Page 109 of Everything You Hate
Scarlett blinks. She was braced for the argument. I watch her not get to have it.
“Okay?”
“Okay.” My voice is shot. I turn my hand over under hers so our palms meet. “You’re right. He was gone. I followed the protocol, and it put me where I could get to you.” I have to stop. Start again. “I’m not going to sit here and tell you I feel nothing about Abel, because I’ll be feeling it for a long time. But I’m not going to call it my fault. Not this one.”
She makes a sound that’s half a laugh and half something breaking loose, and she drops her forehead to our joined hands, and her shoulders shake, and I hold on.
When she finally pulls away, she swipes at her eyes. She’s a mess. Snotty, tear-stained, red-faced.
And, Jesus, she’s still the most beautiful woman I’ve ever met.
“Scarlett.” I cup her cheek in my hand, brush away another wayward tear. “When I get out of here, I want you to come home with me.”
She makes a face. “I don’t know how I feel living on a boat.”
I grin at her. “I don’t actually live on the boat, Hollywood.”
Chapter Thirty-Four
Scarlett
I had no idea Dean lived anywhere but his boat and didn’t know what to expect when he drove me up a winding dirt road two days later.
Something spare, probably.
A cot and a coffee maker, a single fork, a cage for Captain and a bed for Doug.
What I get is a beautiful little cottage.
Weathered cedar gone silver, a white picket fence, a gate that latches with a sound like a small satisfied click. There’s a window box under the front window with something green and half-dead in it that somebody’s clearly been trying, and failing, to keep alive.
“You have a picket fence,” I say.
“Came with the place.”
“You have a window box.”
“Shea planted it. It’s dying. Don’t tell her.”
He gets the door open, and I don’t make it two steps inside before ninety pounds of English bulldog launches off the couchand hits my shins like a furry wrecking ball. I go down to my knees on the entry rug, and Doug climbs into my lap like he’s a quarter of his actual size, wheezing with joy, jamming his flat face into my neck. I laugh and hug him back.
“He missed you,” Dean says.
“He met me twice.”
“He falls in love easily.”
“Unlike this owner.”
“Yeah,” he says with his infuriating little smirk. “Very much unlike his owner.”
From a perch by the window, a green blur with a crooked crest fixes me with one beady, unimpressed eye.
Captain sidesteps down his bar, ruffles up, and announces, at full volume, “Fuck me sideways.”
“He missed you too,” Dean says.
“I very much doubt that.” I eye the bird. “And I know you got that line from Mimi.”
