Page 108 of Arranged To Be Mine

I stared at him, waiting for the catch. He’d had days to apologize and hadn’t. There had to be an ulterior motive.

“You were right,” he continued, the words coming out like they cost him something. “About the board. About everything.”

I still didn’t lower the trowel. “Go on.”

If he thought I would simply accept his apology and forget everything, he was wrong. I had days of stewing and it had only made me feel more justified in telling all of them to fuck off.

He sighed, running a hand through his silver hair. He looked tired. Older. When had that happened?

“They’ve been unreasonable with you,” he said. “The hoops they’ve made you jump through, the standards they’ve held you to. It’s not fair. They never made me prove myself like that over the years.”

“Because you’re a man.”

I watched him flinch. I could see him struggling with whether to deny it or deflect.

“Yeah,” he finally admitted. “Because I’m a man.”

I felt a tiny bit of relief. Not much but enough to notice. I lowered the trowel slowly, letting it rest against my thigh.

“You still have my support,” he said. “That still means a lot in that boardroom. More than those old bastards want to admit.”

“Does it?”

“It does.” He took a step closer, careful, like he was approaching a wounded animal. “The job is still yours if you still want it. I know what you bring to the table, Darcy. I’ve always known. And I appreciate it, even if I haven’t always shown it the way I should have.”

Tears pricked at my eyes and I blinked them back furiously. I would not cry in front of my father. Not now. Not after everything.

“I don’t know if I want it anymore,” I admitted, the words scraping past the lump in my throat. “I don’t know what I want.”

He nodded slowly. “That’s okay. You don’t have to decide right now.”

We stood there in silence for a moment, the sounds of the garden filling the space between us. Birds chirping. Wind rustling through the leaves. Buzzing insects and my windchimes.

“What’s happening with you and Beau?”

The question caught me off guard. I felt my walls go up automatically, that familiar defensive instinct kicking in.

“Why do you ask?”

“He told me you weren’t talking to him.”

I blinked. “You spoke to him?”

“I had a bill to settle.” My father shrugged, looking uncomfortable. “But Beau didn’t want any money from me. Said it wasn’t about that.”

I chewed on that for a moment. Beau had turned down his fee. The money that had been the whole point of our arrangement, at least at the beginning. He’d walked away from a significant payday because it wasn’t about that.

What was it about, then?

I thought I knew the answer. I’d seen it in his eyes every time he looked at me. Felt it in the way he touched me. He listened to me like no one had, not even my father. I thought about the way he’d knelt in my garden pulling weeds just because I’d asked him to.

“I don’t know what’s happening with us,” I said finally. “I said some things. He said some things. And now neither of us is talking.”

My father nodded like he understood. Maybe he did. He’d been through his own share of relationship disasters over the years, though we never talked about them.

“He seemed pretty upset about it,” he offered.

The tears threatened to fall again. I turned away, pretending to examine a tomato plant.