Page 73 of Harbor Me

I get about half a page done before an engine pulls into the lot that has no business on gravel.

I don't have to look up. Nobody else in this town drives a car that sounds like that.

Whitmore comes in with his sunglasses pushed up into his silver hair and sits himself down on the corner of my desk like he owns it.

"Vanessa. I was in the area."

"You live forty minutes away."

"I was in the area on purpose." He smiles the smile that has probably closed a hundred deals. "Tell me you have good news for me."

"I have an answer for you."

"An answer is only good news if it starts with yes."

"Then I'm sorry, it's not good news. I'm turning it down." His eyebrows start climbing, so I keep going before he can get a word in. "And I want you to know, it's a generous offer, and it was kind of you to think of me at all. But my answer is no."

He looks at me for a long moment. Recalibrating. I'd guess it's been a good while since anyone told this man no about anything.

"Is it the money? Because I said it before, the number is just an opening gambit. I’m very open to negotiation."

"It's not the money."

"Hm. Husband standing in your way then, I gather? Is he threatened at the thought of you working closely with me? You'd have your own office. There's a view of the water."

Pain lances through me at the reminder that he assumed Aiden and I are married and neither of us did anything to fix that false impression. Which actually makes his continued brazen push to lure me into his office that much worse, and my decision that much easier.

"I've got a view of the water now." I tip my head at the window, where the harbor is twinkling brightly, like it knows it’s being watched.

At the door he stops. "It’s a real shame. I'd have enjoyed poaching you away from Cole. Mostly to see if his expression can get any more thunderous." He slides the sunglasses down out of his hair. "Give my regards to your husband."

He's already lifting a hand goodbye through the window, down the steps, gone. I don't bother setting him straight now. In two weeks, it won't matter what this town thinks I am to Aiden Cole.

The Lamborghini’s engine wakes up, sulks its way across the gravel, and fades off toward the road.

And that's that. I just turned down more money than anyone’s ever offered to pay me in my life. While on the brink of being unemployed. And possibly pregnant.

It should feel terrifying, and some of it genuinely does. But underneath the terrified part there's a small steady patch that feels like the first thing I've gotten completely right in weeks, and I decide to live on that patch for the rest of the day.

I pick my pen back up and go back to explaining the deposit system to a stranger I'll never meet.

Chapter 19

Aiden

The Lamborghini sat in my lot this morning for exactly as long as it took me to ruin the fuel line I was supposed to be fixing.

Whitmore walked out of that office looking like a man who got what he came for. Whitmore always looks like that. It doesn’t stop me from deciding she'd said yes. That he drove off with her yes in his pocket and come the end of the month she'll be in the city keeping his calendar. Going on business trips with him. He’ll try to seduce her.

I want to murder him for all the sins he’s yet to commit.

By five I've had enough of my own company. I go home, shower, and put on a clean shirt like that's going to help my case. Diesel watches me do it from the bedroom doorway, chin down, unconvinced.

"I know," I tell him.

He doesn't offer to come.

There's a toolbox in the truck and a list in my head of everything wrong with that apartment. The dripping tap. The cabinet doors. That miserable excuse for a bed frame. Fixing things is what I'm good at. But none of it’s the thing I broke, so the toolbox stays in the truck.