When I lift my head and look at her, her eyes are unfocused, like she’s thinking deep about something.
“You know what the really frustrating thing is?” she asks. “It’s not even that it’s a bullshit excuse, which it is, by the way. It's that you actually believe it. That I’m some delicate, untouched princess with stars in her eyes and not a fingerprint on her, and therefore I don’t know what I’m talking about. You've convinced yourself that what I feel, what Iknow, is just…” She pauses, chooses her next word carefully. “Naivety. Like I'm a child.”
“That's not what I meant.”
“Isn't it?” She finally looks at me. Her eyes are sharp. “I’m twenty four. Not fifteen. And I’ve been through plenty.”
She holds my gaze for another moment. Then she reaches over, picks up her book, and leans back against the headboard in a way that closes the conversation as decisively as a slammed door.
“Night, Walker.”
Just like that, I've been dismissed.
From the guest room in my own house, by my own employee.
Except that's a fucking joke.
Because there’s no ‘just’ anything about Sadie. She waltzed into my life, into my home, and reoriented my entire world around her.
She’s not an employee.
She’s the queen of this house.
Long may she reign.
Chapter 22
Thundercloud
SADIE
Istare at the page of my book and read the same sentence four times.
I don't retain a single word of it.
You think that because you're young and inexperienced and don't know any better.
Of all the infuriating, condescending, stupid things that man could have said to me.
I've half a mind to march into his room and tell him exactly what I think of his self-sacrificing martyr routine.
The other half of my mind is busy replaying the way his head felt resting against my chest. Heavy and warm and trusting. Walker Rhodes, laid low. Leaning on me.
I close the book. Set it on the nightstand. Reach over and click off the lamp.
The dark doesn't help. If anything it's worse, because now I can just think.
I’d like to tell myself there’s a good reason for his rejection. That all the reasons he gave me are good ones.
Maybe he’s right to do it. Maybe the practical, self-preserving thing to do is put my walls up, just like he’s doing. Survive the next couple of months with my heart in one piece and my reputation intact and a distant memory of the most electric thing that's ever happened to me.
I squeeze my eyes shut.
I'm so tired of being the practical one.
I think about Momma, who spent half her life hinging her entire existence on my father’s unreliable love and support, emotional, financial, all of it.
And it destroyed her.
