Page 13 of Right With You
I regretted scaring her, but the smile told me enough. My threat to him hadn’t been what’d scared her as much as the whole situation.
“And Glazed? Do you love it still?”
She moved, almost flinched, at my question and leaned a shoulder against the brick wall next to us. “Of course.”
This woman was passion and drive. She was loving and bold. This answer held none of those things.
“Hmm.”
One brow raised. “Hmm what? You have something to say?”
I shrugged again. “I don’t know you well enough to be certain, but I suspect you aren’t being truthful.”
She gaped at me, then after a beat said, “You are not what I expected.”
Every ounce of my self-control activated in order to keep from stepping close, backing her against that wall, and lowering my lips to her ear and begging her to tell me what that meant. If I wasn’t what she expected, then that meant she’d expected something. Somehow, this struck me as an incredible leap forward from not thinking of me at all.
This didn’t matter in the scheme of things. She’d just made clear she didn’t want a relationship, and when I was thinking logically, neither did I. The wreckage love brought with it wasn’t something I wanted after witnessing my father, a man I’d loved and respected, become a useless jerk in the wake of losing my mother.
Now, the only important thing was getting through this. But it wouldn’t hurt if she liked the prospect of spending time with me to some degree.
“I hope you’re pleasantly surprised,” I offered, sounding miraculously nonchalant. She needn’t know how much I hoped we could make this work and convince my grandfather.
She laughed softly. “I don’t know what I am other than a stressed-out small business owner and, apparently, your fake fiancée.”
Dove Jensen’s blond locks caught my eye behind Elise, and she waved. “Everything okay out here?”
I gestured for Elise to head inside, not wanting to detain her any longer. If her friend was here to check on her, that likely meant none of them trusted me with her. I didn’t like this, though I respected it. Unlike the other Saint men save Stone, they didn’t know me very well. And we were done, at least for now.
“I’ll be in touch soon, if that’s alright?” I asked.
She glanced over her shoulder. “Sounds good.”
Once she was out of sight, I sent a text to Kenny notifying him I was leaving. I couldn’t stand at the table and laugh at jokes and pretend my attention was on anyone but the woman who’d just slipped back inside.
I needed time to think, and I needed to call my sister back tomorrow and get her advice right before I begged her to come distract my grandfather from the unsuspecting woman inside.
This hadn’t gone as terribly as I’d expected, which only spoke to Elise’s generosity.
Part of me chafed at that—she shouldn’t give me the time of day, let alone be asking how I was feeling about all of this. We hardly knew one another even if I felt… whatever this was for her. And yet another small part of me, perhaps the voice that’d spoken her name over the line to my grandfather in the first place… that voice was absolutely thrilled.
CHAPTERSIX
Elise
Dove’s eyes grew so wide, I thought maybe her bright blue irises would pop out of her head and take flight.
“Engaged?” she whisper-hissed as though anyone would overhear us in my cramped apartment. Occasionally, my neighbors banged on the door, but they wouldn’t now due to it being a level conversation in the middle of the day.
“Yes. Engaged.”
Her eyes narrowed. “I knew you were being weird. The whole time after you went outside with him, I knew something was up and I should’ve pushed.”
“You did push, but I didn’t cave. I don’t want anyone to know.” I shifted on the couch, curling into a ball and wrapping my arms around my knees. How often had I felt this same thing? The dread and even fear that my friends would find out the truth about the real dynamic with Callum? Or the fact that Glazed was very close to floundering, and I was trying my best not to be miserable about it?
Or even, the truth about my roots—the reality that I came from a woman who used men for their bank accounts, then moved on when they were emptied. That I worried I’d end up just like her.
Dove didn’t even know about the altercation outside Glazed, when Luc pinned dirtbag Callum to the wall with his forearm and called himself my boyfriend. He could’ve said ‘her knight in shining armor’ and it wouldn’t have been any less true, because in that moment, that’s what he was. It was just all so… unreal. And the boyfriend thing paled in comparison to the fiancé situation.
