Page 66 of You Know You Wanna

Birdie grimaced. “I’m glad this is your decision and not mine. I’d have kept her here simply because she so desperately wants to stay.”

“Well, what about you?” he asked. “Do you still want to open a studio in a big city? I know you have one here now, but you never actually said you don’t want another.”

She chuckled. “Right. I’ll consider the tables turned, then.”

I grinned. “You don’t have to answer if you don’t want to.”

“No, it’s not that.” She breathed out. “It’s that I honestly don’t know. I never completely gave up on the idea and I’ve got some money saved, but I can’t imagine leaving Alan behind.”

My eyebrows twitched. “You’d feel guilty about leaving him?”

“I would,” she said. “So, so guilty that just the thought of it makes me want to cry, but at the same time, I don’t want to look back thirty years from now and resent myself for letting the guilt rule my life. If only he’d listen to you, he could hire more help and he wouldn’t need me so much. I’d be able to come and go without having to worry about him, and that would be perfect. He also wouldn’t have to work around the clock anymore.” She sighed. “Do you want to know a secret?”

“Sure.”

“I really hope he doesn’t leave this place to me. It’s not what I want.”

I frowned. “Seriously? You don’t want it?”

“I don’t want to own it,” she corrected. “I don’t want to be tied to it, but at this point, if he’s refusing to even speak to you, then it seems almost inevitable.”

“Actually, Declan might’ve found a way to help Alan out after all,” I told her. “He still doesn’t want anything to do with me, but he’s taken a liking to Dec and we might be helping him to expand the golf course.”

“Wow.” She paused for a beat. Then a soft, sad smile spread on her lips. “That would mean the world to him. It’s always hurt him that he had to surrender that part of the property to someone else. I didn’t realize you guys were in the golf course business, though.”

I chuckled. “We’re not usually. We’re big money investors, you know? Normally, neither of us would touch a place like this, but something about it calls to me, and Declan feels like the same. It also doesn’t hurt that it would help us with an investment we’ve already made.”

“The Greens,” she mused out loud. “I heard about that. Do you think Alan is going to go for whatever offer Declan has made him?”

“I don’t know,” I said honestly. “We’ll have to see, but I hope he does. For all our sakes but especially yours.”

Especially because I was starting to think that what called to me so much about this place was Birdie. If inheriting the resort wasn’t what she wanted, I didn’t want her to be stuck with it either.

As we walked, we had circled back toward the resort at some point, and when I looked again, we were coming up on her cabin.

She let go of my arm and moved in front of me, giving me a small smile as she tipped her head toward it. “I should get some sleep, but thanks for the walk. And the talk. You make me think about things I haven’t thought about in years. It’s good. I like feeling like my mind is opening up again.”

“You’re welcome,” I said, looking deep into her eyes and wondering why I still wasn’t ready to let her go. We’d spent the last three days together and the whole night, and yet, it just didn’t feel like enough. “Can I ask you something?”

“Sure,” she said. “What’s up?”

“Did I mess things up for us?”

Her eyes widened slightly, but then she took a step closer to me and shook her head. “Nah, our summer fling is intact.”

For some reason, I was slightly wounded by her referring to it as a summer fling. I stepped up to her, catching her face in my hands and shaking my head. “It feels like more than that to me.”

She smiled, her head tipping back. She looped her arms around my neck. “I don’t know. I might have to be reminded.”

Chuckling, I slid my fingers into her hair, lowered my mouth to hers, and kissed her, not really knowing how I would label our relationship myself but confident that it was more than just a fling.

34

BIRDIE

Remington and I somehow managed to stumble to my bed without falling or crashing into anything. Our hands roamed and grasped at whatever clothes we encountered, and we desperately pulled them off without stopping our unspoken mission of reaching the mattress.

By the time he pushed me down on it, I was left only in my panties, my nipples hard and my skin tingling. He crawled on with me, his mouth barely leaving mine unless it was absolutely necessary. As he lowered himself down on me, I moaned, wrapped my legs around his ass, and pulled him closer.