Maybe it had been a sign that all wasn’t right.
She had known that everything wasn’t perfect, but she had thought it was fixable. And now she wondered if she had slowly, so slowly that she hadn’t noticed it, fallen out of love with her husband, and had been hanging onto an ideal more than a great romantic love.
“I’m fine,” she said. Mainly because she had lost the thread of the conversation. She had no idea what she had been about to say anymore, and no idea how to rescue the moment. “Also, you could sleep with a cowboy if you wanted to.”
Cara looked scandalized. It would’ve been funny if Marlowe didn’t feel quite so shaken.
“I don’t know if I want to tempt any more drama.”
Marlowe laughed. “Well, there hasn’t been any drama. Like I said, Cody seemed to be completely fine with casual sex. A one-afternoon stand was all he wanted, clearly. He hasn’t even come by the hotel since then.”
“Hmmm,” Cara mused.
“Don’t look at me that way.”
“I’m not looking at you like anything.”
“Sure.”
She took her phone out of her pocket and opened up her email. Where she saw an all-staff bulletin from Walker Grayson.
“What do you think of Walker?” Marlowe asked.
“Well, he is also hot. But… I’ll be honest with you, all these men are above my pay grade.”
“What does that mean?”
“They’re…” Cara lifted her fork and swirled it in the air, “wild mustangs. Like the kind that are somewhere around here. I think I need a kid’s party pony to start with.”
“To start –”
But she was distracted from asking the question by the all-staff bulletin. Because when she opened it, she saw that Walker was inviting everybody to the main venue barn for a grand opening barbecue two days before the hotel officially took its first guest.
“Well, it looks like I’m going to have to see Cody,” she said.
“Of course you are,” Cara said. “That’s what happens when you sleep with your boss. You can’t avoid him forever. And he can’t avoid you. Which, by the way, suggests that he’s not actually neutral about the situation.”
That was the worst thing Cara could’ve said to her. Because as long as Marlowe could pretend that Cody had forgotten about her, she could put all this to one side.
She had been all for accepting the messiness of it. Accepting that perhaps he had been a gift to her younger self,who hadn’t been allowed to make mistakes. Well, she’d made one, and it was all fine, so her younger self could rejoice.
Except…if it wasn’t over, that meant there was still a chance for it to go horribly wrong.
And that should scare Marlowe.
Instead, it made her stomach tighten with anticipation.
Chapter Eleven
“I don’t know why exactly you felt the need to give us all a fuckton more work to do right before the hotel opens.”
Walker glared at his brother, who was standing in the doorway of the main venue barn, arms crossed, expression sharp.
“It’s a trial run,” Walker said. “Testing out all this cracker-jack staff we hired, making sure we can get an event put together as quickly as we need to.”
“Well, you sure made us do it quickly.”
Though when Walker put it that way, he had a hard time being irritated at him. A hard time, not an impossible time.
