Page 25 of All I Feel

“Agreed. Especially given the current state of my personal life. I’ll take all the work and distractions I can get. What about you? I assume you have enough work to occupy your time, right?” I asked him.

He laughed. “Yes. Plenty. But I should probably allow it to distract me more. Because even though we have more than enough work to occupy our time, it doesn’t stop Phoenix and me from getting on each other’s cases.”

I shook my head as a smile played on my lips. “I don’t know why you guys do that to one another. Lark and I would never.”

Ace shot me a look of indifference. “It’s all in good fun. Today, I gave him a hard time about Faye.”

“Faye? The woman who works in the front office?”

“He’s got it bad for her,” Ace shared with a grin.

My eyes rounded. “Really? And is she not interested?”

He shrugged. “I can’t say. He insists that she is, so I can only assume things aren’t terrible there, but maybe she’s playing hard to get. I don’t know. Either way, I probably shouldn’t have said anything to him, because he decided to give me a difficult time when I tried to get back to work after lunch. He wanted to know why I was in such a hurry to get my work done.”

My stomach dropped. As much as I might’ve wanted to focus on my brother finding a woman he was interested in pursuing, I couldn’t overlook the bigger problem. “Did you tell him you had plans to come here?”

Shaking his head, he explained, “I told him I had dinnerplans tonight, but I didn’t tell him I was going to be here with you. I knew you didn’t tell him about what happened on Saturday evening, and I didn’t want him finding out from me.”

Relief swept through me. “Thank you. For that and for being here.”

“Don’t mention it. But I have to ask one question.”

“Sure.”

“Do you plan on sharing the news with your family and the rest of our friends?”

I inhaled deeply as a wave of embarrassment and shame washed over me. “It’s not that I intend to keep it from everyone. But I think before I share it with the whole group, I need to have some answers of my own. It’s not like everyone won’t have questions for me anyway.”

He jerked his chin down in understanding. “That makes sense.”

“Yeah. So, tell me more about your day. Did you work on anything cool?”

Ace went on to tell me a bit more about what he’d been working on at the body shop while we finished eating.

Now that we had, and I was so content, I felt compelled to mention my appreciation. “Thank you for bringing dinner tonight. It was delicious, and the company was even better.”

He smiled at me. “You’re welcome. And I’m not leaving yet, so you’ve got the company for a little while longer.”

“Right. Well, I do still need to try to redeem myself with that Game of Life rematch.”

“We shouldn’t delay, then.”

The two of us cleaned up the containers and popped them in the refrigerator before settling ourselves on thefloor in the living room, the coffee table between us. As I lifted the lid off the box so we could set up the game, I said, “So, if you were concerned about needing to use any muscle tonight, you can probably relax.”

“Muscle?”

“To save me from any bad guys.” My lips twitched. “I think I figured out how to be sure that Ryan won’t try contacting me again.”

Surprise washed over Ace’s expression. “Oh?”

I nodded. “When I got home from work tonight, I sent him a text and told him that I wasn’t ready to see him. That I knew he’d been reaching out, showing up at the salon, and making the effort to see me, but that I needed a few days. I told him I’d contact him sometime this weekend.”

“How did he take that?”

Shrugging before I pulled out the game board, I shared, “It’s always difficult to know for sure through text messaging, but I get the feeling that even though he was slightly relieved to hear anything from me at all, he’s less than thrilled that I’m not begging him to see me immediately.”

Ace’s features twisted with some emotion I couldn’t quite place. There was no denying that whatever it was wasn’t pleasant. “Do you want to see him?”