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We fell into a comfortable silence after that, and I allowed myself to daydream about what would happen when Sterling came home from work. That bastard little devil in my mind tried to convince me that he’d be calling things off the second he walked in the door because that’s what Sterling Bishop did, but that bitch had no hold over me today.
He felt what I did, I was sure of it.
There was no way he’d back out now.
––––––––
Sterling
I SHOULD CALL IT OFF.
The clock on the wall behind my desk clicked and ticked and tocked fucking incessantly until I was pressing the tip of my pen into the post-it note hard enough to make it bleed.
This isn’t good, it’ll never end the way we want it to.
Colin stared at me like I was going to snap, brows pinched in that ridiculously concerned expression he only adopted when we were under the gun with a pitch or about to lose a deal.
She’ll understand. She understood before, and I’ll just explain that I want her so fucking bad I’d do anything to have her ... except this.
Click. Tick. Tock. Stare.
“What?” I asked quietly. “Spit it out.”
Colin huffed. “Me spit it out? You’re the one that looks like you’re about to explode. What’s wrong?”
“You don’t want to know. It’s not business related,” I deflected. When nothing on his face changed, I exhaled hard through my nose. “I think I accidentally did something I shouldn’t have.”
“An Ollie-type mistake or ...?”
“Has Ollie ever fallen in love with one of his employees?” I asked, clipped and low. “You’d know better than I would. He only tells me about the pregnancy scares, not the feelings he may or may not have.”
Colin shook his head. “Far as I know he’s only actually loved one of his exes, and he doesn’t talk about that one. Back to you, who is she? I didn’t have a damn clue you were even interested in someone here.”
His voice lowered like he was worried we might be overheard, but I waved a hand to tell him to relax.
“Not here. Learned that fucking lesson the hard way, didn’t I? No, it’s the uh ... the woman I hired to take care of my dad. I went and fell in love and then I fucked up and now I feel like I was dropped in the middle of the ocean and I have no idea which way land is anymore.”
“Shit,” he sighed. “So she doesn’t feel the same?”
“Oh, no. She feels the same, it’s written over every inch of her body,” I said. “Doesn’t change a thing. You know how these things end, and my dad would die if she left. Seems selfish as fuck of me to do this. And I’m a lot of things, but I make a concentrated fucking effort to not be selfish.”
Colin looked confused, which — to be fair — wasn’t a foreign look on his face. “If you both love each other, why can’t it work? You’re just gonna hurt yourself as much as her because it might not work?”
“And now you see why I lost the fucking plot here, right?” I sat back. “Roll the dice and maybe it works and we all live happily ever after with a pair of Crocs. Or maybe it doesn’t and I break my father’s heart as well as ours. I was trying to wait. To bide time until something changed with our arrangement, but that didn’t exactly work.” I rubbed my jaw, then tapped my desk just to distract myself. “So I should just be honest with her, right? Honesty fixes everything.”
“I’ll leave the Crocs part alone and focus on the point. Yeah, honesty fixes everything. But you have to do it in a way that doesn’t sound like you don’t care or are making the decision for everyone. More like—” he licked his lips and frowned, obviously in deep thought — “like it’s just best for now because you’re worried about Charlie. I think if you can manage that, you’re gold. What happened though, why didn’t waiting work? You guys kiss or something?”
I snorted. “You could say that. She barged into my room, put a hand over my mouth and started riding me. For the record, I was fine before that. Hanging on by a thread, but still hanging on.”
It was obvious Colin was holding back a laugh. “Well um ... doesn’t sound like she’s the type to sit back and let something she wants slip away. Good fucking luck there.”
“Very funny,” I deadpanned, then picked up my phone. “Now go away for a few minutes, I need to call her and make sure she’ll be up when I get home. The sooner we talk about this, the better.”
He stood with his hands raised in mock surrender and headed for the door, but the moment my eyes dropped to my phone to find Zeppelin’s contact, her face appeared on my screen.
Convenient, I thought, answering and bracing myself for the ‘we have to talk’ talk. “Hey, I was just about to call you. I— wait, are you crying? Why are you crying?”
“It’s Charlie.” She sniffled. “Sterling, he fell. The ambulance is on the way.”
