Come to think of it, a woman as beautiful as her? She probably has her pick. Whoever he is, he better be treating her right.
From what I’m hearing through that door, he isn’t.
My jaw tightens. I stand there another few seconds, hand flat against the door. There’s nothing I can do about whatever’s happening on the other side of it. That’s not my place. She’s my designer and she’s not mine and I don’t have any claim on who speaks to her or how.
So I just knock.
A beat. Then the door opens.
Lila is off the phone but still holding it, and she sets it on the desk with more force than necessary. Her smile when she sees me is real but thin around the edges. She’s wearing a soft maroon sweater today and her nails are forest green. Her hair is down, rose-gold waves tumbling over one shoulder. There’s a crease between her brows that wasn’t there this morning.
“Everything okay?” I ask.
“Fine. Family stuff.” She pulls the moodboard out before I can say anything else. “Now, texture. I want to talk about texture.”
I let her talk. She’s explaining something about tonality and variation and I’m watching her hands move and her rings catch the light and thinking that she could wallpaper the entire house in tinfoil and I’d nod along.
I do genuinely like her vision. I trust it. But mostly I like watching her in her element, the way she lights up inside when she talks about something she loves. Right now though, the lightis dimmer than usual and I can see her working to keep it up, and that bothers me more than it should.
Trailing off, she pinches the bridge of her nose. The moodboard sits between us untouched as we stand over it, nearly shoulder-to shoulder.
“Hey.” My voice comes out low, almost soft. “What’s up?”
“It’s not a professional concern. It’s fine.”
“You put your phone down like you wanted to put it through the desk.”
She lets out a breath that’s almost a laugh. “I need to take a few notes from you on maintaining a better poker face.”
I don’t want her to have a poker face. I like that she wears her heart on her sleeve. That her emotions flicker across her face easily for me to see.
Lila is just herself, unapologetically, and I appreciate how rare that is. What I don’t like is someone dimming that. Whoever was on that phone, whatever he said to put that crease between her brows... I don’t like him. I liked him less with every second I stood in that hallway.
He’s not here for me to do anything about it. But I can do something for her.
“You wanna go for the trail ride we were talking about?” I propose.
She glances up at me. “Right now?”
“Why not? Nothing like some fresh mountain air on horseback to clear your head.”
She glances down at herself. Then smiles. “I guess it’s a good thing I wore jeans and cowboy boots today, then.”
Chapter 8
Golden Handcuffs
SLADE
An hour later, we’ve dropped the dog at my house, where she promptly curls up on her bed with her stuffed hedgehog and is asleep before we’ve even made it to the door. Lila looks back at her once with that soft expression I’ve started to take a lot of pleasure in.
And then we’re off to the stables, where I’m saddling up Ghost for myself and Daisy Mae, our prettiest palomino mare, for Lila.
“All right,” I tell Lila, leading Daisy Mae over to her. “You ever sat in a Western saddle?”
“Never.”
“Nothing to it. Stirrups are bigger and saddle is stiffer than you’ll be used to. You got that pommel you can rest your hands on. Daisy Mae’s a good girl. Real responsive.”
