He’s shown me every possible side of himself this week, and even when he’s being an asshole,I get it, and I like him.
How can I not like a guy who wants to give his entire fortune away to make the world a better place? That’s the mission I’ve lived and breathed since I was eight years old.
Starting over is hard. Starting over with an unexpected stowaway—theworstunexpected stowaway—is far more complicated.
And starting over after what’s clearly been a terrible few years is bound to leave his emotions whacked up all over the place.
“How common are fire alarms in hotels?” Oliver asks me while we huddle against the side of the diner across the parking lot as the rain shower that was threatening earlier passes over us.
Like we’re two people who didn’t strip naked and ride each other in the name ofteaching him how.
He’s thirty-one years old.
He knowshow.
Very, very clearly knowshow, and I’ll have the sore body to prove it tomorrow.
Holy fuck.
That’s the only explanation for what that was.
It was a holy fuck. I was possessed by something otherworldly.
Except I wasn’t.
This is what I do.
I mess everything up.
“They happen sometimes.” Firetrucks are here, so clearly, the siren wasn’t anothingthing. “I know I said this wouldn’t happen in my family’s chains, but they do. I remember my dad shut a property completely down once because they couldn’t figure out why the smoke alarms kept going off. It was getting terrible reviews, so he razed the whole building and put a new one in its place.”
He shoots me a quick look, then looks back through the rain at the motel. Most of the other guests have gone into the diner to hide from the rain.
Given how much Oliver tipped the staff, we didn’t want to go in and be recognized.
Not after seeing the news with the kids from the lemonade stand this morning, which feels like a lifetime ago now.
“He didn’t talk about individual buildings very much,” I add.
As if that’s necessary.
Oliver surely knows. Doubt he was spending much time on individual M2G stations the past few years unless they had specific, super-bad issues or were significantly outperforming expectations.
It’s never anything in between if the guy at the top knows about it.
Oliver’s chest rises as he pulls in a deep breath.
He grabbed a T-shirt—it was faster than buttons—and he has it on backward and inside out, and I don’t think he realizes it.
“Does rain always smell like this?” he asks.
And my heart melts for this man a little more.
Why?
Why?
I haven’t dated—not really—since I was disinherited. At first, I was too much of a mess and found myself in toxic situationsmore than not, and yes, sometimes it was me being the more toxic one.
