Page 57 of The Best Laid Plans

Tansy’s peals of laughter had me tightening my grip on the steering wheel. “Oh my gosh, what next?”

“I couldn’t find a towel. I think she’d just done laundry or was moving things around, because she constantly puts things in random fucking places, so I was drying off my face with a stupid little washcloth that smelled like her. And the lock on that bathroom door doesn’t work very well, and ... I don’t know, Tansy, what do you want me to say?”

“What did she do?”

My blood pressure spiked just thinking about it.

“She ... screamed.”

Tansy had devolved into snorting. “What ... what didyoudo?”

I cleared my throat and rolled my neck until it popped. “Does it matter?”

“Yes, Burke.”

“I ... yelled at her. Sort of ... dropped an f-bomb, and she tripped as she tried to leave the bathroom because my yelling scared her just as much as the ...”

“Sight of your manhood?” my sister supplied.

“I am so glad you find this funny,” I said darkly.

“I find it hilarious. She screams. You yell at her. Then what?”

“Then nothing.” I yanked the steering wheel as I turned back into the driveway of the Campbell House.

That was the truth.

We were both—for very different reasons—completely mortified. She’d closed herself in her bedroom by the time I was dressed and out of the bathroom. And the longer I stewed about it without seeing her, without being able to laugh it off, the worse it got in my head.

I’d been noticing everything about her this whole time. What had Charlotte thought when she saw—quite literally—everything about me?

For days, I’d been wrapped up in thoughts of how her hair fell around her face. How she always slept in the shortest shorts in existence. How quiet she was in the mornings.

For days—weeks, if I was honest—I had imagined kissing her. How her skin would feel under my hands. The sounds she’d make if I slid my hand into those short black shorts.

What I hadn’t imagined was a scream of horror. Or me yelling. Or her fleeing.

Too much time passed between the screaming, the yelling, the fleeing, and the first opportunity to see her face-to-face. By the time thathappened, I was a snarling, snappish mess. A bear with its paw caught in a trap. And Charlotte was giving me a very wide berth.

She could hardly look at me for a solid day afterward.

Tansy’s laughter had subsided, and she sighed heavily. “That is such a disappointing story.”

“My apologies for not knowing ahead of time to make it more dramatic for you.”

“Gawd, if you’d been ...you know... and you two had been flirting the last few days, that could have been epic.”

“Tansy,” I yelled. “It’s not ... we’re not like that. She’s my business partner.”

What. A. Crock. Of. Shit.

“I don’t know,” she said with a sigh. “She sounds pretty great.”

“Great? She’s ... she’s infuriating.”

I launched into a heated tirade about all the things Charlotte Cunningham did that drove me insane.

The coffee.

---