Page 32 of Love Me Tomorrow

“Maybe. Good news: they give out participation ribbons for just about everything nowadays.”

With real slick subtlety, she runs her middle finger alongside the picture frame, and I have to bite back a grin. “Please don’t quit your day job. You’d make a horrible life coach.”

“Your claws are showing.”

“Just trying to earn myself a blue ribbon for best wit in New Orleans. You did say they hand them out for everything nowadays, didn’t you?”

My only answer is a low, husky chuckle.

“Anyway,” she says, with a pointed glare over her shoulder that doesn’t even come close to putting me in my place, “Amelie and me, we were meant to be . . . well-rounded, I guess. That was the goal.”

My feet move out of their volition, bringing me closer to her. “Every parent’s hope for their kid.”

“Yeah.” She gives a soft, deprecating laugh that raises the hair on my arms. “You could say that. Only thing is, Dad was sodeterminedto create these powerhouse daughters that it’s like he forgot that we were human too. As soon as school wrapped for the day, he had us following him from restaurant to restaurant. By the time I was ten, I was bussing tables three nights a week. By sixteen? Dad had me helping him man the front of the house—taking reservations, seating customers. The day I graduated high school, he took the family out for dinner and brought ERRG’s account ledger.” Another one of those bone-chilling laughs that makes me swallow thickly. “Apparently it was time for me to look at what went into the backend of keeping a century-old business like the Edgar Rose Restaurant Group afloat.”

“Why are you telling me this?”

The words emerge raspy, demanding, but Savannah turns around anyway, picture frame clasped to her chest, and meets my gaze head-on. “Because I knew then that my dad expected me to be just likehim. The late nights and the laser focus and the ability to sever personal relationships for the greater good of the family legacy.” She shakes her head, sending her wavy hair this way and that. I want to catch the strands and wrap them around my fist. Drag her ever closer until we’ve having this conversation the way I’d prefer: naked, in bed, with the morning light as the only veil we’d keep between us.

I drag my fingers through my hair, exhaling sharply.

“It’s what he would do,” she goes on, completely oblivious to the turmoil rioting in my head, “it’s what hestilldoes. And, you know, up until this point in life, I’ve willingly gone along with it all because it was either me doing Dad’s bitch work or Amelie doing it, and my sister . . .” A fragile smile pulls at her lips. “Well, you know how she is.”

I came here wanting to shout and rage and put this woman in her place for testing the frays of my sanity.

It’s what I wanted, but standing here now, it’s not at all what I do.

Because, at the end of the day, Savannah Rose softens my hard edges and brightens my shadows and,fuck it. I close the remaining gap between us before I even realize that I’ve moved. Her head tips back, gaze rising from my chest to my throat to my face. I feel that one look like she’s taken a hammer to my skull.

Vulnerable. Trusting.

Christ.

I thought I was past this. I spent sevenmonthsgetting past this, and yet it’s a test of willpower that I manage to keep my hand down by my side instead of cupping her cheek and pressing my lips to her forehead.

“Rose, your sister is a great girl, but I’m not . . .” My hands ball into fists. “At the risk of sounding like a complete douchebag, I’ve never been interested in peeling back her layers. It wasn’t like that between us.”

It was never the way it’s been withyou.

Her throat works with an audible swallow. Just when I think she’s about to finally agree to put this Amelie thing to bed, she changes gears completely: “What I was trying to say is, I’ve spent my entire life putting ERRG first so Amelie could put itlast. So, I think”—she winces, fingers tapping on the frame—“that in doing so, I’ve become a little bit too much like my father. The cutthroat side of him, I mean. It’s not who I want to be, and when I came to your office last week with that contract . . .that’swho I was.”

“You mean that you were just like your father?” I draw out slowly, trying to make sure I have this right.

Her gaze brightens. “Yes! Exactly!”

Maybe I’ve had one too many concussions over the years, but let’s put it this way: my Thomas Edison lightbulb is not lighting up.

“Savannah?”

Her smile falters. “Yes?”

“You’re nothing at all like your old man.” Savannah might think she’s cutthroat but she’s leagues away from pinning the blame of theft on a kid just because helookslike trouble. Edgar Rose did that to me. And, yeah, I’m sure my back talk didn’t help matters. I’d been angry at the world, for taking my dad, for my mom taking her own life less than twenty-four hours later, for the universe taking what little naivety I had left. But I hadn’t stolen a damn thing. Not then, not ever.

Voice sharp, I grind out, “You care, Savannah. Do I like you maneuvering to try and get your way? Nah, I don’t. But you do it with humor and you do it with kindness, and maybe your dad worked you to the bone as a kid, as opposed to letting you live, but I wouldn’t say that means you’rejust like him.” I pause, letting the words sink into that pretty head of hers before tacking on, “Although I’ll be honest, the roses scream of your old man. It’s the exact narcissistic bullshit sort of move he’d pull just to have the last word.”

Her lips part. Clamp back together. Then, “You are such a man, do you know that?”

“Why? Because I tell it like it is?”

---