Page 67 of Inarticulate

Punishing.

He spared her one final, torturously long look and then strode down the hall, letting the suite door click shut behind him.

She wrapped her arms around her waist and stared blankly at the open suitcase on her bed. The thought of repacking her things after he’d touched them made her whimper. She didn’t want to deny him. And in the same breath she didn’t want him to claim victory.

Staying meant emotional weakness. Leaving showed professional fragility.

Numb to the world around her, she pulled her cell from her pocket and turned it on. She ignored the continuous beep of updates and the fifteen unread messages noted on her screen, and navigated to her email.

At the top of her inbox sat Patrick Black’s name, the subject—All Interviews Cancelled Until Further Notice.

She clicked on the link and smiled at the email addressed to all Rydel staff. It was an apology. A formal notice from the CEO of Grandiosity over the miscommunication and unintentional stress they had caused. He noted that all interviews were cancelled until a suitable, friendlier approach to the transition could be arranged, and promised to create a positive environment for his future employees.

Savannah wanted to cry in relief.

Something good and solid had sprouted from the ashes of her lust-inspired mistake. There was hope. At least for the Rydel Seattle team members. Her position, on the other hand, was still unclear.

She didn’t want to announce to Spencer that she’d made a mess of the upcoming settlement as well as the opportunity to move on from their relationship. The professional failure was a point of pride. The personal defeat would place her in a detrimental position.

Spencer claimed to want her to move on. He kept poking at her to start dating and broadcasted the lie that he would finally have closure if she found another man.

In reality, he hoped she would try, but fail in the process. He itched to be the white knight. To make up for the mistakes of his past by picking up whatever weak and vulnerable pieces he thought would be left behind if she wasn’t successful in the dating pool.

He wanted her in the exact position she was in, which didn’t leave her in a hurry to get back to Seattle. The only other option was to keep her mouth shut and hope Penny didn’t stoop to a level that involved tittle-tattling.

Decisions, decisions.

The unread message icon glared at her. A constant taunt. There was no time like the present to get another Keenan experience over and done with.

She clicked on the button, and gave a derisive laugh as his name sat right at the top of the screen. Her finger stroked over the letters, a brief moment of whimsy in the forest of devastation, before she tapped to open his text.

She’d been wrong. He hadn’t sent her messages all day. There was only one. Only a solitary brutal notification.

Keenan: If you leave, Penelope wins.

Chapter Twenty-One

Savannah slunkinto her chair and stared at the far wall. She hadn’t left Seattle, not yet, and every day she questioned her sanity over the decision. It would’ve been easier to repack her things and walk away without a backward glance. Only the nasty clutch of responsibility dug its nails into her neck.

If she gave up, Spencer would replace her, and that man hadn’t worked a hard day in his life. He wouldn’t give a shit about the wedding. He wouldn’t care if staff were stressed and fearing for their future. He’d only look at the bottom line—the line that determined occupancy levels—and as long as that was in the black, everything else would go to hell.

All that shouldn’t have mattered, but then she thought of Kelly, whose mother was dying in the hospital. Or Grant, who had only just started to open up to her and speak without stress etching his voice. Or Amanda, who was working her ass off to make the wedding work under the worst of circumstances.

They didn’t deserve to be abandoned, even when she was currently cursing her guilty conscience for pushing her anxiety to the max.

“You need to speak to him. It’ll work out. I promise.”

Savannah raised her focus from the mess of scattered pages on the conference table and met Kelly’s concern. “I know.”

“I mean, you need to speak to himnow. Get it off your chest.”

A defeated sigh escaped her lips as she nodded. “Give me a moment, will you?”

She hadn’t seen sunlight for at least six hours. Her time had been spent in this chair, at this table, speaking to different parts of the management team in an ongoing attempt to mesh uncooperative puzzle pieces together.

She patted the scattered pages in front of her and came up with her cell. There were numerous emails, texts, and calls that she’d missed while it lay silenced on the polished wood, and she swiped past them all to get to her phone directory. Her finger tapped the unfavorable number near the top and the resulting dial tone increased her lazy heartbeat.

“Savannah…”

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