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“How in the hell else was I going to see you?” he zinged back at me.
“Kind of hard to see me when you had your little sex kittens on your lap.”
He busted out laughing. “Sex kittens?”
“You heard me right.” I wished he hadn’t. Yikes. My mouth was ridiculous.
“Scarlett, what did you want me to do? Show up alone? How much more awkward would that have been knowing you were bringing someone with you?”
“You didn’t have to come at all.”
“I did,” he breathed out. “Because it didn’t matter how much it hurt to see you with someone else—at least I got to see you, in the flesh, where I could admire you from across the table.”
I pinched the bridge of my nose. “For years, you could have seen me anytime you wanted to. All you had to do was pick up the phone. But you didn’t. Instead, you treated me like a child who couldn’t make up her own mind.”
“I never thought of you as a child.”
“Regardless, you hurt me and stole my heart. And I would really like it back. Could you at least do that for me?” I pleaded, with tears streaming down my face. Maybe then I could get over him. Truly fall in love with someone else.
“Darlin’, if I could, I would, just to make you happy. But I don’t think there is a ‘your heart’ and ‘my heart’ anymore.” He stepped closer and placed his hand across his chest before resting it on my wildly beating heart. “Whatever happened between us, it wasn’t meant to be severed. Don’t you feel it every time we touch?”
Yes, I felt it. I felt it so much I almost shouted it. His words rang truer than any words ever spoken. But, to know he loved me this entire time and let me live without him was too much. How could I forgive him for that? “There has to be a way.”
“I hope we never find it.”
“I do. We’re over,” I whispered because my heart, our hearts, wanted to strangle my response. Kane was right; we were bound together in an inexplicable way. It made so much sense now. It wasn’t that he had stolen my heart. It was that my heart had found its missing piece, what made it truly come alive.
He hung his head. “You don’t know how sorry I am to hear that,” he choked out.
I think I did, because no one was sorrier than me.
How to Save the World
The phone ringing on my desk startled me. I had forgotten there was even a phone in here. I set aside my books and notes and stood to answer it, assuming someone had mistakenly called the wrong extension.
“Hello.”
“Dr. Young Lady,” Sir Randall’s booming voice came through loud and clear. “Your father would like to see you.”
“Now?” I was in the middle of working on my vision statement. It was going to be brilliant, as soon as I finished reading the book on how to write an inspiring vision statement; and, of course, after I perfected my mission statement, because that had to come first, according to the book. I’d started my mission statement. As in, I’d written out, Armstrong Labs: To discover and develop. Yep, that’s all I had written out. All I needed was one amazing sentence, possibly two, and that’s all I could come up with. There were so many things we did. It was hard to condense it into one little statement.
Maybe Kane was right: I didn’t know business. Or was he more correct when he’d said I didn’t want to? I mean, I could diagnose every disease imaginable in the lab. Give me any specimen, from blood to urine, and I could tell you more about yourself than you ever wanted to know. But I couldn’t write out one lousy mission statement.
“That would be best for him.”
It would probably be best for me too. I’d been locked up in this office all week reading, studying, writing, scribbling out, and crumpling up paper. I still loved to write out my thoughts before typing them. If only that were helping. “I’ll be right there.” I hung up and straightened out my blouse, just in case I saw the main reason I was locked in this office—Kane.
I was also blaming him for my inability to focus the way I wanted to. I kept running our last conversation over and over in my mind. Why did he have to tell me he loves me? Those words haunted me day and night. I wished I didn’t believe him. I wished for a lot of things. Mostly for the ache to go away. The ache for him, the ache for what could have been—should have been.
I did some breathing exercises, trying to prepare myself for the possibility of seeing my competition. It was always awkward when we saw each other now. It made me wish for the good old days when he’d caught me with my hand down my bra.
