Page 4 of An Inconvenient Plan
Damned if he knew, and he knew better than to hazard a guess in her fragile state. He looked into her red swollen pale blue eyes, at a complete loss as to how to comfort her.
She sniffled and more tears leaked out along with sad little sobs. Like a kitten who’d been abandoned in the rain, all scrappy heartbreak.
His shoulders tensed, creeping up toward his ears as if that would block out the sound.
“I don’t want anyone to see my eyes like this,” she whispered. The engagement party was still going strong, all of their friends and family having a great time without them. Probably wondering what was taking them so long back here too.
She blew her nose again. “I should go back to the party.”
They’d gone this round already. Hailey:I should go back to the party.Him:Let’s go.Hailey:But how can I? My mom will think I’m not happy for her, but I am! Sob!
Before she could get going again, he said, “How about we take a walk? The cold air will help clear your head. Maybe we could stop and get your money from my place.” He really would like to get that off his hands and know that he’d righted the wrong between them.
The crying abruptly stopped. His shoulders eased away from his ears as the fire returned to her eyes.
“Are you nuts?” she exclaimed.
He completely relaxed. Fighting with her was so much better than feeling helpless watching her fall apart. “Must be.”
She huffed, all indignant. “Damn right you are. You think I want a repeat of what happened last time?”
He bit back a smile. Not because what had happened last time was so great, but because she was back in fighting form.
She jabbed a finger at him. “Don’t you smirk at me, you scoundrel!”
A-a-a-and she was back.
Hailey held the cold compresses made from folded paper towels to her eyes. “Thank you.”
“No problem.”
Josh was being so nice to her, bringing her cold compresses and hiding her embarrassing tears in the privacy of his office, but she couldn’t even work up a smile. Normally she could always work up a smile. Her pageant training had taught her that. Something in her broke today. Her mom had found her forever love, all of her friends had found their forever loves, while she, a diehard romantic—a fucking wedding planner for God’s sake!—had shit.
Okay, so maybe she’d been too busy creating a strong foundation for her wedding planning business to make any real effort to find a relationship, but she had madesomeeffort. She’d been taking notes for years on what made relationships work, through intensive study of her friends, her clients, and romantic movies and books. And she’d ended a friends-with-benefits arrangement and let everyone know she was open to a relationship. What had it gotten her? Zilch.
So humiliating. She loved love, she’d even added the moniker “Love Junkie” to her business card so clients would know just how much she supported them in the ultimate expression of their love, their wedding. Now she couldn’t even muster the effort to check her online dating profile. It was like her whole identity had broken. No, it haddied. All this time she’d thought she was a Love Junkie when she was really a Love Loser. She couldn’t see a way forward. All she saw was a lifetime of bearing witness to other people’s happy endings. And she was the leader of the Happy Endings Book Club too, a romance book club she’d started as a singles book club. Now she was the only single woman left. Ugh. The painful irony. She should’ve been the first to find her happy-ever-after.
Her eyes welled again, and she took the cold compresses off to help them dry.
Josh stared at her from across the desk. Her nemesis and soon-to-be “brother.” Barf. He’d deeply hurt her feelings onthe night that went horribly wrong. In the six weeks since that night, she’d figured out a perfectly reasonable explanation as to whyit went wrong. She’d guzzled down a cran-vodka that was mostly vodka on an empty stomach at ladies’ night right before she went to Josh’s apartment. Normally she only sipped at wine. Naturally, the alcohol had made her horny—hello, six-month dry spell—and Josh’s apartment had been way too hot, like a hundred degrees in there, giving her the strong urge to feel cool air on her skin. On top of that, in her woozy state, she’d mistaken the tension she felt with Josh as sexual when it was just the usual irritation. Horny plus hot and irritated equaled a wardrobe malfunction. Embarrassing, yes, but perfectly understandable. It could’ve happened to anyone in similar circumstances. If Josh brought it up again, she’d explain it in exactly that way. Wardrobe malfunction brought on by too much vodka summed it up nicely. Except—
That was a lie.
Despite their twisted history of one-upmanship, despite all their fighting, she and Josh were cut from the same cloth. They both loved a challenge, they both felt passionately about their chosen professions (he’d been saving for years for his dream bar), and they were both steady and strong. That stability was something she’d worked hard to achieve as an adult after her unstable childhood. So there she was back on that fateful night, sitting at the bar with her friends, reeling from the news that her mom and Josh’s dad, Joe, were moving in together after only five weeks of dating. Worlds colliding! Her hard-won stability tipped to the anxiety of her childhood with her flaky mom about to ruin everything. Hailey was sure her mom would ditch Joe, and then the Campbell family would turn on Hailey by association for hurting their dad. Mad Campbell was her best friend, she was close with many of the Campbell brothers, and Joe had always treated her like part of the family. Poor Joe had already had a wife who ditched him and his six kids. Her mom would just reopen that wound and leave everyone furious.
And then there was Josh behind the bar, being his laid-back rock-steady self. In that emotionally charged moment, she’d realized Josh wasexactlythe kind of man she needed in her life. In fact, he might be the only one who truly understood her (since they were similar in the ways that counted), the only one who could give her comfort just by being his strong stable self. For so long she’d had all these pent-up feelings where Josh was concerned. He excited her, aggravated her, entertained her, and, okay, she could admit he turned her on with his sexy confidence that told her she’d be in good hands.
Despite everything, she’d trusted that he’d catch her when she fell into his arms.
Only she’d fallen face-first into utter humiliation. He wasn’t even tempted. She was standing there exposed (literally), and he’d turned her down flat.
She’d scrambled to put some distance between them in any way she could. Drawbridge up, battle lines firmly back in place. A drunken wardrobe malfunction was the only way to save face.
“Come on, Hailey, let’s get some fresh air. We’ll get your money—”
“No.” She tried to add a good glare, but her eyes were too swollen to pull it off. At least he’d called her by her real name instead of princess. Probably because he felt sorry for her. She was an ugly crier and rarely gave in to tears, preferring anger, which was motivating, or sheer grit to get through. The last time she’d cried was when she’d ended her friends-with-benefits relationship. The time before that? Way back when she was a kid and found herself homeless for the second time because her single mom didn’t pay the rent. The first time she’d been too shocked to cry. Just another example of her mom’s flakiness. She’d regularly skipped out on work and gotten fired, which was why they couldn’t make rent and ended up homeless twice. Add to that the fact that her mom fell in and out of love easily and no relationship had ever worked out, and it was easy to see why Hailey craved a stable foundation. No one and nothing had ever stuck for her. Even now she kept waiting for her life to fall apart.
“Let’s go, princess.”
