“And you won’t either,” he continued, pressing her. “All the disdain you’ve kept carefully at bay the past few weeks can come spilling out.”
“I’ve enjoyed the past few weeks!” she yelled.
She looked as surprised at her outburst as he felt.
“Yeah?” he asked carefully. Careful to keep his voice casual. Curious, rather than desperate.
“Yeah,” she said with a shrug. “I also really like butter pecan ice cream, doesn’t mean it’s good for me every day.”
She might as well have stabbed him.
A harsh laugh came out of his mouth. “Okay, then. Got it. This tub of Häagen-Dazs will just get himself back to his own house, yeah?”
His hand went for the handle of the front door when her voice stopped him, a quiet, tentative plea. “One last thing.”
Will froze, but didn’t turn around.
“Last night…the fire, the candles…the…intensity…What was that?”
It wasn’t easy for her to ask. He knew that. It also revealed that she recognized a tiny crack in her carefully laid plan.
But the question was too little, too late. He was done helping her find answers. Done providing them for her.
She was on her own.
“Last night is what I like to call the sexual grand finale.” He shot her a steady, cool look over his shoulder. “I’m not surprised you dug it. Most women do.”
He wasn’t the only one that could read between the lines. He saw in her narrowed blue eyes that she caught his implication. Last night was commonplace. You’re not the only one.
“Well, for what it’s worth, it needed some work,” she said in a waspish tone.
He gave a careless shrug as he opened the door. “I did the best I could with a subpar partner.”
And just like that, they were back to where they started.
Like they hadn’t gone anywhere at all.
CHAPTER TWENTY
Your parents have the right to only
know you as their little girl.
—Brynn Dalton’s Rules for an
Exemplary Life, #52
Now, tell me again why you cut your hair, honey?”
Brynn plucked a fancy olive off one of her mother’s trademark hors d’oeuvre platters and mentally patted herself on the back for dyeing her hair back to its natural blonde color before trying to survive dinner with her parents.
If her mother was having this much trouble adjusting to the choppy layers, the dark color might have made her swoon.
To say nothing of the tattoo that her mom would absolutely never see.
One step closer…
“Just wanted a little change,” Brynn said as she reached for the pile of cloth napkins and began carefully sticking them through her mother’s pewter napkin rings.