Page 30 of Wright Kind of Trouble

It didn’t matter that I’d met my match.

The first person I’d ever been with who understood me completely.

All that mattered was that it was over.

“Fine,” I whispered, choking on the word as I wrenched the door open.

His hand clamped down around my wrist before I could go. “Wait.”

“What?” I gasped. “You’ve made your point.”

“I don’t want to ask you to—I have no right,” he said, the words like broken glass in his throat. “But wait for me.”

“You’re right,” I spat, yanking my wrist free. “You have no right to ask for that.”

“I know, and still, I’m asking.”

“I won’t do it.”

He nodded. “I’ll be waiting.”

“For what?”

“Graduation.”

I managed a glare that I didn’t feel. Only sick and hopeful and furious and wanting it so badly, all at the same time.

“It’s a waste of time.”

“Maybe,” he said. “I’ll be there either way.”

I just shook my head and turned and walked out of his house. He might be saying wait, but he didn’t mean it. Three years. Anything could happen in three years. In my experience, no one was waiting that long. He’d be long moved on by then. At least this was the reminder I needed that school came first, and I wouldn’t forget it again.

Part II

Pining

9

Chase

August

“I’m not going to this fucking event,” I told my father.

“You’re going. We need a Sinclair representing the Sinclair Realty interests with the new mayor,” my father, Arnold Sinclair, told me.

“Sinclair interests don’t interest me. I have my own law firm. That’s all that I’m dealing with.”

“A law firm that I funded with Sinclair money,” he reminded me.

It was the nail in the coffin. He’d given me a huge sum of money to move to Lubbock from Houston, where I’d been working for a successful real estate law firm. My business partner and I had made the move back to my hometown and opened the firm Sinclair & Cruz LLC. But now, my dad held that fact over me all the fucking time.

“Can I just pay you back all the money so that you’ll stop using this against me?”

“Could you instead do this small favor that I’m asking of you? What’s the worst that could happen? You schmooze with Jensen at a fancy dinner, have a drink, and come home. That’s it.”

That wasn’t it.

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