Page 50 of The Beekeeper

I looked down my front—my work jeans and my favorite ‘Save the Fucking Bees’ tee; I’d had to be careful wearing this one around the house while Paisley was there.

“What’s wrong with me?”

“You look miserable. Like you’re starving but forcing yourself to sit in front of a buffet without eating.”

“I’ve just been busy,” I brushed her off though Blaze was one-hundred-percent the reason for my recent sleepless nights. “And now I’m anxious about the photos we took and using them on social media…”

Blaze texted me earlier while I was still running my errands that Marc had sent over the final files and that we should take a look at them and plan out a posting strategy. That was what prompted me to emergency-text Frankie to see if she was at her shop and we could talk.

“Don’t worry about that,” she assured me. “One, Blaze’s fans are absolutely going to drown out anything and everything else, and two, I don’t see Adam Eastwood adding a movie star to his marketing plan, so he can shut his little jealous mouth.”

I chuckled, and the sound fizzled into a sigh.

“Don’t make it more than it is, Harper,” she said, staring me in the eyes. “If you guys both want the same thing, then go for it. Protect yourself with a contract. Give it an expiration date. And get this out of your system. We all know it’s been stuck in there for far too long.”

My head swayed. “And what if he still says no?”

Frankie tipped her head. “I know the phrase is pretty but stupid, but I never took Blaze for an idiot.”

“I mean, what if he says no because…he thinks I deserve better?”

Her mouth rounded into understanding. “Men can be annoyingly chivalrous,” she said like it was a well-known fact. “The best way around it is just to make him understand you’re going to…do what you want to do either with him or with someone else. Then they usually get with the program pretty quickly.”

And who am I going to tell Blaze that I’m planning on having sex with instead?

“Oh, tell him you’re going to reach out to the photographer,” Frankie said as if she could read my thoughts. “You said he was flirting with you, right?”

I gnawed on my bottom lip, but nodded. “Yeah⁠—”

“Francesca?” Gigi’s unmistakable voice called from the front of the shop.

“Back here, Gigi!” she shouted back, and a few footfalls later, our grandmother entered the back room, her bright orange hair like a cheeseball on top of her head.

Every season she sported a different hair color because, in her words, ‘why not? I don’t have much time left; I’m certainly not going to waste it on what other people think of me.’

“Oh, Harper.” She smiled, her round red-framed glasses rising on her cheeks. “I’m glad you’re here, sweetie. I had something to give you at dinner last week, but you weren’t there.”

“I know, I’m sorry. Blaze asked me to watch Paisley last minute.”

“Well, you could’ve brought her. She’s family now,” Gigi scolded and my heart squeezed. I could’ve. I hadn’t really thought of that, though I couldn’t say I regretted how things had gone at the house.

“Next time,” I promised, and then added, “We actually made a thunder cake in the storm.”

“Oh. My. God.” Frankie gasped. “I forgot about thunder cakes.”

“Oh, you girls loved those,” Gigi said wistfully, digging in her bag.

“I remember Lou was so afraid of the storms until you came up with that cake.”

“Lou?” Gigi chuckled. “I made those cakes for you, Miss Harper.”

“What?” My brows crunched. “I don’t remember that. I remember Lou crying and wanting to hide under the blankets or in the blanket fort⁠—”

“A blanket fort you made because you were scared.” A knobby finger poked me in the chest.

“I was?”

“Yes, and Lou was perfectly content in the fort. You, however, wouldn’t tell me that you were still afraid, so I had to come up with something else.”