two weeks away from the merry-go-round her life had become to do some serious soul-searching and rethink her goals.
Instead, she’d found herself baking. A lot of baking, in fact. She hadn’t reached any conclusions, but the baking had calmed her, centered her, given her something to do with her hands, and freed her mind from the endless loop it seemed to be on of late. When she returned to her life in DC, still unsettled and unhappy, she’d enrolled in a pastry chef course. Then another one. Followed by an entire semester, crammed in with her regular workload, at a local culinary school. She still hated her life as a tax attorney, but baking things helped level out the stress. In the absence of any other great life plan, it was better than nothing.
Then Bernadette had broken down and told Melody what had really led her to ditch her job as a senior advertising accountant with Hamilton Industries and follow her private dream to launch her own bakery ... she had cancer. Starting a bakery was something she’d wanted to do before she died. With stage four Hodgkin’s lymphoma, that eventuality was going to happen sooner than she’d thought.
Melody’s path had become crystal clear then, all her priorities painfully and abruptly defined. Without a single pang of regret, at the age of thirty-one, she’d handed in her resignation, packed up her essentials, and walked away from the law degree she’d spent many years and a ton of money obtaining, along with a career that was the envy of many. Heading south to be with her friend for whatever time they had left, she’d learned how to run a bakery . . . and how to watch a best friend die. Ten months later, she was alone in Hamilton again ... and the new owner of Cups & Cakes. Bernadette’s dying wish became Melody’s new lease on life.
A new life Melody had grabbed with everything she had. In the town she’d thought a part of her past, she’d found her future and more happiness and fulfillment than she’d ever thought possible.
“I’ll be damned if some spooky-eyed Irish devil is going to screw things up now.”
With that thought bolstering her, she squared her shoulders and headed back to the kitchen area to face the first disaster of the morning. She wasn’t sure what she was going to do about the second one.
She’d had every intention of being at the town council meeting, along with a number of the town square business owners. The news of Lionel’s bold new plans for the town—which had turned out to be Griffin’s brainchild—had leaked out about a month ago and spread like wildfire. The speculation was that Lionel had known the truth about Trudy’s bastard child all along, and had, in fact, gone to great lengths to keep it quiet. For decades. When he announced he was naming Griffin the heir who would be stepping forward to assist in guiding the future of Hamilton Industries, it had been the biggest scandal to hit the town in as long as anyone could remember.
Thomas Griffin Gallagher—and, rightfully, also a Haversham—was reputedly a mini-Lionel in his own right, already well on his way to establishing a burgeoning empire of his own in the U.K. His specialty, so the nosy hens of Hamilton had ferreted out almost before he’d set foot on American soil, was finding new ways to market and brand old concepts, old businesses, even entire old towns, and revitalize them into something prosperous, thriving. All for a percentage, of course.
He’d spun himself to be the pied piper of revitalization, a veritable Extreme Town Makeover magician. Until you dug a little deeper and discovered that not one of those little businesses, brands, or towns remotely resembled what it had been, once the reincarnation was complete. More prosperous? Sure. But lost in the reconstructed and homogenized shuffle was what had made the businesses, brands, and towns special in the first place. Melody understood in some of those cases, without change, there would have been no corporation, brand, or village left to save. It wasn’t the case here. Hamilton wasn’t failing.
There was a difference between saving a sinking ship ... and changing things purely for greed and the desire of more-more-more.
Melody didn’t care if Griffin took on the expansion of Hamilton Industries’ global prospects, but as far as she was concerned, he could leave the town of Hamilton itself right the hell alone. “I just want the town I already