“You seem to get along with my family better than I do,” she said. “I’m sure you’ll be just fine.”
She pushed past him on her way out the door, not bothering to answer as he called after her.
CHAPTER THIRTY-THREE
As he stood outside Taylor’s bedroom, Jamar couldn’t tell if the faint strip of light that beamed on the hallway’s wooden floors came from the sun or from the ceiling fan light. He didn’t want to wake her if she was still sleeping, but the thought of her lying in bed brooding over the way things ended last night made his stomach turn.
Sucking in a fortifying breath, he knocked on the door. “Taylor?”
He didn’t have to keep his voice down. The rest of her family was already awake and eating from the buffet-style breakfast someone had laid out downstairs.
The activity in the kitchen had woken him just after seven this morning. As far as Jamar could tell, the room he’d been assigned had once been a small office or maybe a den that had been converted into an extra room for guests.
He knocked again. “Taylor?”
A moment later, the door swung open and Taylor appeared on the other side. He couldn’t read her flat expression, but he erred on the side of her still being upset with him.
“Umm, hey,” he said.
“Hey,” she murmured. She opened the door wider, an invitation to enter.
Jamar stuffed his hands into his pockets as he followed her inside. She cut across the room, settling near the chest of drawers, but something stopped him from going farther than the few tentative steps he’d taken just inside the door.
He shifted his weight from one foot to the other, unsure of where to start. He hated this feeling, not knowing where things stood between them. There was one thing hehadlearned in the past twelve hours—just how much Taylor Powell had come to mean to him in this short time. The intense regret over how their night had ended was just one indication. How he ached to hold her right now was another. Heneededher.
“Look, Taylor, I know I screwed up last night by sharing my . . . umm . . . my unsolicited opinion, but—”
“Stop,” she said, holding up a hand.
Jamar’s throat grew intensely tight. One of the worst-case scenarios on the massive list of worst-case scenarios he’d dreamed up last night was Taylor demanding they go back to pretending they were dating for the rest of the weekend and then dumping his ass as soon as they returned to Austin.
She’d walked him through the complicated relationship she had with her family, had opened up about how inadequate she felt when compared to them. And in her eyes, he’d sided with her family—with her archenemy of a brother—over her. Could he really blame her for her hostility?
“I . . . um.” She glanced at the bed, the chair in the corner, out the window. She released a deep breath and continued. “I was mad at Darwin and took it out on you. I shouldn’t have.”
It took Jamar a moment to process her words.
She finally directed her gaze to him. “Things were going so well last night that I let my guard down around Darwin. I knew better than to do that. The two of us have always gotten along like expensive taste and bad credit.” She hunched her shoulders. “Like I said, I shouldn’t have taken it out on you.”
Jamar was almost afraid to ask, “So does this mean we’re okay?”
She stretched out both her hands, capturing his and bringing herself into him. She lifted her face to his and placed a kiss on his chin.
“We’re okay,” she said.
The sudden release of tension made his limbs go weak. He still had so many questions about her outburst at her brother, but he didn’t want to chance a repeat of what happened last night. He wasn’t in the right headspace for navigating that tricky conversation.
“Taylor, can we maybe, I don’t know, go for a drive or something? I just need to get away for a bit to clear my head.” He paused for a moment before he said, “Today is kind of a rough day for me.”
He saw the moment that understanding dawned.
“Of course,” she said with an emphatic nod. “Let me change into something warmer.”
She went over to the chest of drawers and grabbed a dark blue sweatshirt from the second drawer from the top and pulled it over the plain white T-shirt she wore. When she turned around, Jamar frowned at the letters across the front.
“Navy?”
She stretched out the hem, looking down at the shirt. “I bought it to piss off my dad.” She hunched her shoulders again. “I can be a bit of an asshole.”
