Something inside me shriveled.
“Yeah,” he muttered.
Zeke came up and sniffed my feet.
It wasn’t Zeke’s fault I couldn’t have his dad.
So I took time for more rubs, these full body.
Zeke licked my wrist.
Quiet, behaved, affectionate, crazy adorable.
Perfect.
Totally Judge’s dog.
“Just stop when you’re done giving the love. He’s good at taking the hint.”
Of course he was.
But I didn’t want to stop.
I really did not.
I stopped.
Coming out of my crouch, I caught Judge’s eyes on my heels, a look in them I never wanted to go away.
I sealed that up tight too, focusing instead on the fact I should change.
However, I wasn’t going to.
I was going to get this done.
As fast as possible
“Let’s work and eat at the coffee table,” I said efficiently, but in a way that it was an order, slipping my laptop out of the attaché.
“Works for me,” Judge replied unnecessarily, since nothing else was going to happen.
Nothing.
At all.
Ever.
My stomach clutched.
We loaded up salads, even though, for my part, eating it might make me sick. We grabbed beers, even though, for my part, I’d prefer to slug gin from a bottle. And Judge took his backpack to the coffee table, thankfully picking one of the armchairs flanking it, rather than the couch, where I wanted to sit, and I didn’t want him to give indication he wanted to sit by me or have the awkwardness of me avoiding him.
Zeke seemed uncertain as to where to position himself. In the end, he proved how good a dog he was, politely, selecting sitting by his father as his place to beg for people food with his eyes.
We settled and Judge began, “Chloe—”
I cut in. “It’d be good to start with where your issues lie with my draft proposal.”
“Chloe,” that was somehow both sharper and warmer.
My gaze cut right to him.
And I said what I had to say.
“As it’s obvious I didn’t make myself clear, I’ll do it now. We’re not doing this,” I declared. “You were right. After you left, I spent some time thinking about it. And yes, I find you attractive. Yes, we had a nice time this past weekend. But you’re an employee of Duncan’s. Duncan is soon to be my stepfather. As such, when it doesn’t work out with us, it’ll be messy. I don’t do messy. And I don’t make my family put up with messy.”
His brows had bunched as I spoke, and he shared why with his, “When?”
“What?”
“When we don’t work?”
I puffed a you-should-know-this-already mini-breath out of my nostrils.
And then I shared what he should know.
“I’m far too young to get seriously involved with a man. You’re settled in Prescott. I love it there, but I have no intention or desire to move there. Frankly, if my boutique takes off as I hope it will, I’ll be opening more, eventually moving back to LA. So, since this doesn’t have the prospects of a good end, but it does have the prospects to make things awkward for people I care about, including me, I see no reason for it to begin.”
That was a lie.
All of it, most especially the last.
But also about LA.
I’d been far away from my family for a good long spell when I was in France.
That wasn’t going to happen again, not unless it was them that moved, and they did it to a place I didn’t want to be.
Furthermore, I loved Phoenix. There was something…unfinished about it. Young. New. It was sprawling and impersonal in the sense you could be private, feel that privacy, but it was still friendly. There was culture. Class. History. Just the existence of the Biltmore Hotel and The Gammage made Phoenix somewhere I wanted to be.
In LA, I knew people.
In LA, my mother was the deposed queen.
In LA, I felt like a nobody.
Here, I was just me.
Judge cut into my train of thought.
He did this saying, “Fine.”
On this word, I came back to the room and our conversation with a razor-sharp focus on his neutral face.
Not carefully neutral, or overly neutral, or affectedly neutral.
Genuinely neutral.
He was fine with us not going there, not angry.
Just…
Neutral.
Oh my God.
What had I thought this was?
I was an attractive woman. I was, indeed, interesting. I had a famous family, and that made me more interesting. I did not want for male attention.
He saw me, I saw him, sparks flew, something came of that, but we’d only had a day and a half where it was something we were both exploring.
Through it, and especially recently, I was adamant about not going there. I’d behaved badly on more than one occasion. The email had been an appalling idea. Judge was right, it was uncool. It wasn’t like we had anything to break up, but that was ill-mannered and detached and Judge didn’t deserve that.
Then there was my most recent speech.
And he was good with that.
He was no longer here to talk me into more exploration of what could be us, not after I’d laid it out, making no bones about it.