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No, she wasn’t all right. She’d expected him to confess his feelings for her, not to announce that he’d accepted the position of COO at Crane Hotels.
“Is this your way of being open?” she asked.
He frowned, his brows pulling over his nose.
“When I asked you to be open, I meant with your feelings, Eli, not your business plans.”
His chin jerked on his neck. Good. He deserved to feel as stunned as she did.
“You know I don’t make it a habit to mince words—or keep my opinions to myself.” She dug for the courage to say what she needed to say. “The truth is…”
She swallowed past the lump in her throat—because she had no idea how he would react when she throttled him with this information.
“I’m falling for you, Eli,” she blurted. “Hard. The kind of falling where you don’t want to be saved.”
He went completely still. Eerily quiet. She kept on anyway. What more did she have to lose?
“I want a future with you. I want to see who we can be when you’re not holding back. I want to come home to you. Have dinner together and spend holidays together. I want to text and call and see you. I want you. All of you. Not just your body. And I definitely don’t want you to withhold part of yourself from me.”
Silence hovered in the room like an angry spirit. When Eli finally spoke, it was with a heartbreaking, but not surprising, response.
“I asked for time, Sable.”
“I know you did. I thought tonight you were ready to tell me how you felt about me. Not that you were going back to work for Crane Hotels.”
“I thought you’d be happy,” he said, anger eating into his voice.
“I am! It’s wonderful,” she managed, fighting with her emotions as she tried to be fair. Going back to Crane Hotels was fantastic for Eli, for his whole family. But…“I thought there would be more.”
“More,” he growled.
“Yes. More.”
“There is no ‘more.’” With his flared nostrils and flat line of a mouth, Eli looked more like the man who had run off ten of her best assistants. She’d uncovered warm, solid, happy Eli, but that version of him had retreated in an instant.
“Crystal complained I couldn’t go all in,” he said. “She always said I’m incapable of committing all the way. I want to. God knows I’ve been trying. I’ve been finishing my unfinished business with Refurbs, with Benji’s widow, with Crane Hotels.” As he talked, he rose from the table. “Goddamn, Sable, I thought you’d celebrate with me.”
“I did! I am!” She stood, too, shaking now. Like a freak flood had hit, everything between them was eroding. “This has nothing to do with Crystal. This has to do with us. Are you incapable of giving yourself to me before everything else in your life is tied in a neat little bow?”
His eyes darkened. “What if I am?”
The words were a slap across the face.
“I asked for time because I need it,” he said. “I thought we’d agreed.”
“And I thought you’d see what we have.” Tears burned her nose but she refused to give in to them. “I have to go.”
“Isa, wait.”
She heard a pinch of regret in his voice but it didn’t matter. He couldn’t give her more and she didn’t want him to lie and say he was ready just because she was angry.
“Wait! Dammit, Sable.”
“It’s Isa,” she corrected. “You’re out of time, Eli.”
She slammed the elevator door and rode down to the parking lot. As she marched to her car, a burst of guilt mingled with her own anger and suffocating, heart-rending sadness.
Leaving was the right thing to do.
She loved him and she deserved to be loved in return. She deserved more than half measures from him. She at least wanted the assurance that there was more to come.
She’d given him everything. It was Eli who had held back—or worse.
Maybe the reason he didn’t profess his love for her was simple. Maybe he didn’t love her.
Maybe he never would.
