Page 72 of Trust Fund Baby

She turned her head to face me fully, her hair spilling forward over one shoulder. “Everything with you is complicated.”

“Not everything,” I murmured, my eyes dragging down her face to her mouth before I could stop myself.

Her lips parted the tiniest bit—whether in surprise or something else, I couldn’t tell—but she didn’t look away.

I took a sip of water, partly because I was thirsty, mostly because I needed something to do other than lean in and kiss her in front of the entire bar. But that was just impossible, wishful thinking. The two of us had barely said more than a handful of sentences to each other since the Hamptons. And none of them had been good.

The Hamptons. Where I’d finally gotten a taste of what it was like to have her.

And by the look on her face, she knew I’d been starving for her ever since.

Roxie’s eyes narrowed. “You’re staring,” she said, her tone light, but her fingers tightened on her glass.

“Am I?”

“Yes.” She took another sip of her drink, not breaking eye contact.

“Do you want me to stop?” I said, leaning in until the faintest trace of her perfume threaded through the smell of bourbon and fried food.

Her lips curved, slow and deliberate. “You’d be surprised.”

I almost asked her what she meant, but then Joey slid another round down the bar, the clink of glass snapping the tension just enough for her to look away. The spell broke, but only barely.

“Can I ask you a question?” she asked finally.

“Absolutely,” I said without hesitation.

“The Hamptons.” Her gaze cut back to me, sharp now.

“Do you believe that I didn’t mean to hurt you by leaving?”

My throat went dry. Not from the lack of alcohol, this was something else entirely.

Her voice was low enough that only I could hear.

“I think I do,” she said, and the words came out rough, unpolished. “But that doesn’t change the fact that it hurt me. It doesn’t take away how I felt waking up and thinking you’d run out like it was nothing more than a one-night stand.”

I didn’t know what to say. I’d been measuring every day since the Hamptons against the night I had with her, and everything else had come up short.

Her eyes stayed locked on mine, like she was daring me to speak.

“It was a mistake,” I lied. The words tasted like ash in my mouth. I regretted them almost immediately.

“Funny,” she said softly, “you didn’t look like a man making a mistake when we were on that sofa together.”

I let out a slow breath of relief. She was playing with me, even though I’d hurt her. Slowly, very subtly, but surely, she was giving me a way back in. “Rox—”

But I didn’t get to finish.

Someone clapped me hard on the shoulder, jolting me back into the noise of the bar. “Bastian, man, are you in here hiding?” It was Nate DeMarco, an old college friend, who had also majored in business to make his family happy before he took over the business. He was grinning, smelling faintly of cigars and trouble. There weren’t many people who would take things further than me, except Nate DeMarco.

I barely had time to process Nate’s question before he pivoted to Roxie, his grin widening.

“Hi, there. I’m Nate,” he said, stepping closer, that easy, overconfident grin plastered on his face. “I don’t think we’ve met before.”

Roxie raised an eyebrow, clearly taken aback by how charming Nate was. “Roxie,” she said. “How do you know Sebastian?”

“College. We were in the same classes. You know how it is,” he said, smiling like he owned the entire room.