Falling for You Read online

  Falling for You

  Stacy Travis

  FALLING FOR YOU

  * * *

  STACY TRAVIS

  Copyright © 2021 by Stacy Travis

  All rights reserved.

  No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means, including information storage and retrieval systems, without written permission from the author, except for the use of brief quotations in a book review.

  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places and incidents either are products of the author's imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual events or locales or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.

  Cover Design: Shanoff Designs

  Copyediting: Evident Ink

  Publicity: Social Butterfly PR

  Contents

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  Chapter 19

  Chapter 20

  Chapter 21

  Chapter 22

  Chapter 23

  Chapter 24

  Chapter 25

  Chapter 26

  Chapter 27

  Chapter 28

  Chapter 29

  Chapter 30

  Chapter 31

  Chapter 32

  Chapter 33

  Chapter 34

  Chapter 35

  Epilogue

  Acknowledgments

  About the Author

  Also by Stacy Travis

  Bonus Chapter - The Summer of Him

  Chapter 1

  Isla

  Wednesday felt like a great day for a breakup.

  To the kind of person who thinks things through—like knowing in the morning which dessert I planned to eat after dinner that night—Wednesday made the most sense.

  For the record, it was apple pie, preferably à la mode.

  Wednesday was far enough away from the previous weekend to blur the memory of the beautiful brunch Tom and I had eaten at Sam’s in Tiburon and far enough from the upcoming weekend that I wasn’t worried about sitting on my couch alone with no plans.

  If I waited until Friday, there was a chance I’d get lazy, decide that kissing the wrong guy was better than kissing no guy, and decide to wait another week.

  Like I’d done for the past two months.

  So Wednesday it was—the day I’d tell my unfairly handsome, highly accomplished, noncommittal boyfriend to pack his things and find someone else to shower with lukewarm affection and expensive jewelry bought by his assistant.

  But first, I needed to bake two hundred and fifty loaves of bread.

  My day started at three in the morning, as it always does, when my babies needed my full attention, and I arose before the sleeping roosters to feed them. I threw on a pair of comfortable cotton pants and a long-sleeved shirt and tied my long, blondish brown hair up in a knot to keep it out of my face.

  My morning wasn’t flexible, and I had the routine down pat, including a little wiggle room for the unexpectedly long red light, the coffee spill in my car, or whatever other trouble could befall me at three in the morning.

  The first snafu came in the form of bad parking karma.

  My usual parking spot was occupied, odd considering it was a non-space wedged between a blue dumpster and a telephone pole in an alley. I managed to find a semi-legal space that only covered a quarter of someone’s driveway.

  In San Francisco, which had zero parking ever, that was practically valet.

  The sourdough starters were sleeping when I opened the back door to Victorine, my bakery and café, and felt the cool outdoor air mingle with the warmer humidity of the industrial kitchen.

  And there they were, lined up in jars under a length of burlap cloth. So pretty. So much potential.

  “Hello, loves,” I said, uncovering them and smiling at the way they’d bubbled overnight.

  Yes, I knew it was a little crazy and they weren’t actually human children, but honestly, they were as well-tended as some of the kids whose parents I knew. And they behaved a lot better.

  If I took care of them and kept their lives consistent, they did exactly what I wanted. I paid close attention to their development, I fed them, I made sure they had what they needed to grow and thrive . . . and the result was an award-winning sourdough that sold out every day since I opened my first bread bakery seven years earlier.

  In the time since then, I’d ended up authoring a couple cookbooks and selling my bread to restaurants—some of which had the most sought-after reservations in San Francisco. That led to write-ups in epicurean magazines, invitations to bake for events at the mayor’s residence, and a devoted following of sourdough die-hards who treated me like a celebrity—a bread celebrity.

  Normally, when I turned the key in the back door, I felt excited—new day, new loaves. Each time I baked, it was a chance to discover something, even though I was starting with the same ingredients every time.

  Flour. Salt. Water.

  It might seem like there were only so many ways baking a sourdough round could go. But depending on how a farmer changed the soil or how the grains were ground, or which strains of wheat were blended with other ones, the bread would taste different. If there was a heavy fog in the city that day or a light rain, the bread would be different. Normally, I loved it all.

  Not today.

  Today, I was so fixated on the impending breakup that it was ruining everything else.

  “Bonjour, copine.” Camille, my pastry chef, was the only other one who got to work as early as me. She had her own morning ritual that consisted of laminating dough for croissants, which meant layering cold butter between sheets of dough and folding, chilling, and folding umpteen times before they were ready to bake. Then she'd start on the other baked goods that we sold in the pastry case in front.

  Classically trained in Paris, Camille wanted to open her own shop, but she needed her green card and some financial backing before she could do it.

  We’d struck a deal early on—she only baked for me, which allowed my café to offer some of the best pastries I’d ever eaten, and I showed her the ropes of running a business.

  Today, a blue beanie covered her blond hair because it was forty degrees outside and she was crazy enough to ride to work on a moped. Even with the beanie under a helmet, thick gloves, and a leather jacket, the fierce chill had her shivering.

  “Hey, Cam. You get wet out there? The fog was practically rain.”

  “Yeah, it was a treat. No big, though.” She unwound a scarf from her neck and started hanging her layers up on a hook in the back. I’d already put my jacket and scarf there.

  Camille had moved to the Bay Area from Paris four years earlier and I’d hired her immediately. Her English was flawless, thanks to a few years she’d spent at a high school in England, and she still didn’t know many people in San Francisco, so she spent a lot of time at work. Like me.

  “You’re a beast. Someday, I aspire to be you,” I told her.

  “You want to ride around in the cold because you can’t afford a car or a parking space?”

  “No, I just want to be cool and ride a Vespa and pretend I’m French. But first I’ll have to learn how to ride one,” I said.

  “It’s easy. I’ll teach you. The key is balance.” As if proving her exceptional skill in that area, she climbed on a stool and
stood on one foot as she leaned to grab a fresh box of parchment paper off a high shelf.

  “Hey, can you grab me a stack of baskets while you’re up there?” I asked. I had a special order for a dozen extra loaves.

  She handed down the baskets and I added them to the stacks that were waiting on the lower shelves for the day’s bread. Then, I fed the starters and waited while they consumed the new flour and water and started to bubble.

  “Alors, quoi de neuf?” she asked. I’d gotten used to her habit of interspersing conversations with French. I understood she was asking me what’s new, but despite a few years of high school French, I always answered in English.

  “Same old. I think I dreamed of bread starters.”

  “Waste of a good dream. You should listen to poems read by French men before bed, dream about that.”

  I went to the front where we had an industrial coffee brewing setup and turned on the machines. The crew of bakers who’d be coming in over the next hour would want coffee and I always made sure there was an urn filled in the back for us.

  When I came back with the urn, Camille was in the walk-in fridge foraging around for her butter. She was almost as crazy about the origin and provenance of her butter as I was about my flour. She imported five-pound slabs of it through a cheesemaker with a connection to a dairy farm in Normandy. “It’s practically black market. Probably illegal,” she told me. “But it’s worth it for the perfect butter.”

  “I won’t tell a soul. Can’t afford to have you hauled to jail for trafficking in illegal dairy.”

  Camille slammed the door to the walk-in. “So . . . how’d it go with Tom?”

  “I didn’t do it,” I said, quickly moving to the other stacks of baskets and counting them. It was pure avoidance because I knew exactly how many baskets were in each stack.

  I hated telling her I’d chickened out of the breakup. Again. But Tom had brought me flowers from a place I liked, and I’d wilted like last week’s blooms.

  “Tonight. I’ll do it tonight.”

  “You’re a broken record, you know.”

  She cast a judgmental stare my way. I didn’t even mind. I deserved judgment. “I know. I was just exhausted by the time I got home and didn’t feel like dealing with a confrontation.”

  She shrugged. “So what, you left him sleeping in your eight-hundred thread count sheets under your warm down comforter so you could come to work and he could live to dream of having lukewarm sex with you another day?”

  Admittedly, it wasn’t a pretty picture.

  Part of the problem was that from the outside Tom and I looked perfect.

  I was tall, he was taller. Both of us were driven and independent. Most people figured that no one in her right mind would dump a billionaire venture capitalist with a hard jawline and searing green eyes.

  Hugely successful and gorgeous, Tom knew how to live well.

  He was exactly the kind of guy I’d dated over and over again, the captain of industry types. They liked that I baked—they thought it was cute and homey—and they thought I’d accomplished enough, but not too much. I could be arm candy at whatever business thing they dragged me to, but not too pretty, smart, or accomplished to overshadow their physical splendor, brilliance, and success.

  And once again, the relationship left me wanting.

  Wanting what, I wasn’t exactly sure, but I had a feeling it had something to do with the wild melding of minds and the hot, sexy melding of everything else.

  Tom and I didn’t have that.

  For a year, it didn’t matter.

  Then I’d rounded the backstretch of thirty-four and was heading into my last months before thirty-five. As the oldest of five sisters, I felt responsible for setting some kind of example for women as we aimed for work-life balance. Our brother, the oldest, was already engaged, and by the logic of our birth order, I was supposed to be next. Or at least taking meaningful steps in that direction.

  Somehow a bell started ringing in an empty belfry in my brain I hadn’t visited before. Clang, clang, clang. Commitment, adulting, babies. It was loud and annoying, and it got my attention.

  I knew I should stop wasting my time if Tom wasn’t the guy. He wasn’t. I just hadn’t done anything about it.

  My phone buzzed with a text.

  Tom: Call me.

  I felt a pang of nerves rush through my body. Breakup time.

  I had to do it. I would.

  But my fingers wouldn’t dial.

  A few minutes later, another text.

  Tom: Please.

  I felt my resolve weakening just at that one word. Please tugged at my heartstrings. Maybe I could wait another week. Maybe something would change, and Tom would want something more than arm candy.

  Maybe I was deluding myself. Again.

  Chapter 2

  Isla

  By seven in the morning, my three baking assistants and I had gotten a hundred and fifty sourdough loaves out of the oven and cooling onto racks in plain view of the small café in front.

  People liked to see the process of bread making and they’d pay a little extra for something made by hand from locally farmed ingredients. Sure, they could go down the block and buy baguettes from the high-end grocery for four bucks, but the dough was brought in frozen and heated in their ovens.

  The trick was used all the time—shops heated baked goods onsite so it smelled like fresh bread and no one gave it a second thought, assuming it was made fresh for half the price I charged.

  “These frozen baguettes don’t hold a candle to your sourdough goodness,” a voice intoned in the doorway. I didn’t need to look up from the pastry display to know it belonged to Owen Miller, my most regular regular.

  He held up the loaf he’d just bought from the grocery and ceremonially dropped it in the trashcan, as he did about once a week.

  We’d had lengthy conversations about it. I hated waste. But Owen claimed he was “saving one more unknowing soul from bad bread,” and couldn’t be dissuaded. I’d fish it out later and feed it to the birds in the back alley.

  My bread was too good for the birds. On that we agreed.

  “Morning, friend,” I said. “And thanks for the undying loyalty to my bread cult.” When the grocery had first opened, Owen had checked it out and dismissed the place as an Eataly wannabe with hipster lettuce.

  “How’re the kids?” I noted amusement in his eyes when he asked about the starters. He probably thought I was a loon for treating them like the living organisms they were.

  Or maybe he was one of the few souls who appreciated the molecular magic that was fermentation.

  “They were blooming with bacteria. Sour smelling. A little sweet and yeasty.”

  Owen nodded. “What I like to hear.” There weren’t many people who’d find that description appealing, but sourdough nerds united with a common purpose—fresh, amazing bread.

  Owen was an enigma who came by himself several mornings a week and never brought a newspaper or a laptop or even a sudoku puzzle. He’d sit at the table closest to the kitchen and crane his neck to watch the bakers finishing up the loaves with rapt interest, as though he hadn’t just done the exact same thing the day before.

  He also showed up early—too early—a good hour before we opened to the public. He said it was because he wanted to smell the bread baking and he was an early riser. That, or he was a bread mole feeding dough secrets to MI6.

  Ordinarily, I wouldn’t let customers in the door before we opened, but Owen was nice to everyone and seemed harmless, a bread diehard who had nothing better to do. Anyone who paid attention to what we did and felt so passionately that he’d dump someone else’s baguette in the trash was okay in my book.

  When I had a free moment, I liked chatting with him—always about the flour I sourced from farmers in the fields northeast of San Francisco and the care and maintenance of starters. At this point, he knew enough to start his own bakery.

  “Can you sit? Do you have time?” he asked. He always asked, I alw
ays said no. Normally, it was a knee-jerk response. But today was different.

  “Actually, sure. I made good time on the baking today because I have three assistants back there.” It was the first time I’d ever baked with three and although we crowded each other initially, we’d quickly figured a system and had been super-efficient.

  We’d made all the loaves for the morning and finished the dough for the afternoon, so it could do a bench rise instead of going in the warmers later. I was excited to see how that would change the flavor. But more importantly, it saved me time.

  “You normally have two. Plus, Camille, but she doesn’t help with bread.” He said it matter-of-factly because he’d watched us enough mornings to know the order of things.

  “It was a scheduling mistake, but it made my morning so much easier. And now I’m kind of fantasizing about having three assistants every morning . . .”

  “You should,” he said, stirring milk into his coffee. He drank the coffee I made for the employees and poured the milk from a carton I plopped on the counter when he walked in. He

  never complained that I wasn’t making him a fancy latte from the machine. Good thing, because in seven years, I’d never bothered to learn how to use it.

  “Too expensive,” I said. But I let my mind wander to how luxurious it would feel to have an extra assistant every day. I might have moaned.

  “You’re tired,” Owen said, again as a statement, not a question.