Page 103 of Breaking All The Rules
I don’t love you.
Too numb to think or feel, he nodded slowly, stepping back, her hand sliding away. “Goodbye, Beatrice.”
And this time he knew it was for real.
CHAPTER TWENTY-NINE
A week later, Bea was sitting under leaden skies at an alfresco café for a breakfast meeting three blocks from Greet Cute HQ with Kim and Nozo. Mal was attending a dental appointment with his daughter, which Bea loved. She could only imagine how Charlie Hammersmith would have reacted to a man wanting to accompany his daughter to a dental appointment.
There’d have been much talk about lack of balls being tossed around in the boardroom.
They were meeting with Leilani Leota, a young Instagram influencer who had been born in Hawaii but was now living in LA. Bea had been watching her—she was smart, innovative, and from an advertising background, and Bea wanted to work with her really badly. She thought Leilani could bring something unique to the online space for Cranky Bea, but also several of the other lines in Greet Cute’s portfolio.
The menus arrived and they decided to go ahead and order, as Leilani had just messaged to say she was stuck in traffic—of course!—and might be twenty minutes late. Kim ordered an egg white omelet. Nozo ordered a chia bowl. Bea found nothing on the menu appealing. In fact, all she could think about was a piece of Annie’s key lime pie and a beer.
Sadly, there was no breakfast pie or breakfast beer on the menu.
And, had there been, she couldn’t even begin to imagine the shock on Kim’s and Nozo’s faces if she ordered something so carb-laden. And alcoholic. For breakfast. A Bloody Mary was acceptable, but a turmeric chai latte was more in vogue.
Sighing, Bea ordered what was expected of her—an egg white omelet—and hated herself for it, but mostly she was just too distracted by the silky underwear currently moving steadily north up her ass crack. All her LA underwear had been waiting for her when she got back to her apartment, and while she may have ditched the corporate power suits from her wardrobe and corporate America from her résumé, she hadn’t yet gotten around to purging it from her lingerie drawer.
Day-of-the-week underwear might not be sexy, but it sure knew how to cling to hips and ass cheeks. God, how she missed her Thursday panties…
Along with a million other things from Credence. Like Princess. And the lake. And dear lord, Annie’s pies. Also binge-watching TV shows on her laptop, her bunny slippers, and the golden oldie line dancers at Jack’s.
But most especially Sundays at the ranch. And Austin… Austin, who had walked into her office last week and turned everything upside down.
It had been so easy to keep him and their time together in a neat little box when she’d ended it over the phone. Much harder to ignore it when he’d been standing at her door, looking all freaking Wild West and causing a hundred different micro-memories to bombard her all at once.
I love you. That’s what he’d said. I’ve fallen in love with you. And she’d absolutely panicked. Because it was ridiculous—they’d known each other for three months, and worst of all, she’d realized in that moment, she’d become her mother.
The thing her grandmother had most feared and her father had most dreaded and she’d always told herself she couldn’t become. Because look at what had happened. Disaster. Tragedy. Grief. A household defined by a ghost. Her grandmother trying to erase the influence and a father trying to ignore it.
Austin had been right—she hadn’t ever considered them a couple. In fact, she’d deliberately avoided thinking of them as anything because of the age difference and how close that cut to the bone. He’d obviously been getting emotionally invested, though, spinning castles in the air about them living together, and she’d hit the retreat button as soon as it had fallen from his mouth.
No matter how much she’d ached for him since.
But that wasn’t love. That was lust and…nostalgia. She missed him. Of course she did. But she missed Princess, too. And Molly and Marley and Winona. She missed all of them.
She missed Credence.
Especially sitting here listening to Kim and Nozo chatter about the latest colonics on the market and the salon that had opened its doors nearby, offering all kinds of scrubs, a vast array of hair removal options, and the latest in injectables. Nozo was talking about getting fillers in her lips because she thought her perfectly nice mouth was a little on the thin side, and Kim was seriously considering getting some Botox in her perfectly smooth forehead.
They were both in their late twenties, for crying out loud. But despite their very nontraditional corporate life, they were LA natives through and through. Having work done was just what one did when young and upwardly mobile in LA.
Which made her miss Credence even more. Credence, where the content of a person’s character was more important than how they pouted or how many lines they had on their forehead. And people were always so genuinely pleased to see each other. And no one was twenty minutes late because of traffic.
And where it was perfectly okay to wear day-of-the week panties. And the sound of Austin’s boots on the stairs outside her door could make her pulse beat a little faster.
Goddamn it, Austin. Why’d she have to miss Austin most of all?
Hot tears pricked at her eyes, and she was glad for her sunglasses to cover it up, but they didn’t help with the tightness in her chest or the ominous internal cracking as small chinks became deep fissures in the wall around her heart. The one she’d built to block thoughts and feelings of Austin out. His appearance had been the first chink, and with every memory of Austin this past week, more had appeared. And now they were deepening into ravines.
How much longer until it disintegrated entirely?
…
Fifteen minutes, it turned out.
