“Yeah, good luck with that.” Cassie waggled her fingers as she shut the door behind her, leaving Amy alone. Totally, completely alone.
She hadn’t even bought a new phone yet.
It was a little bit scary. It was a little bit awesome.
…
When Dax headed over to Winter Enterprises later that week, it wasn’t because he wanted to see Amy. He’d been hearing about her from Cassie, who reported that after an initial few days of crying on and off, Amy had seemingly picked herself up and gotten on with things. She was on a Jack-ordered holiday and was holed up in Cassie’s old place, apparently filling her days with movies and shopping and trips to the spa. Cassie was skeptical, worried that Amy wasn’t allowing herself to really feel her heartbreak, but Dax wasn’t so sure. It seemed entirely possible that Amy was over Dr. Vajayjay and was merely enjoying her hard-won freedom. But who knew? Probably Cassie was right. Women knew about that shit. He certainly didn’t. He’d only ever had one serious relationship, and when he’d tried to break that off, all hell had broken loose.
It wasn’t only Cassie who’d been talking about Amy. All week, his employees had been afire with chatter about the wedding—they were plotting an elaborate hacking scheme designed to ruin Mason’s credit rating. It was all Amy all the time on the forty-ninth floor, even though she wasn’t there. There was no escaping her.
So when he heard from the programmers that Amy had been spotted on the forty-ninth floor on the Friday of her forced vacation, he wasn’t wandering over there, like the Boy Geniuses were talking about doing, to bask in her newly single presence. His trip to the neighboring company was to see if Jack wanted to grab lunch.
Probably Amy wouldn’t even be in. If she had indeed been spotted on the premises earlier, it was likely just to pick up something she needed. In a way, it was too bad he wouldn’t see her, because it would have given him something to taunt his sister with. To the extent that he had thought about Amy this past week, it was because Kat would not shut the hell up about her. That was why he tried to keep his personal life separate from his family. They all went crazy at the slightest hint he might be moving toward settling down—which was irritating because they had all had front row seats for the train wreck that was Allison, so they had to know it was a lost cause. Still, when he’d arrived at his parents’ house on Sunday night for their family dinner, Kat, ever hopeful, had filled them in on every detail.
“I promise I won’t even nag you about grandchildren if you bring this girl to meet us,” his mother had said, patting Kat’s belly. “Your sister has that covered.” She narrowed her eyes at him. “For now.”
“We all just want you to be happy,” his traitorous sister said, an artificial smile plastered on her face.
His father, typically, said nothing, just served Dax’s mother more stroganoff.
“I am happy. And she’s just a friend. Not even that! She just needed some help, and I happened to be around.”
“Don’t you think eighteen years is long enough to let what happened with Allison rule your life?” Kat said, her signature playful smile gone.
Adrenaline flooded Dax. They didn’t talk about this. Kat knew that. “It doesn’t rule my life,” he said stiffly. It was true. It had been a tragedy, of course. And he had learned an important lesson. But that was it. It wasn’t like it kept him up at night—anymore.
“I’m glad you helped this girl,” his mother said, oblivious to the tension swirling around her children. “Your father needed help when we first met.” Dax and Kat had both heard the story of their parents’ meeting countless times, and this was usually the part where they would catch each other’s eye and commiserate, but Kat just stared at the floor as their mother went on. “He was locked out in the rain.” Mercifully, his mother left out the rest of the story, where she invited the waterlogged boy inside. Her parents weren’t home, but when they arrived, they freaked out at the prospect of their daughter being alone with a white boy. Yada, yada, Romeo and Juliet, yada, yada, love conquers all. She always left out the part where Dax’s father had charmed his in-laws so hard that when he’d asked their mother to marry him and she’d said she had to think about it, her parents had tried to ground her, despite the fact that she was twenty-one.