“I just said that to hear you make that sound. I’ll sleep on the floor. It’s fine.”
She exhales shakily, and nods. “I’m sorry,” she whispers, just before we reach the rest of her family.
* * *
That apology is still ringing in my ears an hour later when the perfect excuse for an early bedtime happens.
“Do you snowboard, Jake?” Nathan asks.
No, because I don’t have a death wish. “Is that on the agenda for tomorrow?”
Sienna shoots me a wary look. “We don’t have to.”
As long as I have known Sienna, she has been a willful wild child. A brat, I like to think fondly, late at night.Mybrat, I indulge in the dark, when my cock throbs and nobody is there to see how much I lust for my young assistant.
And when that lust whips to a painful fervour, I think of her as my little girl. My young secret.
But I’m never unaware that she is a whole person, a woman who knows her own mind.
And she never holds her tongue with me. Always makes her opinions known, even when I don’t ask for them.
She’s bold and strong and fearless.
Who is this uncertain child?
And what does she need from me to be more like her usual self?
“No, it sounds great. But I don’t have the appropriate gear. Can I rent it in the village, or…?”
“We have extra snowpants and jackets that will fit,” Sienna’s mother assures me. “And you can rent equipment at the hill.”
“Excellent.” I glance at my watch. “And if we’re going to do that, then we should turn in, shouldn’t we?”
She worries at her lip, but quickly nods. “Night everyone,” she says quickly, not making eye contact with anyone.
I follow her up the stairs to the room on the third floor, which I realize on closer inspection is clearly designed for a child. “Sienna, this room—”
“It’s ridiculous, I know.” She exhales loudly and shakes her hand at me, her fingers wiggling dismissively. “Don’t start.”
I smother a grin. That’s more like it. “I wouldn’t dream of starting.”
“They mean well.”
“They treat you like a child.”
“Yeah, well…to them, I was a child just a few years ago.” She grabs her bag and heads for the bathroom. “I’ll get changed and washed up first, okay?”
She doesn’t wait for me to accept the plan.
While she’s in there, I check my email. There are messages from my brother and sister concerned about my sudden change of plans. Instead of spending the week in San Diego with them, I’ve followed Sienna across the country and up a mountain, and I can’t tell them about this yet, because I don’t know how it will end.
And if she rejects me, I don’t want them to know I’ve failed to hold on to the most precious person in the whole wide world to me.
My brother and sister are the only family I have now, and Sienna has come to feel just as important to me as they do. Even more so in many ways. All the important ways, and like an idiot, I didn’t see it until I’d gone and made her all the way mad at me. So angry she needed to never see me again.
Not that I accepted that for a second. As soon as I finished reading her letter, I was on the phone to the airline I fly with the most, begging for any ticket they could find for me to get to Denver today.
But even as I stormed to the airport and flew toward her without a second thought, I didn’t ‘think I’d be searching an attic nursery for extra pillows to make a spare bed on the floor.