LUNA
Crossingthe threshold into Nate’s office, I tried to take small, imperceptible breaths through my mouth, hoping that would prevent me from picking up the intoxicating scent of cloves and leather with the subtle hint of tobacco. It was a smell that was distinctly Nate and left my brain muddled every damn time I smelled it. If I were honest, just one of those three scents set off a Pavlovian response in which my nipples tightened and my mouth grew dry as lust swamped me. It had gotten so damn bad I’d had to throw the jar of cloves I’d kept in my spice rack in the garbage because I kept opening it to get a sniff.
Pathetic.
Every time I smelled it, I was transported back to the night we first met, to that shitty bar where everything was sticky and covered in a layer of grime. It was a crying shame the man turned out to be such a pompous, hard-hearted dickhead, because he still managed to rev my engine somehow. It really wasn’t fair that a man who looked like that had a personality pricklier than a porcupine mating with a cactus.
I was halfway to his desk when his head came up, those eyes the color of smoke or a heavy mist, hitting me like a punch to the gut even with the space between us. They narrowed as they watched me grow closer, the ever-present furrow between his brows notching even deeper. “Why are you breathing like that?” he asked in a tone only a step or two up from accusatory.
“Like what?”
“Like you’re about to hyperventilate.”
Well, shit, I thought. So much for imperceptible.
“What’s wrong with you? Are you sick?” From the way he shot his chair back and curled his top lip up, you’d have thought I was about to cough tuberculosis all over his desk just for the fun of it.
“No, I’m not sick,” I said flatly, breathing normally now that my initial plan had failed. I’d just have to live with being able to smell him. The delicious bastard. “But your reaction would be heartwarming if I were.” I tossed the thin stack of sticky notes—still brightly colored because I was standing my ground on that one—onto his desk. “Here are the messages that came in overnight. And your calendar’s been updated to show your meetings for the rest of the month.”
“Great,” he said in a tone that indicated it was anything but as he snatched up the messages and began riffling through them. “Let’s see what we’ve got. Will update. Will update. Will update to, and I quote, ‘Make sure my lousy waste-of-oxygen son doesn’t get a single red cent.’ Will update. Divorce. Another will update. Divorce. And oh look.” He flipped the last one around for me to see. “Someone wants to sue their HOA because they got a notice that the sculpture in their front yard is against regulation for being too vulgar. That’s a new one.” When he was done, he tossed the sticky notes down on the desk with a disgusted sneer.
“Jeez, what the hell crawled up your butt?”
He turned that pinch-faced look back to me. “What crawled up my butt, as you so elegantly put it, is that this wasn’t exactly what I had in mind when I opened a practice in Whitecap. It’s a waste of a perfectly good law degree.”
It was my turn to curl my lip up in disgust. “Wow.”
“What?”
I shook my head in disbelief. “Nothing, boss. I’ll let you get back to it.” I turned on the heel of my flirty nude stiletto and started for the door when he called my name, bringing me to a stop.
“It’s obvious you have something to say, so just say it.”
The odds of keeping my job this were slim to none, but it had been three weeks of this shit. Three weeks of his childish bellyaching over his current lot in life that, at least from where I was standing, didn’t seem so damn bad, and I couldn’t take it for another freaking second.
Whipping back around, I cocked my hip, throwing one leg out, and planted my hands on my hips. “Okay. You asked for it.” At that, the infuriating man leaned deeper into his chair, rocking it backward and resting his elbows on the arms, fingers steepled in front of his chest like he was settling in. “I am sick and tired of listening to you bitch and whine like a toddler about everything under the damn sun,” I snapped. The dam inside me had broken, and every grievance, every slight I’d felt coming from him over the past two weeks came rushing out of me like a tidal wave.
“You think you have it bad?” I jabbed a finger in his direction with a caustic laugh. “I tried living the American dream, I tried having it all, being my own boss, a career I actually enjoyed, and I failed so spectacularly, I had to resort to working at the dive-iest of dive bars for extra cash so my water wouldn’t get shut off for a second time. As if that wasn’t humiliating enough, I’m now stuck working for a cold, callous prick I can’t stand so I don’t lose my house.
“And, oh! Just because that’s not enough crap dumped on my life, he also happens to be a random bar hookup I was never supposed to see again. But I suck it up. I swallow all that down and wake up each morning, determined to do it all over again, because I’m not a quitter. I’m an adult with adult responsibilities. No one promised us life was going to be easy or being a grownup was going to be a barrel of fun. It’s hard work. But you have to do it, so there’s no use whining about it,” I finished on a raised voice.
“And you think that’s what I’m doing? Whining because my life’s not fun?”
“Isn’t it?” I challenged. “From the way people react when they see you, what they say, it’s obvious when you blew out of here, you didn’t bother staying in touch with the people who’d been in your life from birth. You left Whitecap in your rearview and everyone who cared about you with it. To me, that says you think you’re better than this place.” I crossed my arms over my chest and narrowed my eyes in challenge. “Tell me I’m wrong.”
He opened his mouth to object but couldn’t, because he knew I had him. So I kept on chugging right along.
“Honestly, your self-important attitude blows my mind, because Georgia and Dezzy are two of the most down-to-earth, kind-hearted, hardworking people I’ve ever had the privilege of knowing. How they’d create someone as entitled and selfish as you is beyond me.” I clicked my tongue and shook my head, the action radiating disappointment. “But it sure makes sense to me now why your girl is the way she is. She’s come by her attitude honestly. Like father, like daughter.”
“You can’t—”
“You told me to,” I threw back in his face. “That means you get to sit there and take it.” My hand shot out like a rattlesnake about to strike. I lifted the first sticky note and turned it to him. “Will update for Mrs. Sills,” I read. “Might seem tedious to you, but seeing as she was just diagnosed with stage four breast cancer a couple weeks ago, I imagine it probably seems pretty serious to her.”
Nate’s entire frame deflated, and I knew my point had been made, but I wasn’t nearly done. “And this first divorce here,” I said, holding up yet another note. “This is Angela Hasky. Maybe drafting up those divorce papers is boring, but since this means she’s finally summoned up the courage to leave the man who’s been putting his hands on her for the past five years, I’m sure she’s downright terrified but strong enough to finally, finally see it through.”
I threw the rest of them down, scattering the brightly colored paper squares along the slick, polished wood surface of his desk. “You may think your law degree is going to waste on such menial tasks, but these are real people scraping together money to pay you for a job that’s important to them. So you’re not at some fancy, big-city firm, so the hell what? Get over it. If you’d pull that stick out of your ass long enough to look around, you’d see how great this town really is. This right here,” I jabbed my finger at the messages, “is good, honest work for good, honest people. You think you’re better than them? That you’re above this kind of thing? Then do everyone here a favor and leave, because if that’s your attitude, we don’t want you here.”
By the time I finished, I was breathing so heavily my chest heaved, straining the tiny buttons down the center of my soft, silky, pale pink blouse. The air in the room crackled with energy, adding a dangerous charge to the silence between us. Just when I thought I might blow my top if he didn’t say something, he spoke.