Page 92 of Just One Little Bargain

“That’s the job, isn’t it? Learn things about me and find my weaknesses.” Her voice stays level, which is the worst part. “I keep thinking someone is finally paying attention to me, and it turns out you’re just very, very good at what you do.”

“That isn’t what this is.”

“No?” She wraps her arms around her knees. “Because from where I’m sitting, it’s textbook. Everything you’ve done since you got here is exactly what a person does when they want something from you and haven’t asked yet. Very generous customer service for the woman whose soul you’re contractually obligated to walk out of here with.”

“You know it isn’t. I can’t lie to you.”

The last coal in the pit dims to black.

“It’s getting late.” She stands.

“Evie.”

“I heard you.”

She walks toward the house without waiting to see if I follow, and I hate how empty the blanket feels without her beside me.

Chapter 25

Evie

The Garden Kitchen smells incredible, and Wade Sullivan’s handwriting slants across the seasonal menu in tight, economical script, listing things like chèvre, candied walnuts, and brown butter sage with the casual confidence that these are ordinary words people use. Daisy’s cocktail glows cranberry-red, a sprig of rosemary bobbing among the ice.

Candlelight fractures off the greenhouse glass into copper, and I’ve devoted a humiliating amount of attention to the mason jars on the shelf beside me, specifically the question of whether the figs inside are structural or ornamental. The distraction is deliberate. Apparently, my brain would rather debate structural fruit than sit with the mess I made myself.

The first two days after the bonfire were all apologies. Milo said sorry so many times I nearly threw a spatula at him. And I, in my infinite maturity, told him it was fine, and that we should just go back to how things were and pretend nothing had ever happened between us. So he did. He heard me and he obliged, the way he obliges everything, with that earnest whole-body attention that makes ordering him around feel cruel.

For five days, he’s been the model employee. He learns faster than anyone I’ve ever hired, anticipating the towels, the kettle, the crooked step I keep meaning to fix. Around the inn, Milo is warm, easy, and entirely appropriate. He hasn’t looked at me once the way he did on that blanket with the fire dying between us.

Which is what I asked for, and I hate it. It’s a wonderful development for a woman who claims to want stability.

“Hold on.” Maddie sets her drink down hard, sloshing bourbon over the rim. “You left him in charge? Of the inn? During peak season?”

“I gave him a list.”

“A list,” Maddie repeats.

“Three pages, color-coded, laminated.” I drain a quarter of my cocktail in one pull. “Emergency contacts on the fridge. With backup ones inside the supply closet.”

I hear how it sounds. The thing is, the list took me two hours to write and another thirty minutes to laminate. Letting go of those pages meant handing someone the architectural blueprints to my entire nervous system. I’ve never left the inn overnight. Not once, in all the years the place has been mine. Milo promised he’d guard it with his life, and he wasn’t being sarcastic.

I haven’t fully unpacked why I trust him with it. Some of it is guilt. I let him apologize for a fight that was at least half mine, and giving him the keys was the closest I got to apologizing without actually saying it. But most of it is simpler and more damning than that. He notices things about me that no one else does.

So I gave him the keys, and all night, the same thought keeps pulling at me: I want to be back in the room with him.

Daisy props her chin on her hand, chestnut eyes wide and delighted. “Evie, last year, you made us do girls’ night at your place so you’d stay within sprinting distance of the front desk.”

“Last year was different. I had a full house, and the Petersons kept trying to light the fireplace unsupervised.”

“You put the hallway camera feed on your phone and propped it next to the TV.”

There’s no dignified way to defend that.

Maddie snorts. “Whatever that man is doing to you, it’s working.” The silver underlayer of her hair flashes as she tips her head back. “Seriously. Is it demonic? Because I’m starting to wonder if the whole demon pitch wasn’t just his very weird, very effective pickup strategy.”

“Please don’t.”

“A guy tells you he’s a demon, you let him move into your house, and now you’re voluntarily sitting in a restaurant twelve miles from your business while he runs it unsupervised. That’s not a normal progression, Evie. That’s a cult recruitment timeline.”