Caroline scowled. “No.”
There was more banging.
“I’m going to use a saucepan.”
She grunted in agreement. After setting the water on the stove to boil, Adrian edged into her frame of vision. She wished he’d speak, but he just silently looked her over, gaze eventually landing on some of the previous day’s purchases scattered in disarray near a stack of empty moving boxes.
The largest obstacle was a pink duffel bag with wheels and a tow handle. It was already unzipped with a few sweaters packed in the bottom.
“Are you going somewhere?” he asked.
“Paris,” Caroline said curtly.
“Oh,” he said quietly. Then, “What are you planning to do while you’re there?”
“I’m going to take a class on choux pastry. At the Cordon Bleu.”
“Isn’t that the one that had the student loan scandal?”
“I. Don’t. Care,” Caroline growled, punctuating her words by slapping the sofa arm. She didn’t care if the classes were severely overpriced. She was going to eat cream puffs thousands of miles away from everyone and everything that had disappointed her.
Adrian shifted on his feet. “Are you going to come back?” he asked even more quietly, eyes on the moving boxes.
“I don’t know.” If she liked it there, why would she? At this rate, she wasn’t going to get a job with her business degree. And if she got one, she probably wouldn’t even like it. She thought she might get better at choux pastry with sufficient instruction, and then she’d have donesomethingright.
The water on the stove bubbled, and Adrian went to the kitchen to attend to that. The pot clattered as he packed the grounds and gingerly poured the water into the French press.
He took two mugs and the brewing pot of coffee out to the table and set them in front of her. He returned to her kitchen for the bottle of vanilla creamer in the fridge and brought that as well. Out of tasks, he looked away, at the front door.
“I hope you have a great time,” he said, sounding defeated. “It’ll be cold, but not worse than here, and the tourists won’t be so bad this time of year. I could send you... I suppose there are a lot of guidebooks on what to do.”
Caroline curled her lip, worried that she was going to cry, when her top, number one mission had beendo not cry.
What reason did he have to look so sad about her trip? That was what he’d thought she’d do, after all. Go without him.
She swallowed hard. “I wanted to go withyou,” she nearly shouted, and that was true, but not a thing she’d planned on saying. It didn’t sound like such a huge request, did it? Why was that such an ask?
Adrian crossed the room in two wide steps and dropped onto the couch next to her. He held up one hesitant hand, not sure where to put it. Eventually he placed it on her shoulder and lightly gripped the muscle there, thumb curling into the loose fabric of her hoodie.
“Oh, sweetheart. I did too.” He swallowed hard, eyes fixed on her face. “It’s not that I didn’t want to go.”
Caroline tucked her chin and tightened her shoulders, hands clenching in fists as she tried to get her voice under control.
Apparently giving her a moment to compose herself, Adrian reached for the coffeepot and depressed the plunger to fill the upper chamber with the filtered coffee. He poured two mugs and passed her one. She accepted it, grateful to have something to do with her hands, and blew on it to cool it.
“Would it really have been so bad? Just to let me handle the money?” she asked in a smaller voice. “I promise I wouldn’t hold it against you, ever.”
Adrian sighed. “You are always so generous, maybe you wouldn’t, but—”
“I’m not that, really,” she insisted. She was rational, that’s what she was. She could understand why he needed more money, and she had it in excess.
“Caroline.” His face was still tired, but the corner of his mouth tugged up. “You carried cardboard boxes of mystray socks and underwear out of my ex’s house when you’d known me for a week. I know you must have given Tom the money to rent his moving truck, because he’s been such a squirrel about it. I know how wonderfully generous you are. With your time, your money—everything.”
“As a counterpoint, you were really good-looking, and I didn’t have anything better to do that Saturday.”
“Caroline,” he scolded her again, voice finally sounding a little more like himself. “I don’t think your motives for offering me money were somehow impure.”
“It’s about what I want,” she insisted. “Isn’t that selfish?”
