Page 67 of Make Me Love You

Chapter Eighteen

Pale golden sunlight shimmered through the crack in the curtains. Emma was already awake, had been for an hour, even though she no longer had to be up when the sky was still dark to serve burritos with Cesar. Old habits were hard to break, it turned out. Even when those habits made you miserable and cranky and served no purpose in your current life.

She rolled over. Eli was still asleep, his dark eyelashes fanned out across his tan cheek. He was beautiful. She could live with waking up before dawn if it meant waking up next to him. She could live with a lot of things, if it meant having Eli. Even her own mistakes.

It wouldn’t be easy. She couldn’t have a future with Eli if she was still keeping a secret in the past. Her father might not hold a grudge against Eli, but a daughter’s betrayal was on a whole other level. She didn’t have Eli’s excuse of just doing her job. She didn’t have an excuse at all, except she was a mess. She had lost her mother and discovered her dad was a meth cooker all in the space of a month, and she had been messy with grief and loss.

There was little Emma hated more than a mess. Realizing there had been a mess inside of her all along was painful.

Fortunately, Emma was good at cleaning up.

She didn’t know whether her dad would understand why she had done what she had done. She barely understood it herself. He might not be quick to forgive. Hopefully he wouldn’t follow in her footsteps and drag it out for eight long years. He would forgive her, eventually. She had faith. Love had a way of working it out.

Like she loved Eli.

Because, God. She did. She loved him. She loved him so much her chest felt tight, like all the love she felt for him was forcing her heart to grow bigger to accommodate it. It was uncomfortable, even a little painful. Growth usually was, she reckoned.

Footsteps on the stairs alerted her to the fact that at least one guest was awake and would probably want breakfast. She slipped out of bed, careful not to disturb Eli, and threw on clothes before heading down to the kitchen.

On the menu were blueberry pancakes, scrambled eggs, bacon, and a variety of fruits. Simple foods that were hard to screw up, because as Cesar had pointed out, she was great at following instructions but a natural in the kitchen she was not. Still, everything was delicious and satisfying. Nearly everything was sourced locally, as close to Hart’s Ridge as she could get, with the exception of the ingredients for pancakes.

Selena, one of the guests, mumbled a sleepy good morning and tucked in, after taking the requisite photo of her heaping plate of food. It was an odd sensation, knowing that nearly a million people were going to see those pancakes, the pancakes she cooked. Not a bad sensation, just...odd. If all went well, some of those people would be booking their own stays here. She hoped so, anyway.

“Hey.”

She turned at the sound of Eli’s voice. “Hey.” She waved the spatula at him. “Want some breakfast?”

“Wish I could. Everything looks great. But I’ve got to get going. I slept in later than I meant to.”

“Oh.”

He hadn’t given her a morning kiss, and judging from the way he stood with his hands jammed in his pockets and six feet of empty space between them, he wasn’t planning to remedy that. She knew he was feeling some kind of way about their agreement, and they needed to talk about that, but now was not the time.

But God, she wanted to kiss him. To touch him. To break down this wall he was building around himself, shutting her out. His words and tone were a shade too polite. There was no warmth, no intimacy. He might as well have been a one-night-stand trying to make a quick exit.

“Come over tonight,” she said. When he didn’t say anything, she added, “So we can hear the election results together.”

His eyebrows knit together in a frown. She had a feeling that, in his mind, they were already done. Over. Well, that was unacceptable. And she would tell him that, in no uncertain terms, but she was not going to do that in front of her guests, when Holiday House had only just opened for business.

“Please,” she said. “Until the election is over, remember? The election isn’t over yet.”

“All right,” he said after a long pause. “Six o’clock.”

“Six o’clock,” she echoed.

He nodded. That was it. No hug. No kiss. No sign that they were anything but acquaintances. She hated watching him walk away from her, with this thing between them unresolved. Why was he so determined that their relationship had to end with the election?

Her stomach rolled uneasily. Maybe the question had never been whether she could forgive him.

Maybe he couldn’t forgive her.

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