Page 61 of Tempted To Be Mine

“Sure. See you at dinner?”

“Yeah. I’ll be there.”

I walked back to my own cabin feeling worse than I had before. We’d just had an entire conversation without actually saying anything. That wasn’t us. That had never been us.

I’d broken something. I just didn’t know how to fix it.

After my shower, I sat on the edge of my bed and stared at my phone. I needed to talk to someone. Normally it would be Lucy, but that wasn’t an option. I wasn’t a guy that held shit in. I needed someone that might actually be able to give me advice about this mess I’d created.

I scrolled through my contacts and landed on Beau. My brother was a lawyer. He dealt with complicated situations for a living. Maybe he could help me figure this out.

He answered a second before I was about to hang up.

“Jeremy? Everything okay?”

“Yeah. No. I don’t know.” I leaned back against the headboard. “I did something stupid.”

“What else is new?” I could hear the smirk in his voice. “What happened?”

I told him. Not all the details, but enough. The cabin. The fire. Lucy. The fact that she was now avoiding me and I had no idea what to do about it.

Beau was quiet for several seconds.

“Let me get this straight,” he finally said. “You slept with your manager? The woman who runs your entire life? The one person in your professional orbit who actually keeps you functioning like a normal human being?”

“When you put it that way, it sounds bad.”

“It is bad, Jeremy.” Beau sighed heavily. “You need to stop fucking every woman within a ten-foot radius. This isn’t some random hookup at a party. This is Lucy.”

“I know.”

“Do you? Because everyone knows the first rule of professional relationships. You don’t sleep with someone you work with. That’s a rookie mistake, and you’re not a rookie.”

I didn’t have a defense for that.

“Look,” Beau continued, his voice softening slightly. “Are you looking for something serious here? With Lucy?”

The question caught me off guard. Was I? I thought about the cabin and how good it felt to be with her. Not just in the physical sense, but that connection in general. Lucy was officially the first woman who knew all of me. The model and the guy that liked pizza, beer, and reality TV.

But serious? That word came with expectations. Commitments. Things I’d never been good at.

“I don’t know,” I admitted.

“Then you need to leave her alone.”

“What?”

“I mean it. If you’re not looking for something real and anything that can actually go somewhere, then you need to back off. Lucy’s not like the other women you’ve been with. She’s not going to be okay with casual. She’s not going to be fine with being another notch on your bedpost.”

“She’s not a notch.”

“Then what is she?”

I didn’t have an answer.

“Give her space,” Beau said. “Follow her lead. If she wants to pretend it didn’t happen, then you pretend it didn’t happen. Keep things professional. Don’t push her into something she’s not comfortable with just because you’re feeling some kind of way about it.”

“And if I want more?”