Saving a Legend(38)

The man was her dream come true, and she’d let him go.

She opened the fridge and scanned the few items inside, hoping something would catch her interest. Glancing down at her hand clutching the handle, she remembered how Kieran’s lips had danced over her skin last night. It’d been the sweetest gesture she’d ever experienced, and yet she’d turned from it. From him.

Honestly, she wasn’t even sure why. She’d told herself at the time that Kieran had wanted them to slow down because everything he’d witnessed about her life last night had been too much. She’d expected it, because sometimes it felt like more than she could handle. However, as the cold from the refrigerator caused goosebumps to break out across her skin, she wondered how true that was, or if she’d turned him away because of something else.

Frowning, she thought of what she’d done in her past, the dark truth she didn’t like to revisit. Memories flooded her thoughts, but the truth was that while she truly felt guilty for what she’d had to do, what hurt her more was what Shea had gone through because of it. If Fiona had made Shea her priority that day over three years ago, then Shea never would have seen what she’d seen.



Another reason why she didn’t want to pursue a romantic relationship with Kieran: her focus had to be Shea. It had to. The once-blank face of the man of her dreams now held Kieran’s slightly crooked smile and deeply invading eyes. It was a door she’d almost opened last night, but she was quickly reminded why it needed to remain closed.

Guilt washed through her like bile at what she’d done. At how much she and Shea had both lost because of it.

Cursing under her breath, she grabbed some eggs from the fridge, then a frying pan out of the cupboard. Purposefully focusing on breakfast alone, she turned on the stove and cracked eggs into the pan. It would be the second day in a row her shop would be closed, with no one there to help her.

She had only one employee on weekends—a high school girl who did barely anything to justify her minimum-wage pay. During the week, there was no one to watch the shop when Shea was sick and Fiona had to stay home. Fiona was never going to choose her business over her family, though, a decision she’d firmly made three years ago. While she didn’t regret that, it still sometimes felt as if she was letting her dreams slip through her fingers.

She’d hoped that after having her own shop for three years, she’d be flourishing rather than barely scraping by. She’d worked at the flower shop for several years before taking it over, but just as an employee. She’d loved it so much, and it had done so well, that when the owners decided to sell it and retire to Florida, she’d begged them to let her buy it. The kindly older couple had given her an amazing price for it, but she’d still needed to find the finances to make it happen.



The bank loan she’d taken out a few months before her mother died had helped her buy the shop in the first place, but she still wasn’t making much of a profit. The recommendation of the previous owners and help from her mother with the down payment had gotten her started, but the rest had been up to her. Paying back the bank loan plus covering the wages of her one employee made seeing a profit nearly impossible now. And with needing to spend significant time with Shea, Fiona wasn’t able to put a lot of herself into the business to keep it growing.

Because of that, traffic through the shop had dwindled and, with it, profits.

Last week, the man who owned the building her shop was located in had put a for-sale sign in the upstairs window. The idea of a new landlord was terrifying—would he let her stay, and if he did, would he raise her rent? She certainly couldn’t afford to keep the business open if he did.

She was giving half of herself to her work and the other half to Shea—and as a result, both parts were struggling. Her job and her sister needed her entire focus, and she hadn’t figured out how to do that yet.

Flipping a fried egg over with a sad excuse for a spatula, Fiona’s thoughts returned to the last time she’d picked her store over Shea. Three years ago, her mother had asked her to come pick up her sister for the night, to distract her for the evening as her mom broke the news to their stepfather that the marriage was over. Fiona had always hated the man and the way he treated them all, but her mother had talked about leaving him a few times, then never followed through.



So Fiona hadn’t really taken it seriously when her mother told her the plan, and so Fiona had been late coming back from her shop. Because of it, two people were dead, and Shea had very nearly been the third.

She could have stopped it. Instead, she’d made it worse.