”

The elections for mayor were coming up in two weeks. The term for mayor and the way elections were run were unique to Sapphire Falls. As were many things. The term for mayor was three years and elections were held on the Friday before Labor Day, per the town charter from 1895.

The election ordinance also stipulated that anyone who had a Sapphire Falls address could run and there were no term limits. The town turned out all at once. Each citizen wrote their selection on a slip of paper and dropped it into a big wooden box. The box was also from 1895 and sat in a special case in the city hall until it was needed for that one day every three years. There was a special committee of six who counted the votes. They were selected by the oldest Sapphire Falls citizen—Robert Zimmerman had held that title for the past ten years—from a bin that held the names of every person in town over the age of eighteen. Being selected for the election committee was considered an honor and everyone took the job very seriously. The committee counted the votes three times over the weekend and then wrote the result on a huge chalkboard on an easel in front of city hall on Monday morning. The new mayor took office on Tuesday.

It was all a very well-respected and beloved tradition in town and no one had ever thought to challenge it.

“You haven’t heard?” Phoebe asked.

“She looks way too calm to have heard,” Adrianne commented.

Phoebe nodded. “True.”

“
What
is going on?” Hailey asked.

“You have some competition,” Adrianne said.

“Competition?” Hailey repeated. Her eyes widened as that sank in. “For
mayor
?”

Adrianne nodded, watching her carefully. “He announced his candidacy at the Come Again at five o’clock. We thought maybe you knew.”

“I don’t. This is the first I’ve heard…”

But then five o’clock sank in as well. She narrowed her eyes. Ty had insisted they needed to talk
before
five. That couldn’t be a coincidence.

“Is it Ty?” she asked. She knew her tone sounded ominous. She was definitely feeling ominous.

Adrianne and Phoebe both nodded.

“And he already claimed blue and white as his campaign colors,” Phoebe said, as if
that
was his greatest offense. “Which is crap, since you’ve been mayor all this time. But then we decided that blue and red was snappier and much more
you
.”

Well, thank goodness, her campaign
colors
would be snappy. Without that, what did she have?

Hailey tamped down the wave of panic that threatened at the obvious answer—
nothing
. She had nothing for this campaign. Except snappy colors, apparently. And cupcakes.

She focused, instead, on her anger. At Ty.

The bastard.

Yes, he’d tried to tell her before she found out this way, but did that really make anything better? He was running against her for mayor. Because she wouldn’t approve the training center? Because he didn’t like that her job was more important than he was? That was actually quite possible. No one had an ego bigger than Ty’s.

Hailey tossed her hair over her shoulder. “If I kill him, there won’t be any opposition though, will there?”

Phoebe came forward. “As your campaign manager—”

“Campaign manager?” Hailey asked.

“Well, with Adrianne. But Joe spends a lot of time in D.C.,” Phoebe said of her husband. “He knows how politics work.”

“
I
will be her campaign manager.”

They all swung to the front door of the shop.

Lauren Bennett had just walked in.

“
You
want to be my campaign manager?” Hailey asked the other woman.

Lauren had an I’m-in-charge vibe about her that rivaled Hailey’s. It had been weakened over the past couple of years since she’d married Travis Bennett, gotten settled on the farm and had a baby girl. Still, if anyone in Sapphire Falls could keep up with Hailey, it would be Lauren.

“I’ve been hanging out in Washington all of my adult life,” Lauren said. She was the co-founder and owner of Innovative Agricultural Solutions with Mason, a world-renowned agricultural engineering company that had relocated to Sapphire Falls when Mason fell in love with Adrianne. Lauren was a businesswoman, a political lobbyist, a scientist and a genius.

“But Joe—” Phoebe started.

“I’m Joe’s
boss
,” Lauren reminded her. “And,” she said to Hailey, “you’re running against a man. No one knows how to get into a man’s head better than me.”

“Joe
is
a man,” Phoebe protested.

But everyone knew that Phoebe just wanted to be in the thick of things. She loved being involved in whatever new drama was going on. As long as Hailey and Lauren made her part of the inner circle, she wouldn’t really care who was in charge.

“A straight man,” Lauren acknowledged. “Which means Joe doesn’t have my experience getting men to do whatever I want them to.”

“Well, when my hands are wrapped around Ty’s neck and I’m squeezing as hard as I can, I’m guessing I can get him to do whatever I want,” Hailey said. “If that doesn’t work, there’s the machete-to-the-balls thing.”

“Oh, no,” Lauren said. “What you need to do is head over to the Come Again, buy a round for the whole place, and toast Ty and his campaign.”

Hailey frowned. “Pretend I’m
happy
?”

“And totally confident that it doesn’t matter who’s running against you,” Lauren said with a nod. “Show them that you don’t care, that you’re not a bit intimidated.”

“I’m
not
intimidated,” Hailey said firmly. A total lie. “I’m pissed.”

And shocked. And hurt. And confused. But definitely pissed too.

“But you can’t show that,” Lauren said. “He’s probably trying to get you to react like a pissed-off, emotional woman. He’s trying to show that you can’t take a challenge.”

Hailey sighed. He wasn’t doing that. Ty wouldn’t try to discredit her.

But what
was
he doing?

This was bizarre.

“He’s hogging the spotlight,” Hailey said. She often accused him of that when he was in Sapphire Falls. It was part of their cover-up. He’d flirt, because he couldn’t help it and he didn’t like hiding their relationship, so she’d turn it into him simply wanting attention.

It was easy enough to believe. The guy loved being in the public eye and everyone knew it.

“Well, it’s working,” Lauren said. “Not only are people surprised he’s running, they can’t wait to see your reaction, and they can’t wait to see the two of you together.”

It was like in the old days on the playground when someone would throw out a challenge and the crowd would start chanting, “Fight, fight, fight.”