“Kendall!”
She wasn’t sure which of them called after her, but it didn’t matter. She shoved up from the table and strode for the door, every bit of her self-control directed at making sure she didn’t actually sprint from the room. Leaving that space didn’t help, though. Not when she was still faced with evidence after evidence of her failure.
Kendall needed air and she needed it now.
It took her far longer than it should have to reach the deck. It was like her brain wasn’t firing on all cylinders and she’d lost the instinctive navigational skills that served her so well in NYC. Or maybe they weren’t skills at all, but just a habit born of her retracing the same steps over and over again.
Stuck.
She was so incredibly stuck.
Finally, a small eternity later, she found the right path to the top deck. Kendall stepped out into the darkness and immediately regretted the most recent questionable choice. It was cold. She wrapped her arms around herself and shivered. For someone who usually had a plan for everything, she’d forgotten the most important part of her wardrobe—her coat.
It didn’t matter as she drew her first full breath since realizing this trip wouldn’t be what she’d so desperately wanted. What she’d needed.
A break. A reset. A chance to get her head on straight and maybe even gain a little perspective on where things had gone so wrong. Oh, her life wasn’t wrong. She held down a good job. She had a very tiny but decent apartment. She had friends. She had her sisters, Marley and Gretchen, even if they were across the country.
But there were so many ways she didn’t measure up.
She worked twice as hard as anyone else on staff and had more responsibilities than her job description listed, and yet somehow kept getting passed over for the promotion to sales manager she so desperately wanted. She did all the work, ensured nothing fell through the cracks no matter how many ill-advised hires the general manager made. And yet, everyone considered her so firmly entrenched in her assistant position that she couldn’t see how she’d ever dig herself out. She felt just as trapped at work as she felt right now on this cruise she hadn’t wanted.
Impossible not to compare herself to her sisters and be found lacking on both sides. Gretchen was the perfect sister, the perfect wife, the perfect everything. She was back in their little Oregon town, living her dream life because she never once diverged from the path she’d set her eyes on when she was only a teenager.
And Marley? Marley might be as unattached as a dandelion blowing in the wind, but she made no apologies for it. She drifted from place to place, never letting others’ expectations box her in. She was free and bold and courageous.
Kendall? Kendall wasn’t perfect, she wasn’t bold, she certainly wasn’t courageous. She was simply Kendall. Not quite good enough.
“You’re going to freeze if you stay out here too long.”
She jumped and spun around. Kendall blurted out a response before stopping to think. “No one asked you.”
A low laugh drifted out of the darkness, followed by a man who looked vaguely familiar. It wasn’t until he stopped a few feet away that she realized why he was familiar. The man she’d seen earlier on the deck, the one who seemed to reach across the distance and stroke her skin with his gaze.
The same way he was doing now, dragging his attention over her in a way that was just shy of being rude. He didn’t linger at her breasts the way some guys would, seeming to want to take in the whole picture in equal measures.
“Stop staring at me.”
He finally refocused on her face and frowned. “You should go back inside.”
Consider that her skin sparked with little pricks of pain from the cold, that’s exactly what she should do. What she’d planned on doing, even. But that was before this man appeared to order her around. Before she’d seen the cumulations of her “almost but not quite” life brought to a head on this stupid cruise that she’d promised her friends would be just what they needed to relax and reconnect. “I’m fine.”
“Nah, I don’t think you are.” He considered her. “You’re going to be stubborn, aren’t you?”
“If by stubborn, you mean I’m going to continue with my previously intended plan, then yes, I’m going to be stubborn.” She couldn’t believe she’d just said that. Kendall was many things, but she wasn’t the shit-starter. That was Marley. She was the peacemaker. The one who smoothed out all situations to make it more comfortable for other people. The one who took care of other people. She didn’t bite a stranger’s head off, no matter how much they aggravated her.
He laughed a little. “Thought so.” He shrugged out of his leather jacket and dropped it over her shoulders before she could do more than stare.