Page 69 of Ruthless Edge

"I know it's easier said than done," Paige says. "I know it's been weeks of her showing up to every meeting and finding Knox, and making her little comments, while hanging onto him. I'm not telling you to just not feel it. I'm telling you she's doing it deliberately. She's good at it, and you are not what she's trying to make you think you are." She squeezes my shoulders. "This is the dress. You're buying it."

I look at myself in the mirror. Green dress, fitting room light, Paige beside me with her curly hair and her certainty.

"Okay," I say.

"Okay," she says, satisfied, and lets go.

I change back into my regular clothes and we start going through the discarded pile, sorting keep from return, and Paige says, "So. Knox."

I hand her a dress to re-hang. "What about Knox?"

"How are things?"

"Fine."

"Emma."

"Good," I say. "Things are good. That's the problem."

She waits.

"He makes the meetings fun," I say, which is something I've never said out loud before and immediately wish I could take back. "He listens. He backs me up on things. He knows when I'm getting close to the edge of my patience and snaps me out of it with a joke." I fold a rejected dress over my arm. "The Hawthorne trip was worse. Four hours in a car and lunch and the whole day, and it was… it was easy. The whole day was just easy."

"That sounds terrible," Paige says drily.

"It is terrible. Because none of that changes anything that happened before." I look at her. "He didn't come to the gala, Paige. He left me sitting at a table alone all night and then Laura told me why, he didn't want to be seen with the fat girl. That happened. Whatever Knox is now, that was him then."

Paige nods slowly. Not agreeing, exactly. Just acknowledging that I've thought about this.

"Maybe he likes what he sees now," I say. "Maybe something changed when I lost the weight. But I can't separate that from what it means. If he's only interested in me now, then the message is still the same as it was at that gala. I just happen to look different enough that he's changed his mind."

Paige doesn't try to talk me out of it. That's one of the things I love about her, she doesn't rush to fix what I'm saying, she just lets it be said.

"You don't owe him anything," she says finally. "Whatever he is now, however good it's been. You don't owe him trust until you're ready to give it." She picks up the last dress. "And you're allowed to figure out what you actually want before you decide anything."

"I know what I want."

"Do you?"

I look at her.

"You know what you're scared of," she says. "That's not exactly the same thing."

I take the dress out of her hands and put it back on the rack because it gives me something to do. "Can we find the second dress now? We need two, one for the gala, and one for the auction."

"Absolutely," she says. "Right after you admit I made a good point."

"You made a passable point," I say, and she grins and leads me back out to the floor.

We're working our way toward the front of the store, debating just how formal I need the dress to be for the gala, when Paige suddenly lights up beside me the way she lights up when she spots something interesting.

I follow her gaze.

Blake Carter, Knox’s brother, is coming out of the men's store across the way carrying a garment bag, moving with the absolute straight-ahead focus of a hockey player on a mission. He's big enough that people tend to get out of his way, and he's wearing his usual vaguely irritated expression.

Paige raises her hand.

"Blake!"