Sandcastle Beach (Matchmaker Bay #3) - Jenny Holiday Page 0,112

talking. That was the power of Ben. “I should have had someone else learn the part. But I thought, well, Holden moved here for this, so he’s going to be reliable. And who’s going to understudy Holden Hampshire, anyway?” She blew out a breath. She was so frustrated with herself. “What am I going to do?”

“You’re going to come to the beach with me.”

“What?”

He stood and extended his hand. “Come on. I have an idea, but it’s too beautiful a day to talk about it inside.”

“What about the bar? You can’t just leave the bar closed.”

“You know what? It turns out I can.”

Chapter Twenty-One

Law could leave the bar empty and locked in the middle of the afternoon. He could take a loan against the bar building and open a restaurant. He could apologize to the woman he loved for hurting her, albeit unknowingly, in the past.

He could do all these things, it turned out.

So the next thing was easy. “I think we should apply for the grant together.”

Maybe he should have dropped the bomb on their way to the beach, rather than wait until they were right at the edge of the water, because she started so violently he feared for a moment that she was going to trip and get wet.

But she steadied herself and turned to him. Bewilderment gave way to incredulity, and he could tell she was gearing up to argue.

Bring it.

“What on earth are you talking about?”

He smiled. “I’m talking about a joint application. Think of it as risk pooling. No, it’s more than that. We’ve been bickering about business-related stuff all this time, but what if we flipped the script? A restaurant and a theater. They complement each other. Why not stick our lots in together?”

“But you’re probably going to win. So if we shared, you’d be giving up half the grant.”

“That’s not true. You’re going to win.” He truly believed that.

“I am not! You already have a successful business.”

“It’s apples and oranges. I sell beer. People will always pay for beer. You’re a nonprofit. This town is organized around its festivals. And what’s at the center of every festival?”

“A pack of meddling old people?”

“No. A play. Your plays.”

She sucked in a breath.

He gestured across the beach, which was fairly crowded but thankfully not populated by any of the old folks. He’d brought her here hoping to make a point he was struggling to articulate even to himself. “Sandcastle Beach. The site of so many battles. Think of all the years we spent competing. Think of all the energy we spent. What if we had worked together? Can you imagine the sandcastle we could have built?”

“What are you saying? Is this a metaphor? My brain is too tired for metaphors right now.”

He smiled. “The new restaurant will need business. You want to keep theater attendance up in the post-Holden era. What if we offered dinner-and-theater packages? Maybe we could each draw customers we might not have had without the other. If we work together instead of against each other, we might find that we’re more than the sum of our parts.”

“We’re more than the sum of our parts,” she echoed, a note of astonishment in her tone.

“So I’m thinking, what if we divide the money into thirds? You use a third for building repairs. I’ll use a third as a down payment on Jason’s house. So each business is getting a new lease on life, so to speak. Then we take the final third and use it for stuff that will benefit us both—and the town.”

“But you’re going to need more than thirty grand to buy Jason’s house. You’ll still need a mortgage.”

“Right. The grant was never going to be enough to allow me to buy the place outright, and—”

“But you said it was enough to—”

“Will you let me talk, woman?” He rolled his eyes, but he smiled as he did it. She rolled hers back, but she stopped talking. “I’ve learned something from you this summer.” Her mouth fell open, but she didn’t interrupt him again. “I learned that sometimes you have to take a risk. I’ve been thinking about that Junior Achievement panel. You did start something from nothing when you opened that theater, and I admire the hell out of it. Sometimes you just have to take a risk.” In more ways than one. But one risk at a time. “Watching you taught me that.”

“Sometimes you just have to take a risk,” she echoed, astonishment and happiness battling it out on her