Page 35 of So Close

So why, for the first time in a lifetime of doing business, did he feel like he was operating at a disadvantage?

Likehewas weak and impulsive and on the verge of doing something he’d regret?

He set his half-drunk glass of milk down on the coffee table. His second cookie, too.

“I’ve got some emails I have to answer,” he said. “You can check teatime off the list.”

Deja was still looking at him. Hard.

“You go do that, then,” she said. “We’ll all still be here, enjoying each other’s company, believing what we believe. Devouring what we wish to devour. Speaking of which, if you’re not going to eat that other cookie, hand it over. Someone needs to teach you to quit wasting food.”

17

Auburn pounded on the door to the guest house.

“What?”

“You missed breakfast, and you’re supposed to be biking on the beach with me right now. Technically, you’re in violation of our agreement.”

She was sure his absence had something to do with the unusually personal conversation she’d overheard between Trey and Deja. The one that had ended with him declaring that love destroyed things. Auburn had tried to get Deja to tell her what had led to Trey’s dark utterance, but Deja had just shrugged. “All I said was that romance writers believed that love conquered all. And he went off.”

Auburn suspected that there was more to Deja’s story than she’d told, but she hadn’t been able to pry any more information out of her.

She also hadn’t been able to stop thinking about Trey since last night. She’d lain in bed and wondered at the vehemence in his voice and what had brought it about. She had all these pieces of him, like a puzzle, but they didn’t quite fit together. Something was missing. And she wanted to understand what it was.

Love doesn’t conquer anything. Unless by ‘conquer’ you mean ‘destroy.’

Those were big words.

“I have a work emergency I need to take care of.” Trey’s voice came from a distance.

“Can you come to the door so I can stop shouting at you through it?”

She waited long enough that she wasn’t sure he would, and then he did, opening it barely enough for them to converse through the gap, like he was trying to keep something out. Her. And he wouldn’t quite look at her, either. “Look. I have things I need to take care of. I need to take a rain check.”

“We have a deal. You promised me a week.”

“Yeah, well, I’m unpromising.”

She closed her eyes and took a deep breath, trying not to lose her temper with him. She opened them and said, “If you don’t want to do the deal, that’s fine, but I’m not going to just give up on Beachcrest. If you can’t go through with this, we can do it the hard way, with a partition action. And maybe I’ll lose, but maybe I won’t. Carl has a good claim on sweat equity in the property. He might convince a court to sell it to me. You and I both know if you didn’t think that was a possibility, you wouldn’t have signed that contract with me.”

“That contract would never hold up legally.”

“That’s not the point, Trey. If you don’t honor your deal with me, this whole thing is going to be out of both of our hands. And I don’t think either of us wants that.”

She was pleased to hear her voice come out strong and sure—far surer than she felt.

He paced away from the door, to the other side of the room. Back again. His expression was dark. He reached up, pressed a hand against the wall over his head. Leaned in and sighed heavily. “Okay,” he said, finally. “Give me a minute.”

She eyed him. “You can’t go dressed like that.”

He was wearing brown linen dress slacks and a cream button-down, both gorgeous specimens that clung to his muscular body like a second skin. She knew the fabric would be soft to the touch, and the urge to reach out and test that theory made her fingers itch.

Quit it, she admonished herself.This is enough of a mess without you bringing sex into it.

“I’ll change into jeans.”

His expression was bland, almost blank, the same cool, impersonal gaze he’d leveled at her in Carl’s hospital room, in the dining room at Beachcrest when he’d tried to buy her off, and when she’d presented him with her deal. Like she was just a minor irritation. Gone was any hint of the warmth he’d shown her yesterday, or the teasing.

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