Page 5 of Sleeping with Her Enemy (49th Floor 2)

“How did he propose to you?”

“What?” She shook her head. What did that have to do with anything? And weren’t they back to normal—i.e., fighting?—now that she had insulted his mother?

“Humor me. I just want to know how he proposed.”

She bit the inside of her cheek, debating whether to set herself up for his scorn. Well, why not? She probably couldn’t sink any lower in his estimation. “He didn’t—well, not really. I basically told him last year that I expected him to propose at Christmas. Honestly, I’d gotten tired of waiting.” I was on a schedule. But she didn’t say that part—that sounded stupid now, even to her. “So I just laid down the law. I thought he might do it in front of the tree or something. But then one morning at breakfast the week before Christmas, one day when he was going to do some shopping, he said, ‘Do you want to come with me and pick out a ring?’”

“That was it?”

She didn’t miss the derision in his voice, but she thought maybe it was directed at Mason and his lame proposal and, for once, not at her—which seemed odd because Dax was decidedly not the romantic type. On account of the fact that he was too busy being the jerk type. “Um, yes, I guess that was it.”

“And did you go pick out a ring? At the mall, I suppose?”

She looked down at her hand. All this time, all this drama, and she hadn’t realized she was still wearing the engagement ring. “Oh my God.” She tried to twist it off, but her fingers must have swollen on the hot afternoon because it didn’t budge. “I can’t get it off.” Frantic, she planted her left elbow on the bar and tugged with her right hand but still couldn’t dislodge it. “I have to get this off!” The ring might as well have been around her neck. That little band of platinum was suffocating her as surely as a noose would have.

“Hey, it’s okay.” Dax gently tugged her arm until it lay flat on the bar. He gave her hand a squeeze, and the pressure of his touch was somehow soothing. Her heart slowed a bit. “Want me to try?” She nodded, and he picked up a napkin and blotted her finger on both sides—the condensation from her beer bottle had made her hand a little damp. Then he laid his fingers at the base of her ring finger. His touch was featherlight, but she almost gasped at the contact. The ring started to move. Was he a Jedi master or something? That thing had been good and stuck. Slowly, slowly, he slid it up, pausing slightly to work it over her knuckle. Warmth was pooling in her chest and, embarrassingly—hello, this was Dax!—between her legs. Man, Mason had done a number on her. She had temporarily lost her mind. But probably she could blame the booze. Note to self: never go drinking with Dax again.

He set the ring on the bar in front of them and she stared at it, trying to get her shit together. It was beautiful in its way. She had picked it out, after all. But lying there in the dim light of the bar, the emerald-cut stone and shiny platinum band looked so…common. Like something you’d see on every third Pinterest board of women her age. She took a deep breath. “Well, a man removing a ring from my finger was not how I’d imagined this day going.” She’d been going for levity, thinking a bit of self-deprecation would pierce the weird, thick awareness that crackled between them. But instead of wry, it came out sounding sad. Pathetic.

Dax cleared his throat. “My point earlier, which I stand by, is that Mason is a tool. What kind of idiot proposes over cereal? Even I, who will go to my grave never having proposed to anyone, know better than that. And you know what? Mason is not just a tool. He’s a boring tool. You might be a lot of things, Ms. Morrison, but boring isn’t one of them. So Mason left you—so what? You didn’t really lose anything.”

He might as well have punched her. Because although he was, as usual, mistaken, he’d managed to get right to the heart of the matter with that last comment. “I have, though,” she squeaked, appalled at how her voice came out sounding like she’d just inhaled the helium from one of the Canada Day balloons hanging above the bar. “I’ve lost everything.”

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