The Planner and the Player eBook

Fletcher Crawford is a playboy producer. He flies around the world chasing fast cars and fast women. He’s way too old to still feel hurt by his high school heartbreak, right?

One day he scorns the wrong woman and finds himself grounded in his hometown, where he finds Thistle McMurray around every turn.

She was his first everything…including his first heartbreak.

Thistle McMurray always had big plans, and they did not include taking care of anyone else. She spent years building her career, avoiding her hometown like the plague.

But one phone call changes everything, and plunges her back into the heart of her darkest memories.

Can Thistle and Archer bury the past and find forgiveness? Do second chances really exist?

I finish the file I’m working on and realize I have time to take a break before I open my next one. This concept is so strange to me, taking breaks. Breathing. 

In New York City, I barely had time to double check tax codes in between frantic requests from my boss. My decisions, made quickly, mattered on an international level. 

Here, my decisions affect just a handful of people, but they matter deeply to those people, whom I know personally. And I have time to be thorough. 

I sigh and rest my chin on my palm, staring out the window to Main Street. It’s early, before nine, and the town hasn’t come to life yet. Everything looks peaceful and crisp under the recent snowfall. Bright. 

The snow hasn’t yet turned to gray slush, and with so few cars driving around the small town of Oak Creek, I think it might just hold onto its pleasant white brightness a bit longer. 

It bothers me now that I don’t have strong memories like that about my home town. I grew up here, but I was so busy plotting my escape from Oak Creek that I never took time to consider my surroundings. A lot like the career I just left behind—always snapping to check things off, look to the next move, consider the downstream impact. 

I really have no idea how to focus on the now.  

So I decide to stare out the window until I count to 100. That feels like enough time for a break, for me to catch my breath. I should look up how to meditate, maybe take a yoga class if my mom seems stable some night. 

I reach 85 and my mind starts plotting out which project I’ll tackle next, as soon as this break is over, when I see something that makes my heart stop. 

Fletcher Crawford comes dancing down the sidewalk with a baby strapped to his chest. I can see his lips moving, his head bowed over the baby, obviously singing. He bends his knees and cradles the baby’s head as they make their way up the sidewalk. 

A wash of confusing emotions floods through me. Jealousy, which I quickly dismiss. I know it’s his brother’s baby, that Fletcher is sticking around town to help them out since Abigail had such a hard time with the birth. 

Fletcher is in town indefinitely to try on his new role as Super Uncle. 

Frustration comes next. I’m frustrated that he seems to be able to come to his family’s aide so seamlessly, like it’s no sweat off his back to drop his work for a bit and just chill out in his hometown. 

Meanwhile, here I am home helping my mom, filled with resentment and anger at my father’s inability to emote and my brother’s refusal to step up and help at all. 

This is everything I never wanted in life. Caregiving. I didn’t want to be selfless; I wanted to travel. I wanted people to listen to me and I wanted to be in charge of important decisions. And I had all that. I had a career where I filled my passport, flying business class to Tokyo and Mumbai and Rome. 

All of it was pulled out from under me in a heartbeat when my mother got sick. My mother, who had given up her independence and her career to stay home and raise my brother and me—my mother had a stroke. 

Fletcher drops a kiss on the baby’s head. As they get closer to the window of the accounting office where I’m now working part time, I can see that the baby’s face is red, like he’s been crying. I  remember hearing that Louie is sort of a miserable baby. 

He doesn’t look miserable now, though. Strapped around Fletcher’s fleece jacket in a baby back pack on the front…what does Indigo call it? Not a sling…

My ex-boyfriend’s jeans hug his hips in such a way that I start to remember the firm muscles beneath them. Those legs used to hold me up against fences and bleachers and all the places teenagers go to fuck in a small town. Those thighs I felt behind me just a few weeks ago.

I shake myself out of those memories and realize that he’s going to see me sitting here in the window if I keep staring. I adjust the screen of my laptop and hunch lower so that only the top of my head sticks up. 

I breathe through my nose silently, as if he could hear me through the window, and wait what I hope is enough time for them to pass. 

Once I brave a quick glance above the monitor, I see the back side of Fletcher Crawford. The straps of the baby carrier are tied in such a way that I can see his shoulder muscles and broad back are every bit as delicious as they were ten years ago. 

And that ass in his jeans is worth the drop of drool I have to catch with the back of my hand before it splashes onto my keyboard. 

“Jesus, Thistle,” I mutter to myself. This is highly inappropriate. It’s not ok to drool over the memory of my high school boyfriend and it’s not ok to sit and analyze his uncle habits. I don’t know anything about him now, I remind myself. In order to find that out I’d have to talk to him again, which isn’t going to happen. 

We had our moment of closure, and that was enough. Right? And I did him a favor, so now we’re even.

Better to dive back into my work and try to forget that I saw him today. And I almost convince myself that this is true until I see Fletcher and Louie coming back for another lap around the square. 

This time, his eyes lock with mine through the window. He lifts his eyebrows in question, continuing to bounce and sing to the baby, who is now asleep with his head nuzzled against Fletcher’s chest. I want to smile at them and wave. I think I want that. 

But instead I frown and duck my head, staring at the spreadsheet on my screen until I’m certain they’ve walked away.