“Marlowe… I’m sorry, I was avoiding you.”
“It’s okay,” she said. “I knew where to find you if I needed to.”
“I’m your boss.”
“I’m aware.”
“And I shouldn’t do this.”
“Do you think it makes you like your dad?”
He smiled, but it was grim. “No, but I think it makes me into something I don’t want to be. This place is important to me.”
His words were like a finely sharpened knife stabbed perfectly between her ribs. She was so damned tired of being stabbed.
“I’m just a hookup,” she said, acerbic and angry now.
“I didn’t say that.”
She felt like he’d said it, though. Felt like she’d been brought back in and then pushed away. She hated it.
“No. But I feel like that’s what you meant.”
“It isn’t what I meant,” he said, his voice clipped. Hard. “I say what I mean, Marlowe, that’s the one thing you can trust me on. What we had… It was good. But I’ve spent my whole life building toward this moment.”
“And I’m a distraction.”
“Stop fucking telling me what you are. You don’t know what I think. It has nothing to do with you. Nothing to do with whatyouare, and everything to do with whatIam.” He looked away, then down. “I don’t want a romance. I can’t give you anything.”
She wanted to knock the cowboy hat right off his head.
“Great,” and she said, “I don’t want anything. I don’t want anything but this job. I don’t want anything but this new life that I’m building by myself. I sure as hell don’t want a man covering it all up. Been there, done that. Thanks for trying to placate me by doing theit’s not you, it’s mething, but I didn’t need placating. I just lost a whole husband, Cody. I’m not going to cry over a one-night stand.”
She pushed away from the barn, and she stormed back toward the party. When he tried to tell her to stop, she flashed him her middle finger and kept on walking.
Maybe it would have been helpful for him to remind her again that he was her boss.
Because you probably, definitely, shouldn’t flip your boss the bird after making out with him, and telling him he wasn’t going to make you cry.
But that was just too bad.
There was only so much one woman could take, and Marlowe was at her limit.
One thing hadn’t been entirely true, though.
Cody was closer to making her cry than she’d like to admit.
Chapter Thirteen
Cody spent the whole rest of the evening steeped in regret.
He’d messed it up because he had no idea what he was doing when it came to…whatever the hell this was. Had been.
He knew women. He knew their bodies. He knew them generally speaking, knew how to make them laugh, make them sigh, make them come.
But this was a whole separate situation altogether.
Because with her, things just seemed to go wrong. An epic sign from the universe, or wherever, that he needed to leave it alone.
