“I need some advice,” Spur said, running his hands down his legs to his knees. He’d changed into a pair of gym shorts and a T-shirt, and if he could get his mind settled about tomorrow, he might be able to go to sleep.
“Okay,” Blaine said. “About Olli?”
“Yes,” Spur said. “It’s not a terribly long story, but it starts with Olli asking me to be her fake boyfriend so she could get this grant she applied for.”
“Fake boyfriend?” Blaine asked.
“It became real very soon after that,” he said. “On the first date, actually.” He looked down at his hands, his mind racing. “We talked about that. Admitted it.” Mostly he’d admitted his feelings for Olli. “There was kissing, and I started helping her with this new men’s line of colognes she’s been working on. The investor is coming tomorrow, and I’ve promised her I’ll be there.”
“Then you have to be there,” Blaine said.
Spur looked up and met his brother’s eyes. “She told me tonight she doesn’t need me. She thinks it’s stupid to need a man to have a business and get a grant.”
Blaine nodded, his head sort of rolling from side to side. “I can see her point.”
“She broke up with me,” Blaine said. “She told me not to come.”
“You want to go.”
Spur started nodding, and he couldn’t get himself to stop. “I want to go.” Agony burned through him. “Why do I want to go? She wouldn’t admit to me that she’d done anything wrong by using a hook-up website to get male testers for her cologne panel. She thinks she can do anything by herself—and she probably can. She’s never confessed her feelings to me the way I have her, and then she just drove away from me like the last two weeks meant nothing to her.”
He sucked in a breath and held it to force himself to calm down.
Blaine just watched him for a few seconds. “You want to go, because you want her to get the grant.”
“Sure,” Spur said.
“It’s more than that.”
Spur couldn’t confirm or deny Blaine’s statement, though it was absolutely more than that.
“You want to do what’s right.”
“Yes,” Spur agreed. He’d always want to do what was right.
“You don’t want to hurt her.”
“No.”
“But you don’t want to be hurt either.”
Spur swallowed and looked at the floor. “I’ve already been hurt.”
“I can’t tell you what to do,” Blaine said. “I think you have to do the same thing here that you did with Katie.”
Spur didn’t want to walk away. He didn’t want to go through that pain again, though his heart beat shallowly in his chest in much the same way it had when he’d signed the papers that made his divorce final.
“Follow your heart,” Blaine said, standing. “Now, if you’ll excuse me, I’m going to go do the same thing.” He left, and it wasn’t until the door clicked closed that Spur realized what he’d said.
“What?” he asked. As far as Spur knew, the only woman Blaine spoke to was Tam. Had he met someone else?
Thoughts of his brother only distracted him for a moment, and then he went right back to thinking about Olli and what he should do at two o’clock tomorrow afternoon.