Florence tightened her jaw, the muscles bulging at the sides. And she looked like she was going to keep on arguing. Angelica straightened her back and stood up firmly.
“Ronan’s thirty minutes are up. I need to check on him.” She didn’t wait for anything else from Florence or from Hope. She just walked away. Maybe she was being the difficult one now. Maybe it had always been her from the start. Maybe Josef hadn’t been entirely wrong about that.
And if it was the truth, then she needed to do something about that.
Maybe tomorrow.
Chapter
Seventeen
“You looklike you have the weight of the world on your shoulders.” Cadence plopped down next to Hope in the conference room.
Hope frowned, her shoulders curled over the coffee she had sitting on the table, the one that she’d barely touched. It was early in the morning, and no one was there yet. Not even Ansel was up and around yet. This was the quietest Hope had seen the hotel yet, and she was just enjoying it for now. While she could, at least.
Because she had a big day planned.
Ronan and Elsie had agreed to their plan, so they had food to cook and a market to go to.
“Hope?” Cadence said her name and touched her arm.
“Yeah?” Hope stilled, but she couldn’t bring herself around to be her normal smiling self. Not yet anyway.
“What’s going on?” Cadence seemed so genuine. Usually, she was loud, boisterous, full of flirtation and laughter. But this Cadence was the one under the surface that you only got to see when you knew her well.
“Ange asked if I wanted an open relationship.” Just saying those words out loud was so difficult. The weight of it had been heavier than she realized, and the constant pushing from Ange for an answer wasn’t helping her any.
“Oh boy. Okay. Um…” Cadence ran her hand up and down the back of her head roughly before she snorted and chuckled. “You know, it’s five in the morning. We’re not supposed to have deep philosophical conversations until it’s beer o’clock.”
Hope laughed lightly at that. “Yeah, well, I’ve been up since beer o’clock pondering this.”
“Damn, girl.” Cadence laughed, a little more harshly this time than before.
This was why Hope liked her. She didn’t hold back. She was true to herself as she could be—at least from where Hope was standing. Biting her lip, Hope canted her head to the side and nodded. “What do you think about open relationships?”
“Poly?” Cadence blew out a breath and leaned back in the chair. “I’ve toyed with it myself. Been in relationships with multiple women at the same time, though nothing very formal like you might be thinking. Just noncommittal.”
Hope shook her head and grabbed the cold cup of coffee and took a sip. She winced as it hit her tongue, but she drank it anyway. She was going to need as much coffee as she could possibly get that day.
“Rex and I tried an open relationship.” She shifted her gaze to Cadence to judge where she was at with this information, but Cadence remained steady and unmoved by the comment. “It didn’t exactly work out.”
“With Ange?” Cadence asked.
Hope nodded silently. She’d never told anyone this before, not really, not when it was her choice to tell the story, not when she was seeking an unbiased opinion, not when she wasn’t trying to defend herself or Angelica.
Cadence whistled. “From my understanding, and from what little experience I have as a bystander, open relationships don’t usually work when a relationship has already been established for years before it becomes open. That’s not always the case, but there’s a lot of negotiation, boundaries, and testing and back and forth that has to happen for it to work. I’m going to take a wild assumption here and guess that you and Rex didn’t do that.”
“No, we didn’t.” Hope’s heart sank. Angelica had told her something similar two years ago when everything had started to go downhill, but she’d ignored it. She’d lived into the dream that everything would work out. And it hadn’t.
Cadence nodded slowly, shifting in the chair. “Do you feel as though one person could be enough for you?”
“I don’t know,” Hope whispered, tears brimming and stinging her eyes. She just wanted to have the answers, to be able to tell Angelica what she wanted, but she hadn’t thought about it. Not until Angelica had asked, and she didn’t know for sure if an answer of yes would end up with them together in the end.
Would it be Angelica’s deal breaker?
“That’s hard,” Cadence responded, touching Hope’s arm lightly. “Why does Ange want to know so much?”
“She likes rules and lines and standards.” Hope shrugged a little. “I suppose she wants to know so that she can know what she has to prepare for.”
