He had made me feel beautiful, desired, and absolutely cherished. Like I was the only woman in the world and he was lucky to be there with me.
I thought that was a good thing. Now I was worried my radar for decent men was completely broken.
“He was…” I started, then stopped, not wanting to admit how thoroughly he had wrecked me. “It doesn’t matter. Good sex doesn’t excuse treating someone like garbage the next morning.”
“No, it doesn’t,” Emmy agreed. “But it does explain why you look like you’re about to cry. You thought it meant something.”
That hit too close to home for comfort. I had thought it meant something. After his kindness with Mr. Withers, I let my guard down.
“He was so nice,” I murmured. “He didn’t just, you know.”
“I don’t know. Tell me everything.”
“It wasn’t like a race to the finish line for him,” I said.
We had compared notes about our past relationships before. Usually, we talked shit about them. But I had no complaints about Kent, aside from the last bit.
She grinned. “Yeah? He took his time.”
“He’s a man,” I said as if that cleared up everything.
“A big man?”
I felt my cheeks burning. “I am not about to get into the graphic details with you.”
“Fine. But it was good?”
“Very.”
“And you want him again and he ran out of here like a bat out of hell,” she surmised.
I rolled my eyes. “No.”
“Liar.”
“I don’t know what I want,” I sighed. “I didn’t expect him to just up and leave this morning with barely a goodbye. He didn’t tell me he had a good time or wanted to see me again. Just said he had to go. I have never felt so dismissed.”
She nodded her head, doing her best to look sympathetic while also resisting the urge to tell me she told me so again.
I appreciated that.
“Do you think he’s coming back?”
I shrugged. “I don’t know.”
“Well, fuck him,” she said. “Fuck him and his fancy shoes and good looks. Fuck him and his family money and his amazing sex. We’ve survived this long without him. We don’t need him.”
“That’s the problem, Emmy. We do need him. What if I just screwed up any chance we had to get the money we need to save this place?”
“You can’t bethatbad in bed,” she said with a grin.
The whole situation was making me feel insecure in ways I hated. I should be focused on the lodge. I needed to figure a way out of my family’s financial crisis. I needed to figure out how to save everything my ancestors worked for. Instead, I was sitting here obsessing over some tourist who’d gotten under my skin and then disappeared at the first sign of complexity.
“I’m being ridiculous,” I said, more to myself than to Emmy. “I should be worried about keeping the lights on and the bills paid, not about some wealthy guy who probably has a different woman in every city he visits. Hell, he probably has fifty women in Manhattan alone.”
That thought made me cringe. Thank God he had a condom. And that alone should have been a red flag. What grown man carried around condoms? Wasn’t that a high school thing? I supposed when you looked like Kent, the chances of getting lucky were pretty damn good.
“You’re not being ridiculous,” Emmy said gently. “You’re being human. You slept with someone you were starting to care about, and he treated you badly afterward. That hurts, regardless of everything else that’s going on.”
