Page 56 of My Favorite Bad Decision
“Fuck,” I whisper, holding a hand to my throat, where my pulse gallops. “I don’t know what to do.”
Miller’s jaw flexes. “You get the hell out of here. That’s what you do.”
I shake my head, torn between fleeing and accepting my fate. “If Blake organized this whole thing to propose, I can’t just…not show. He’d be so embarrassed.”
Miller reaches out, placing a hand on my bicep. I shiver at the contact. “Exactly. And then he proposes, and you won’t want to embarrass him there either, and it’ll get harder and harder to dial it back. You said your mother already has this wedding half planned, which means she’s going to make it impossible for you to extricate yourself.”
He’s right. That’s how it’s always been with both of my parents when they want something. The cost of ending the relationship will only grow greater and greater, more and more excruciating. And my mom probably knows that Blake and I aren’t a good fit, and that I was not completely sold. She’s trying to get my signature on the dotted line before I come to my senses and walk out of the negotiation.
I could leave, but my mom, Maren, and Blake all have access to my apartment. I don’t think there’s anywhere in the city I could hide for as long as I’d need to while the dust settled.
“You didn’t have to blow off your safari. You could’ve just…called me.”
Something shifts in his eyes, a shutter closing, as if he’s scared I’ll see what is roaming around in his brain if I look too closely. “I was worried a call wouldn’t be enough. That your mom or someone else would guilt you and guilt you again until you found yourself engaged.”
I am not someone who gets bullied, but my mother would’ve tried to convince me I was being crazy, or that it was cold feet, or told me that this had been planned for weeks, and not showing up at the party would be atrocious. There are a million ways she could manipulate me successfully, and I guarantee she’d attempt every one of them if she had to, while the man in front of me just gave up a safari he’d always wanted to go on—after giving up the excursion he’d planned—all for me. Even Rob, as wonderful as he was, wouldn’t have done that.
“Jesus,” I say, rubbing my temples. “I don’t know how to get out of this. They knew I was on the way here. There’s no way to now tell them I can’t make it.”
“I have a house,” he says. “Starfish Cay. In Turks and Caicos.”
I blink. “That’s a weird flex in the middle of this conversation.”
He gives me a halfhearted smile “It wasn’t a flex,” he says. “It was an offer. We can leave straight for the airport right now. Text your mom; tell her you got sick. Say whatever you have to before they suck you in for good.”
“So I’d be going there…with you?”
“If you want me along, yes.”
Our gazes meet. I picture a few days alone with him in Starfish Cay. White sand. Clear water.
“As friends?” I ask, though in my head I’m already picturing a big, soft bed. His weight above mine.
“If that’s how you want it,” he says.
I glance away. That’s not how I want it, but that’s how it will have to be, for Maren’s sake. “Yes, as friends.”
“Fine,” he agrees. “Nothing more than friends, no matter how hard you beg.”
I laugh. “Let’s be realistic. If I begged, you’d give in.”
“Fair enough,” he says, his grin brighter than the chandelier overhead. “I’d like to point out that you are taking this conversation back into the territory of one we’d have if weweregoing to have sex.”
“We aren’t,” I insist.
He lifts his shoulders. “Don’t even want to.”
“Yeah, you do.”
“Kit, you’re doing it again.”
“Okay,” I whisper, looking around me. “Do I go pack?”
He hesitates for only a second and then shakes his head. “I think the important thing is that you get the hell out right now. We can go straight to the airport, get on a flight, and figure it out when we arrive.”
I look down at my strapless, red satin dress and four-inch heels. “I’m gonna look pretty weird on the beach in this.”
He bites down on a grin. “We can buy clothes there, and I’m guessing your father would pay a top designer to personally come outfit you if it meant you weren’t going to be marrying Blake.”
