“I’m so sorry,” she said. “I didn’t plan for it to take that long. They just kept asking questions and I kept thinking it was about to wrap up and then?—”
“I know,” he said softly. He reached out, touching her elbow to draw her closer. “You look exhausted.”
“I am,” she admitted, and the truth came out, raw and immediate. “I think we lost the job anyway.”
His eyebrows rose slightly. “After all that?”
She nodded and eyed the sofa, which looked inviting. “Are we going now?”
Something shifted in his face and he shook his head.
“No?”
“We’re not going to get that apartment,” he said.
“How do you know?”
Roman exhaled slowly, then tipped his head toward the couch. “Sit down.”
She sat, but it didn’t feel like resting. He took the chair across from her instead of sitting beside her, and the choice—small, probably unintentional—hurt a little.
He leaned forward, forearms on his thighs.
“The agent called,” he said. “She said someone else requested a showing today. She thinks they’ll sign for it today and it’s first come, first served. She couldn’t hold them off until tomorrow.”
Lacey groaned. “I’m so sad.”
He gave a quiet, almost-smile. “Yeah. Me, too.”
She waited for him to say something sharper. But Roman just looked at her, and the softness in his eyes made her throat burn.
“I kept thinking,” he said slowly, “that you were going to walk in the door with your hair all windblown and your smile all bright and say, ‘Okay, I’m here, let’s go,’ like it was nothing. Like work happened, but then you chose us anyway.”
Lacey’s chest tightened.
“I did choose us,” she said, too quickly. “I was trying to. I was trying to do both.”
Roman nodded, accepting the words, but not fully soothed by them. “I know you were. And I know what you were doing was important.”
“It was,” Lacey insisted. “It is. A huge client. A major opportunity. Tessa needed me.”
Roman’s eyes flickered at the name, not jealous, exactly—but aware that there was another person in this relationship that neither of them had invited, but both of them felt.
Her boss and his birth mother. It would be funny and ironic, except right then? It wasn’t either of those things.
“I get that,” he said. “I do. I’m not asking you to quit your job.”
Lacey let out a shaky breath. “It doesn’t feel like that.”
He blinked, and for the first time, his disappointment sharpened into something more vulnerable. “I don’t want to do that.”
“I don’t see any other way,” she said, and looked down at how her fingers were twisting together.
That was the thing, wasn’t it?
He wasn’t asking her to choose Jacksonville over Destin. He was asking her to choose him as the center of her orbit. To adjust her life around the gravity of his.
And he was so easy to orbit, she could happily say yes.
