So what now?
No words. I couldn’t abuse my position, and I couldn’t follow her like a stalker.
So what’d that leave?
I paged through the rest of the book. About a quarter of the way from the end, more pink caught my eye.
“Sometimes we can’t outrun our past.”
Another nail in the coffin of my actions. I couldn’t change how I had reacted.
So how did I face my past?
I pushed away from the counter and tossed the book in the trash, fake cover and all.
CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR
Ruby
Tenor: Can we talk?
Nope. I put my phone facedown and tried to concentrate on my computer screen. My office was on the second story and overlooked the wide, treed lot around the distillery. This location didn’t have the character of the original distillery in Copper Summit. More trucks entered and pulled out of the lot, the barrelhouse looked like a standard warehouse and not a work of rustic art, but it was still pretty and peaceful.
I’d spent the last two weeks working in my office at Bozeman, on alert for any Bailey that wandered by. Since I had put in my notice at the tasting room and no longer picked up bar shifts, I hadn’t had to worry as much.
I had foolishly thought that my heartbreak would heal faster if I wasn’t going to Bourbon Canyon all the time.
I added a filter to an image of Teller’s boots with a glass of bourbon superimposed over them. That sucked.
I tried another one. Both images faded with the glass looking overexposed. Ish.
Punching the keyboard, I tried several more. Ugh. None of them looked good.
What about another image?
Picture after picture scrolled by. The horizon beyond the pines around the Bourbon Canyon location. The sky with clouds and mountains in the distance. Almost looked like the outline of the peaks in Copper Summit’s logo.
The picture I had taken of Tenor behind the bar the night he’d agreed to be my fake boyfriend flashed on the screen. His strong arms were braced on the countertop, his hips were kicked back, and his expression...
He looked at the camera with that tight jaw of his, smoldering emotion in his eyes. A heat reserved only for the person taking the picture.
Me.
He’d looked at me like that and he’d still ended things? I asked myself that every time I pulled up this image to refresh my heartbreak.
Now he wanted to talk. Had he seen the parts of the book I’d highlighted?
What had he thought?
I had gone to work last week, and the first damn thing I had done was look in the cupboard for a book. There’d been nothing. Twice he’d reached out. Twice I’d shunned him. He didn’t like to be strung along either.
My eyes stung. I blinked rapidly. I would not cry.
My mind was made up. I had to live with the consequences.
Didn’t I?
My phone buzzed again and I scrambled for it, my hopes catapulting upward for Tenor’s name on my screen.
