Page 84 of Stirring Up Love
Not expecting a reply, she climbed out, but Finn met her by the trunk.
“You can turn it down,” he said. “You can walk away, and I would understand.”
She wanted to believe him. Wanted to go back to not caring if he understood or not, even as she desired him more than ever, there in the softly falling snow and country darkness.
“What about you?” She’d been scared to ask. Scared of what his answer might do to them. “Do you want it? Really want it?”
He looked away, jaw bunched tight in the red glow of the taillights. “I don’t see another way to make my culinary school a reality. And I don’t know if I believe in a higher purpose, but ...” He trailed off. Thistime when he met her eyes, she saw need, raw and bare. “Yeah, I want it. But I want you more.”
There he was, the Finn who’d been missing all day. Cards on the table when she kept hers close to her chest. And unlike him, she wanted it all.
CHAPTER 30
FINN
The whole entire purpose of renting a car and driving halfway across the country was to convince Simone to take the deal. And his parting words? His monumental closing argument?
Yeah, I want the deal.But I want you more.
The worst part? It was true.
Last night she’d asked him if her not taking the deal would change things, and he’d hesitated. Hesitated all day, for every mile of the drive. So could he blame her for merely nodding at his declaration? For taking her suitcase out of the trunk and saying, “I’ll text you”?
What more could he ask when a week ago they’d been enemies? The twisted terms of the deal pitted them against each other, even in a merger. There was no winning. Not for both of them. Maybe not for either of them.
Shifting into reverse, he craned his neck back to navigate the long drive. He braked with a curse, car idling in the drifting snow flurries. Simone’s purse lay on the back seat. For a cowardly second he considered pretending he hadn’t seen it to avoid facing her after his embarrassingly one-sided declaration.
Should he hang it on the doorknob, knock, and run away like a prankster? Super weird. Then again, the vibe he’d been getting from Simone was very muchI’ve-spent-the-past-few-days-with-you-and-now-I’m-home-and-reality-is-setting-in-and-I-fully-regret-kissing-you.Which meant she might appreciate the leave-the-bag-and-run maneuver.
Still, even though this house sat on the edge of nowhere, leaving a purse unattended outside at night seemed like a bad idea. So he braced himself for a quick, face-saving getaway and knocked.
Laughter, then the door swung open to reveal a woman with a short blonde afro wearing a matching tie-dye lounge set. She broke into a wide smile. “Simone, you little minx. You ordered a stripper?” She sized him up, and her perusal stopped at his open collar. “Tats too? Ooh, he couldn’t have come cheap.”
His cheeks flamed. What had he been thinking, crashing a bachelorette party?
“Chantal, quit torturing him.” Simone entered the room, a jar of salsa in her hand and an unreadable expression on her face. “What are you still doing here?”
Talk about a gut punch. Was it too late to toss the purse into the room like an unpinned grenade and run?
Feeling like a caveman who’d clubbed a rat and brought it home, only to discover a pig roasting on the spit, he held out the purse. “You left this in the car.”
“What’s Barbecue Guy still doing here?” Meg entered the room, carrying a bottle of Fireball whiskey, and he instinctively smiled at the familiar face, but a second later his brain registered the fact that she knew his name from the farmers’ market and hadn’t used it.
He took a step back, a cold wind blowing at his nape. “I was just leaving.”
“You can’t go without some refreshment.” This from a fourth woman he hadn’t noticed because she was folded up on the couch underan enormous bowl of tortilla chips. Her eyes were darker than Simone’s, but the sly smile was the same. Must be her sister, Alisha.
She bit off a corner of chip, talking around it. “I, for one, am super happy you’re not a stripper, because I would’ve had to murder my sister. I expressly said no penises.”
No penises. “Got it.” He took an involuntary step back. Self-preservation. “Wouldn’t want to violate any rules.”
Alisha laughed. “The ‘no penises’ rule only applies to naked ones or fake ones.”
“Oh, well, mine’s real.” His cheeks blazed. “And covered, as you can see.”
The woman nearest him—Chantal?—snickered at his discomfiture. He got it; her allegiance was to Simone, and the last time any of these women had seen him, he was dissing her on set.
What had she told them in the time since? Nothing good, it seemed.
