“And I’m asking you one back.” Her chin lifted slightly. “Do you want me to take the job, Zane? Or is there somethingelseyou think I should do?”
My heart thumped in my chest, louder than usual, making a cacophony of itself.
“Did you take the job?” I growled.
“No.”
Cautiously, I asked, “Did you turn it down?”
“Not yet.”
She was watching me with those eyes that had been unraveling me since I was twenty-one years old, and I wanted more than anything in the world to tell herexactlywhat I thought she should do.
Stay. Stay in this house. Sleep in my bed. Cook in my kitchen. Let me love you the way I’ve been wanting to love you since before you ever left this town.
Instead, I picked up my glass of water.
“That’s your decision to make,” the words scraped out of me. “Not mine.”
She held my gaze for a long moment, and frustration flickered behind her eyes. Then she sat back in her chair and looked toward the hallway where the growth chart was.
“Did you ever want kids?” she asked quietly.
The question landed somewhere I wasn’t expecting, and I stared at her across the candlelit table as a sharp, bewildering twist of pain shot through me.
Why would she ask me that?
Whatpossiblepurpose did that question serve when she had forty-eight hours to accept a job in Chicago?
Every sign pointed to her walking out of my life the same way she had the first time.
It felt almost cruel. And Mallory had never been cruel a day in her life, which meant I had no ideawhatshe was doing.
I did the only thing I could. I stood up and stalked out of the room. I didn’t make it two steps up the stairs before I heard her chair scrape across the kitchen floor behind me.
Chapter 9
Mallory
He’d eaten three enormous plates of pot roast and barely said ten words through the whole meal, and now he’d walked out of the room like I’d asked him something offensive instead of something that mattered deeply to me.
But I knew his gruffness tonight was just an outer shell. The man was terrified of telling me how he felt.
And he couldn’t chase me awaythateasily.
It might have worked on all the other women on Red Oak Mountain. But they didn’t have the determination I did.
I left the dishes sitting on the table and went after him.
His bedroom door was shut when I got there.
I knocked gently.
“Can I come in?”
“Yeah,” his voice was quiet and rough. Then, after a beat, he added, “I’m not in the mood to fuck, if that’s what you’re after.”
A small laugh escaped me before I could stop it, and I opened the door.
