He’d been telling himself that he didn’t know what he wanted for the last couple of months, and yet at the end of the day, he was pretty sure he knew what he had to do.
“Will you come back to bed?”
“Yeah,” he said. “Just a minute.”
“Will you brush your teeth first?”
“Only because you asked nicely,” he said.
She stood up, and walked back toward the house and turned and looked at him just one last time before she slipped into the glass door.
And he sat out there for just a few moments longer, until everything inside of him went still. Until all his certainty crystallized.
Then he stood up and went back toward her bedroom. But not before he stopped and brushed his teeth.
He had kissed her goodbye this morning around five o’clock, and she had a feeling that had been on purpose, because they hadn’t had a chance to talk.
The kiss hadn’t been on her mouth. It had just been on her cheek.
They hadn’t had sex again. He pulled her up against him and said something about her being sore, and told her to go to sleep. She didn’t know how he got home—if he called one of his brothers or if he’d taken a cab...
She felt a little bit melancholy, and she carried that all through her day. Her offer was accepted on the hotel, and she made an appointment to go and sign papers. It also happened to work out that the contractor she wanted to use was free to meet with her at the property that afternoon. And all of that should’ve been great and exciting and more than enough of a distraction to stop thinking about Jace.
It was perfectly normal for them to not have communicated on a random Thursday.
It was just that they had never not communicated on a random Thursday the night after they’d had sex.
They’d had sex.
She wasn’t a virgin anymore.
Sex sounded so clinical, even in her head.
She would call it making love, but it hadn’t been especially sweet either. It had been... Wrenching. A rending.
It had been something else entirely.
And now so was she. And maybe so were they.
She couldn’t shake that image of him, sitting with his elbows on his knees in that chair on her back patio, the cigarette between his fingers. His cowboy hat on like he was fixing to leave in the middle of the night.
She had to say something to him. Because he was her friend.
Because she didn’t want him to go.
She sighed and pulled her truck up to the front of the hotel. It was almost hers. Just a few signature pages away.
The contractor was already there, his big white truck parked out front. She got out and tried to smile. She’d been trying to smile all day.
“Hey,” she said. “Glad you could make it by today.”
“Good to see you, Cara.”
Mike Colton was a regular at the bar, and they had a pretty good rapport. He was never flirtatious and didn’t flirt with any other women in the bar, which was good, considering he was married. So she had a pretty high opinion of him right off the bat. Plus, she knew he did good work.
“Let’s take a walk through the place.”
She heard the sound of an engine, and turned around. Just as Jace pulled right into the driveway.
