“Did…did she hit on you?” The words came out as if gravel paved my throat. If she had, I was leaving. I couldn’t bear this. Not with the guy I was crushing on. How could I ever look him in the face again?
Hell, he was famous andrichenough to be the type she liked to dally with or marry.
When he remained silent, my heart sank into the abyss forming inside me.
I slid off the barstool. It took everything inside me to hold it all together and speak coolly. “I’m tired. Thank you for letting me stay. I’ll be out of your hair in the morning.”
I pivoted, tears stinging my eyes. It didn’t matter I wasn’t going to have anything to do with him. But…why did it have to be him?
His warm hand caught mine before I even took a step, spinning me around.
Whyher? I wanted to yell at him. “What do you want?” I rasped instead, my emotions all over the place.
“Just you, Charli.” Those blue eyes darkened, his sun-kissed hair flopping over his brow. He gently ran his knuckles down my cheek, and I leaned into his touch—then I remembered, and a whimper of pain crept up my throat. I pushed him away.
“Charli, wait. Let’s talk about this.”
“No!” I spun away.
“Charli—” He reached for me.
I grabbed the first thing I found, his hockey stick near the side table, and brandished it in front of me. “I don’t want you. Just leave me alone!”
His chest heaving, he stared at me, and something flashed in his eyes. Regret?
Pain snarled my heart. “You and she hooked up, didn’t you?” I breathed, my fingers squeezing the stick.
“No.”
Relief flowed, but hard on its heel, shame and embarrassment reared their ugly heads, engulfing me. “She came onto you?” Oh, God. How could this get any worse? The hockey stick fell from my hands in a clatter. I wheeled around and darted for the room I used, opening the door.
“Charli, wait—” He was there, putting a palm on the wood, stopping me from shutting it. “She kissed me. We’d just won the semifinals.”
“I don’t care!”
“Nothing happened, dammit! Even if she was interested, I wasn’t. She said congratulations and moved on.”
I wiped my swimming eyes with the back of my hand, unable to stop my tears. But this, everything hurt so damn much. “I can’t deal with this right now. I just can’t. Please go.”
A tick worked his jaw, but he stepped back.
I shut the door and sank to the floor, thumping my head against the wood. I could move past his slanks, but my mother?
How could everything end this way?
The last couple of days, the taunting, the teasing was fun, and the few hours at the amusement park made something within me stir alive once more. It made mefeel.
My mother kissed him.The thought, like a dark rope, tightened and tightened inside me, threatening to strangle me.
I can’t do this.
I crawled to my feet, retrieved my cell from my tote, ignored the many missed calls from my mother, and texted my realtor.
Take the brownstone off the market.
I was going to New York, away from my mother’s drama and away fromhimas soon as I’d finished weeding his damn garden.
WAR
