Page 14 of A Winter Wish

“Look. I’ve been thinking.”

He sighed. “Here we go.”

“You have no idea what I’m about to say.”

“You don’t want the company, right? It’s all you’ve said since you first found out about it.”

“You mean, since I first found out about it less than a week ago?” She took a breath. Stay calm, Lexie. “Anyway, not the point. You’re right. I don’t want it.” Plain and simple language, that was the key.

“If you walk away, you get nothing.”

“We get nothing.”

He cocked his head. “You’d do it to spite me, would you?”

“Well, why not? You’ve been nothing but nasty to me since the moment we met.”

“Or is it about spiting your dad?”

“Fuck you.” OK, so much for calm. “I’m leaving. I don’t want any of this. So go ahead, see how you do without me—maybe you’ll find a workaround to the will.” Though she knew, from talking to Fran, that that was highly unlikely.

She shoved the jar into her bag, hitched it on her shoulder, and made for the exit.

He stepped in front of her to block her path. “We need to talk about this. Figure out what to do.”

“I just told you, I’m out.”

“Yeah? Well, that doesn’t actually solve anything, so I don’t accept that.”

“You can accept it or not, doesn’t make it not true.”

She tried to move past him, but he mirrored her like they were in some kind of stupid sports game.

“Get out of the way, Theo.”

“Look, what if you didn’t have to do anything?”

“What?”

“You clearly don’t want any part of this—and OK, maybe I can’t blame you for that.”

She scoffed. “Seems an awful lot like you blame me anyway.”

He took a slow breath, like he was praying for patience—like he was the one who needed patience in this scenario. “Regardless, what if you didn’t have to do anything? Would you stick the year out then? Because I doubt very much there will be a workaround—your dad would have made sure of that—and I really don’t want his company to go bust just because you…”

She glared at him. “Because I what, exactly?”

They were very close—close enough that she could smell him. Sandalwood and something muskier layered underneath it. He hadn’t backed down at her glare, just kept his eyes level on hers. She could see the different colors, the way brown gave way to amber. She should step back. But she didn’t want to be the one to back away, didn’t want to look like she was uncomfortable around him. She brought a hand up to play with her loose curls—a nervous tic—and he followed the movement with his gaze. He frowned at her hand and she dropped it.

“Never mind,” he said.

He eased back an inch, and she let loose a relieved breath.

“Look, I’ll do the work. I already know how to do it. You can do whatever—go back to your ski chalet, hit the slopes. Whatever makes you happy. And just be a silent partner. Then at the end of the year, when we’ve made a profit, we…”

“Sell the company?”

He said nothing to that, just slid his thumbs through the belt loops of his jeans and waited. She really wanted to throw the offer back in his face. But she could do with the money. She had no savings, a ton of university debt. Moving from one job to another had lots of perks, but a steady income wasn’t one of them.