Page 4 of No Apologies
He softened his stance, “I’m about to close up for the night. It’s been slow and I’ve got somewhere to be.”
“Oh, yeah, no problem.” Trey nodded good-naturedly.
“Let’s get you on the books though, we need to get that thing finished.”
He forced himself to open his calendar and make small talk with a man he wanted to hate as they found a good day and time for an appointment. The truth was, he didn’t like talking to Trey because the more he got to know him, the harder it was to hate him. The guy was too damn easy to like. Trey was a good guy, which just made lusting after his girlfriend that much worse.
Colt really was a bastard.
If there was one thing in the world Skylar Holland hated it was being treated like an invalid. She’d been sick when she was a little kid, like really sick. She’d spent more time in the hospital than she had the schoolhouse. There had been doctors that she called aunt and uncle because she saw them so often but that had all changed when she was twelve and the surgeons finally fixed her broken heart.
And no, that joke would never get old.
What did get old, however, was the way her parents, older brother and pretty much everyone in her life still treated her with kid gloves. As if she was still weak and sickly. As if she were a fragile, breakable thing.
She wasn’t.
She’d worked hard to show them that she was happy and healthy. That she was fully capable of living a normal, typical life. That she could do and be whatever she wanted, just like anyone else, no matter what the scar on her chest looked like.
Part of that was living an independent life. She’d insisted on going to cosmetology school. She’d moved out of her parents’ house at the first opportunity and over their arguments. She’d even gone so far as to refuse her parents’ money to open the salon.
Split Ends was hers. Not her parents. Not her family’s. Hers, and okay yeah, maybe a little bit of it still belonged to the bank. But it was something she’d done herself, gotten for herself.
She’d needed to do it on her own, to prove that she could, and she had.
She liked to think of herself as stubborn and independent and those were not dirty words in her opinion just because she was a woman. She didn’t need anyone to do anything for her that she couldn’t do herself and she liked it that way. She’d spent too many years at the mercy of others, being coddled and catered to when she was sick. She wanted to prove she was strong.
But God, she didn’t feel strong right now. She felt weak. She felt emotional. And she kind of wanted her mommy.
Being sick was the worst. She hated it. She tried like hell not to do it really. She worshipped at the altar of Lysol and washed her hands religiously. During flu season she downed Vitamin C and was always careful about germs and being around other sick people. She couldn’t even remember the last time she’d been sick.
That was why, when she’d first felt nauseous, she’d honestly thought it was some sort of sympathy pain for her roomie/best friend forever. Jemma had a case of early onset morning sickness that was in no way relegated strictly to mornings. For the past few weeks, the girl had all but lived in the bathroom so at the first sign of sickness, Skylar had blamed her best friend, naturally.
Twenty-four hours later, with her stomach cramping, an inability to hold down anything heavier than water and a fever that alternately burned her from the inside out or chilled her to the bone, she’d been forced to admit that shemightactually need a doctor.
Maybe.
She hadn’t decided yet. She was going to give it a few more hours to see if she improved first. Or died. Because the only thing she hated more than being sick was being treated like she was sick and doctors had a special brand of condescension that set her teeth on edge. She hated doctors so much the idea of going to see one sent a chill through her that had nothing to do with her current illness.
It was probably just food poisoning. That was what she’d decided sometime this morning while she was praying at the porcelain altar. That was what she got for trying grocery store sushi in a rural Oklahoma town nowhere near a coastline. Yeah, it was definitely food poisoning which meant it would pass on its own… eventually.
In the meantime, she’d made a fort in the bathroom so she didn’t have to run back and forth from her bed. She was buried under a pile of pillows and blankets that helped warm her when the fever spiked and she felt like she was freezing. Alternately the cool tile floor beneath her was hard but provided a much needed chill when the fever broke.
Gross? Yeah, definitely. But she didn’t really care what anyone thought of her current predicament because she never intended to tell anyone just how sick she was.
She would rather suffer in silence, alone, than deal with her family while she was sick. She knew the drill too well. One mention of feeling under the weather and her parents went into overprotective mode, convinced she was backsliding and should have every three letter test known to man administered immediately. They would show up and drag her straight to the hospital and if by some miraculous feat she convinced them she only needed to stay at home in bed, they too would stay and hover over her as if every breath might be her last.
They meant well, she knew that. She was their baby girl. She was their only daughter. She’d been ill from the day she was born so that every moment of her childhood had been spent with them worrying about her. She knew that even if she hadn’t been a sick child with a serious medical condition that it would have been natural for them to worry about her. But that didn’t mean it was any less annoying.
Luckily, both of her normal babysitters were out of town for the weekend. Her older brother, Owen, had taken a last minute shift filling in on a rig somewhere in Texas this week so he wouldn’t be by to pester her anytime soon. And she’d sent Jemma off with her guy after promising that she would call her parents if she got worse.
Really, Jemma knew her well enough to have called her out for that blatant lie but her bestie must have been distracted by the six plus feet of her fine ass fiancé ushering her out the door for their mini-vacation.
Just thinking about the adoring way Cash looked at Jemma sent another pain shooting through her. This time she knew it didn’t have a thing to do with food poisoning. She’d had it for months. Ever since Jemma rolled back into town, Skylar had felt the green-eyed monster rise up inside of her.
She wasn’t jealous of Cash per se, even though he was a gorgeous male specimen. It was more that the man had eyes only for Jemma. She was envious because her best friend had found a man that thought the sun rose and set on her cute little ass and in Skylar’s short and sketchy dating history, she couldn’t remember a single one of her boyfriend’s ever looking at her like Cash did Jemma.
As if she was his entire universe. As if he would set the world on fire for her. As if no other woman existed but her.
