“I’m going home,” I tell her, trying to sound calm and unaffected, even though inside I’m tense and quite frankly freaking out at the possibility that she’ll sleep with Westwood again just to spite me.
“Okay. Drive safe.” She turns back to Avery. I lean on the tabletop in front of her.
“Are you going home with him?” She looks back at me with shock. Avery also looks stunned. Neither of them say anything so I just keep talking. “Because if you go home with him, Callie, then we’re really done. I won’t play those games. And if you come home, you better be coming home to me. Not to my house. Not to my guest room. To me. Those are your two options.”
I turn to Avery. “If she chooses you, I will fucking wreck you next time we play each other, so sorry in advance.”
Before anyone can pick their jaws up off the table, I turn and storm out of the bar.
Chapter 46
Callie
Cole and Luc find me pacing on the sidewalk in front of the bar. They both walk right up to me and stand in front of me like a wall while Leah and Rose continue past us.
“I love you, Callie!” Rose is looping her arm through Leah’s and wandering down the sidewalk back toward the hotel they’re staying at. “Do the right thing!”
“That’s Devin, by the way!” Leah adds as she waves, blows me a kiss.
“Did my wife just call my brother the right thing to do?” Cole makes air quotes around the words “right thing” and “do” while making a horrified face.
“Yeah. Sucker,” Luc jokes back. Cole pretends to shiver in horror and then turns to me and puts his hands on my shoulders to stop my incessant pacing.
“He told me that if I went home with Avery then we were over,” I explain in a helpless voice.
Cole nods. “Makes perfect sense.”
“And then he said that if I don’t go home with Avery and I go back to his house—where I freaking live—then that means I’m coming home to him and a relationship. Like I have to start dating him if I want to sleep tonight.”
“If you’re dating him, I doubt you’re sleeping tonight,” Luc pipes up with a goofy grin and his eyebrows wiggling.
“Shut up, French Disaster,” I snap.
“Wow.” Cole laughs in amazement. “I gotta give you credit, Callie. The brother I thought I knew would be hate-fucking his way through women for years after having his wife rip his heart out. But a few nights with you and he’s not only willing to hurl himself back into a relationship, he’s willing to do it with the most commitment-phobic woman in the history of the universe. You must be something in bed.”
“If she’s anything like her sister, she totally is,” Luc adds.
“Shut up, French Disaster!”
“So what are you going to do?” Cole wants to know.
“Get a hotel room,” I inform him quietly. “And then quit my job and move back to L.A. and change my phone number. Maybe dye my hair or get plastic surgery. Change my name.”
Cole laughs and hugs me. “Or maybe you should do somethingreallycrazy like start dating a great guy who is crazy about you and makes you happy.”
“I hate you,” I tell him.
He lets me go and Luc comes over to hug me. I cuff him upside the head.
“Ow! What the fuck?!”
“We live in the same city now and if you hurt my sister, I will be able to do that to you every day for the rest of your life,” I inform him and then hug him as he’s still rubbing his head. “She better not regret moving here. You better be serious about this, Luc Richard.”
“She’s not just a roommate, Callie.” He shrugs off his winter coat and then lifts the hem of his shirt underneath until his well-defined torso is visible.
I see the tattoo that he got a couple years ago, except now it’s finished. Before, in the top half of the large, ornate fleur-de-lis was an intricate drawing of four boys playing hockey on the frozen lake in Silver Bay. In the middle were the French words for “More Than My Own Life,” but the inside of the bottom of the tattoo was empty. I once teasingly asked him if he’d decided it hurt too much halfway through. Now it wasn’t empty. There was a flower—a rose—inked in that space and the wordFleurin script at the bottom.
“That’s about Rose.” I blink and suddenly feel teary. “Fuck, Luc! That’s going to be with you forever.”
