the other as he followed Rick up and down the aisles of Aubergine Specialty Foods in the business district. Somehow, when he’d asked Sawyer to be his wingman for his Valentine cooking class, he’d left out the part about shopping for groceries.
Aubergine was the sort of grocery store where only someone like Rick would shop. A true foodie’s paradise. For starters, it was minuscule, crammed full of tiny twenty-dollar bottles of olive oil, pasta imported from Italy and gourmet cheeses Sawyer had never heard of. It also had a crisp black-and-white striped awning out front and a sidewalk fruit stand, as if someone had plucked it right off the streets of Europe and dropped it in Waterford. The fancy little shop definitely hadn’t been around back when Sawyer was in high school.
Plenty of things had changed since then. Sawyer knew this. He was just having kind of a hard time adjusting to Waterford’s new reality.
“Why didn’t you tell me that Jamie bought True Love Books?” he said to the back of Rick’s head while his friend perused the selection of spices.
Rick grabbed a small bottle of peppercorns and placed it carefully in the basket. “Remember a few years ago when I casually mentioned she was dating that dentist? Your reaction was to tell me to never let you know anything about Jamie because it distracted you.”
Distracted. That was one word for it. A more accurate description probably would have been that thinking about Jamie with another man made him crazy.
Sawyer cleared his throat. “Vaguely.”
“Well, you did.” Rick shrugged and added something else to the shopping basket. “So I didn’t.”
“Anything else you’re not telling me?” he asked, doing his best to ignore the sudden throbbing in his temples. He’d known coming back to Waterford to help secure the Ridley project might get complicated, but this was beyond complicated. This was a disaster in the making.
“She’s not happy about the project,” Rick said nonchalantly.
Sawyer’s jaw clenched. He wondered if Aubergine carried ibuprofen. Doubtful. “Yeah, I get that already.”
“And she’s single.” Rick shot him a smile and rounded the corner toward the produce section.
Sawyer paused. So Jamie Vaughn was single? Now this was the sort of pertinent information he was most interested in.
Not that it mattered. Whatever he and Jamie once shared had been over for a long time. Fifteen years, as she’d been so quick to remind him.
He chased Rick down and found him contemplating a purple cluster of radicchio. “So what happened with the dentist?”
Rick abandoned the radicchio in favor of something that looked sort of like grass clippings. “He moved to Texas last year.”
Sawyer let out a breath. “So they weren’t that serious.”
“Oh, no. They were serious.” Rick picked up another bundle of weeds, smelled them and added them to his pile. “But he got some job offer that he couldn’t turn down. He asked her to move with him. She declined.”
“Why?” Sawyer’s throat grew tight.
He couldn’t help comparing himself and the mystery dentist who had asked her to move with him across the country. It was more than Sawyer had done when he’d left for Columbia.
But they’d been kids. It would’ve been crazy to make such a serious commitment at that age. Right?
He found it more and more difficult to swallow while he waited for Rick to respond.
“You’ll have to ask her,” he finally said.
Sure, because that would go over really well. Jamie probably couldn’t wait to have a good old-fashioned heart-to-heart with the man who wanted to tear down her precious bookstore and put something “hideous” in its place.
“Given how she reacted when she found out I was working with Ridley, that feels highly unlikely.”
He couldn’t even blame her. The plans for the new development definitely didn’t include keeping True Love in its present form. But how could he have known the bookstore belonged to her now?
Her words from their walk in the courtyard spun round in his mind, taunting him.
I bought it a few years ago, just like I always said I would.
Maybe he should have known. Once Jamie made up her mind to do something, she usually made it happen.
“Does she date anyone now?” he asked, dreading the answer. Rick had said she was single, but Sawyer had a hard time believing it.
“No one.” Rick tossed a lemon in the air, caught it and shrugged. “She’s on a ‘romantic hiatus.’”
Sawyer laughed. “That does sound like something she would say.”
“Lucy thinks that, instead of dating, Jamie pours all her heart into the bookstore.” Rick gave him a