Claire
His reply came within a minute.
Claire,
If you want to buy me out, meet me at the given address. They’re open until six on Mondays.
Thanks,
Tai
Now her thumbs were pounding the screen fit to crack it. She bared her teeth and let out a low hiss as she hit Send.
Tai,
No, thank you. Sign the form please.
Claire
A minute passed. Then two. She nearly crowed in triumph when her inbox rang again. Surely he’d seen the folly in stubbornness and signed the thing….
Claire,
This is my single condition to signing. It’s not negotiable.
Tai
Claire growled at the phone, then tucked it away in its customary nook and returned to her customers. She fumed in the frost of her fury until, from the center of her chest outward, she felt like a vampire icicle.
Fine. She would go. She would glare. He would sign the documents, and this whole thing would be over. She would be through with Tai for good. She needed this. She needed it so she no longer had to see his name on the shareholders reports, include him in emails about overhead and profits.
Maybe she wouldn’t need it if her disdain had remained as pure and icy as it had been three years ago. If seeing him at Leslie and Ryker’s party had left her unaffected by his voice, his laugh, his eyes, his refusal to tell her the whole truth when she’d risked asking one last time.
But she hadn’t been unaffected. In fact she’d remembered all over again why a sliver of her heart had wondered, back whenthey brainstormed musical décor and researched instrument vendors, if he saw her as she saw him. As a possibility. As someone worth knowing…deeper.
So without returning his email, at five twenty-eight she walked into the title office with her purse slung over her shoulder and a pen easily accessible in the outside pocket.
Sign and get out. Sign and get out.
He stood up from one of the lobby chairs, and he looked…infuriating. His navy-blue suit was tailored, and he wore it with a classic white dress shirt, an eye-catching yellow tie, and a heck-ton of authority. Even his brown dress shoes gleamed with an expensive aura. His hair was neat and professional, and somehow, annoyingly, this contrast was the perfect reminder of how casually he’d shaken it back from his face when he emerged from underwater to talk to her in the dim cave with a snapping turtle latched onto his foot.
But the man she faced now wasn’t cave-swimming Tai. This was fundraising Tai, who’d just spent his day among dollar signs and donor meetings. He nodded to her, and she nodded back and hoped she looked half as confident. She hadn’t dressed for this part. She was wearing her usual bartender’s uniform—a cap-sleeved beige button-down shirt, black jeans, and black tennis shoes.
“Hi, Claire,” came the disarming baritone.
She glared at him with the fiercest weaponized look she could wield toward one of her own kind, and it caught him off-guard just as she intended. Tai broke eye contact, a self-protective instinct.
Good. Now that she had him on the defensive, she could do this. “Do not ‘hi, Claire’ me. This is a stupid hoop you wanted me to jump through for your own satisfaction, and I’m doing it, but I’m not happy about it, so just—”
He held up both hands, palms out. “No. I wanted to talk, and you’ve blocked my number.”
“Talk about straightforward documents that can be signed via email? What, did you call your lawyer?”
“No. I’m prepared to sign everything over to you today.”
She spread her hands. “Then what is this? What do you want from me, Tai?”
“A truce,” he said.
