Page 36 of Love Me Tomorrow

Shoulders hunched, he rolls to his side, his palm going to his dick.

Just kill me now.

“It’s not what it looks like.” In the span of seven months, I’ve turned him down on national television, leveled him with an ultimatum to sell off his real estate, and now, to iron out his hatred for me, I’ve potentially rendered him childless.

What a grand time to be alive.

Gaping, Georgie looks from me to Owen and then back again. “Does he need ice for that?”

“Yes,” I say at the same time Owen growls, “No.”

“He does,” I tell my assistant firmly, “and could you maybe take Pablo . . .”

“You owe me,” Georgie grumbles as she snakes an arm under my cat’s underside. “He hates me.”

“I know the feeling,” Owen mutters under his breath.

“He needslove,” I interject lamely even though I suspect that, when I stumbled across him at the animal rescue shelter across the river in Algiers, two years ago, it was me who needed love more than my aggressively agitated pet. “He’s a little prickly, that’s all.”

Owen drags himself up onto his knees. “He’s a menace to society.”

“Only to men, really.” Guilt eats at me when I spot tears in Owen’s perfectly nice slacks. At the rate I’m going, I’m going to owe the man a private island, equipped with a yacht, a massive house, and a constant stream of women to occupy his days. I cringe. Okay, maybe not the women. “He’s not all that bad otherwise.”

“Savannah?”

The door closes behind Pablo and Georgie.

Breath caught in my throat, I shift my focus to Owen’s face. “Yes?”

His big, tatted hands land on his thighs. “Ask me again if I want to be a partner in your family’s hotel.”

Is it wrong that I’ve totally forgotten the reason I wanted him here in the first place? I mean, the hotel wasn’t theonlyreason, of course. I wanted him to see that I’m not just my father’s puppet. That I can rebel just like him and Amelie. That I’m not lost to the vision of ambition, the way Dad seems to be most days.

Ba-dum.

Anxiously, I pick at the hem of my dress, which, miracle of all miracles, has not ridden all the way up my butt to show the world my unappealing granny panties. Open my mouth and give voice to the proposal that’s been nagging at me for three days, ever since I left Inked on Bourbon’s office: “Keep your property, Owen. It’syoursand no one else’s, and not my father or me or anyone else deserves to strip that from you. But I think . . . I think it might be monumental for both you and ERRG if you were to come on board with this project. You’ve said in the past that you enjoy investing in new opportunities. If our restaurants are any indication of the hotel’s profitability, it will be insanely lucrative for you—you could buy other properties; do whatever you want with the money, honestly. And, maybe, if you agree, my dad will finally see that the Edgar Rose Restaurant Group won’t be . . .taintedif we welcome people into our midst that aren’t family by blood.”

And maybe then I can prove to my father that the world won’t come crumbling down if we sometimes hand over the reins to someone else.

BeforeIcrumble from the weight of it all.

I nearly jump out of my skin when Owen’s finger touches my bare knee. Shaded black ink against unblemished caramel. A sight that balloons emotion in my chest. It feels so right and maybe just a little wrong, given our history, but I want to beg him to press his palm to my leg and let me feel the weight of himerasing the heaviness of everything else.

“Look at me, Rose.”

He doesn’t need to tell me twice.

In his gaze, I see nothing of that shy man I playfully accused him of being. He’s all stern lines and intoxicating heat. Hard muscle and steely confidence and an unexpected compassion that I see in the set of his mouth. He looks at me now the way heusedto look at me, back beforePut A Ring On It, back before I ruined it all because I have never, not for long, anyway, been able to erase Dad’s insistent voice from my head.

A Rose marries for the betterment of the family, Savannah.

A Rose never deviates from the plan.

A Rose—you—will not sleep with the man who dated your sister.

Sometimes, most days, there is nothing I despise more than being a Rose.

“No.”

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