Page 8 of Billionaire Unforgettable: Tanner

Stop it, Hannah! You’re acting like a fool.

I wasn’t going to moon over a guy who had nearly destroyed me years ago.

“I figured that was why you were here,” I said, forcing a cool tone from my lips even though my heart was racing.

“Mom sent me here for apple fritters, which is something she’d never normally ask me to do,” he said huskily. “Why are you here today?”

“My mother was tired,” I replied politely. “I told her I’d work the counter today.”

“Do you think this was a set-up?” he asked with a rueful smile.

Surprise rolled over me as I realized what he was asking.

My mother never complained of tiredness, and his mother had probably never asked for apple fritters.

Millie had never been particularly fond of donuts.

“You think the two of them conspired to get us to talk to each other?” I asked.

He shrugged his broad shoulders. “It wouldn’t exactly surprise me. They are best friends.”

Crap!Now that he mentioned it, I had to agree that it wasn’t impossible.

Like Silas, Mom had encouraged me to face Tanner and deal with our past to stop the gossip about the two of us.

Tanner explained what he wanted for his mother and the crew of people that were going to be working on Charlie’s farm today. I started to box up his order, happy to have something to look at other than his handsome self.

“People think I’m still heartbroken,” Tanner said conversationally.

“And they think I’m a bitch,” I shot back as I loaded donuts into a box. “Everyone hates me around here because they think I broke your heart.”

“Didn’t you?” he asked smoothly. “You did leave me, Hannah.”

God, I really hadn’t wanted to get into our past, but his comment made me so irritated that I retorted, “For a very good reason.”

Luckily, there was no one else in the store to hear us bickering.

“What reason?” Tanner demanded. “I was on a business trip in Tokyo. When I got back, you were gone. You left for Seattle the day before I got back.”

“I told you on the phone that I was leaving. You told me to do whatever made me happy,” I said icily as I put an apple fritter in a box with more force than was necessary.

“Not possible,” he answered in an annoyed tone. “If you had said you were leaving, I would have done everything possible to make sure that didn’t happen.”

My anger started to fizzle away.

Like I’d suspected, he had no idea what I’d said that day. His answer had been automatic because he hadn’t been listening to what I’d said.

“You didn’t hear what I was saying, Tanner,” I said in a calmer voice. “It had been that way with us for a while. Your company was everything to you and your brothers. You were so distracted with world domination after Kaleb set up your headquarters in Billings that you never noticed that I wasn’t happy. I tried to talk to you. You just weren’t listening.”

I’d loved being back in Crystal Fork, but there was very little opportunity for my profession here. I ended up working with Tina at her shop in Crystal Fork doing old style perms and haircuts.

Maybe that would have been enough for me if my relationship with Tanner hadn’t gotten so broken. Maybe I would have eventually sought out something else in Billings if Tanner hadn’t completely changed once we’d moved back to Montana.

The last time we’d talked when he was in Tokyo, I’d told him that if things didn’t improve between the two of us, I had to go.

When he’d told me to do whatever made me happy, I suspected he hadn’t been listening.

He hadn’t been listening to me for a very long time, and I’d gotten to the point where I couldn’t take it anymore.

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