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"Promise me," he snarled. He was nothing like the man I had worked with before, but fine—if this was what he needed from me, I would give it to him. Whether I meant it or not, well, that was another thing entirely.
"I promise," I muttered. Was that it? Would he be satisfied now? I was certain Thea would get the same treatment from him the moment he saw her again, but that was between the two of them, and I didn’t much care to put myself in the middle of it.
Mark glowered at me for one more moment before he finally turned and stalked out of the house, leaving an air of unease behind him. I rubbed my hand over my face. Whatever had happened, I knew we just made things a whole hell of a lot more complicated—as if they hadn’t been enough of a mess already.
I reached for my coffee, wishing I had something a little stronger to wash away the taste of that confrontation. If there was one thing I didn’t like, it was being told what to do, let alone by people like Mark.
And let alone when he was telling me to stay away from the one woman I couldn’t get out of my head.
Chapter Eleven Thea
"Mark?"
I passed my brother in the corridor as he emerged from his office, but it was like he didn’t even hear me. He brushed right past me, and I let out a sigh.
How long was he going to give me the silent treatment? Yes, I got it, he was mad at me, but did he have to play games like this? I thought the two of us were a little more mature than that, but clearly, I had been mistaken.
I got it. He was pissed. As far as he was concerned, I had gone behind his back to sleep with the one person in the city I should have stayed away from, and maybe he was right to be furious with me. I just couldn’t stand my own brother brushing me off like he had never met me, especially now that I was trying to keep my distance from Scott, too. Apart from Shelby, it felt as though I didn’t have anyone to talk to, and I felt more alone than ever. I wasn’t sure how much more of it I could handle.
I trudged back up to my room to continue the job search I had been in the midst of before I had come down here to try and speak to Mark again. I knew he couldn’t ignore me forever, but he sure seemed like he was going to try.
It had been nearly a week, and it felt like I was losing my mind. I didn’t know what the chances were of Mark walking in and seeing the two of us together like that, but he hadn’t given me any room to deny it. He’d stayed behind, and I’d heard him yelling at Scott before I had managed to flag down a car. Since then, he had been utterly ignoring me, making as though I didn’t even exist. I wasn’t sure what he had said to Scott, but I hadn’t heard anything from him since then, so it must have been enough to get him to keep his distance.
But I didn’t want him to. Did I? As I flopped down on my bed again, pulling out my laptop, I ran the thought around my head once more. I had been trying to work it out for so long, just what I wanted from Scott if I wanted anything at all. Did I need to see him again? Or was it better to keep my distance?
The night we’d spent together, and especially the morning after, I felt as though I had seen a different side of him. A softer side. He had opened himself up to me a little, and I had felt like we were beginning to deepen our connection, to find some space between us that we could use to close the distance between our lives. I knew he had lived such a different life than mine, but there was more that we had in common than we didn’t. Right?
I wasn’t even sure anymore. Maybe I was just dreaming, hoping it worked that way, even though I was sure it couldn’t have been real. I wanted him to be a better person than he was, than the man Mark clearly believed him to be.
Perhaps my brother could see him for who he really was, and I needed to trust that he had my best interests in mind when he made his distaste for the two of us clear. I just...I just missed Scott, which I realized was crazy because we hardly knew each other. But when I thought of him, I felt this pang in my chest, as though some part of me still craved him. I should have known better, but the taboo was only making it harder for me to keep my distance, and I felt like I was losing my mind, lying in bed alone at night, feeling as though I couldn’t go on missing him this badly.
I had been trying to throw all my energy into finding work, but honestly, I would have been lying if I said I wasn’t distracted. I wanted to find a job I could focus my time on, something to keep me busy so I wouldn’t spend every waking moment thinking about him.
I wanted to find something I could use to continue my mother’s legacy. I knew she would have wanted me to use what I had learned to make this city a better place, and that was exactly what I intended to do—even if it was hard to find paying work in the charity sector.
If only I could actually just—I don’t know—focus my skills on helping out somewhere without worrying about the pay. I knew I couldn’t rely on the hotel to provide for me, I had signed that over to Mark, and I doubted he would have been in any rush to assist me after what had just happened. But everywhere I looked, it seemed people were searching for help, but they couldn’t afford to pay a living wage.
I was up to my eyeballs in college debt, and I had to start paying it off soon. I needed to get into the job market, but I didn’t know if I was going to have to sacrifice my plans of working in charity to do so. How had my mom managed to pull it off? She had helped run the hotel and then spent the rest of her time pouring her energy into the community, as well as raising the two of us. Even thinking about that much work was enough to make my head spin.
But she had done it, so there must have been some way for me to keep up with it, right? Some way for me to get on top of all of this. I just wanted to have some focus to my life, some purpose. Studying at college had been a great way to keep myself busy and give myself goals, but now I was out, I was starting to feel lost, especially without my parents.
I had looked through all my mom’s charitable work she had done over the years, and it was hard to know how to keep up with her standards. She was so prolific. Maybe the women’s shelter? Or the food banks? Or the homeless shelters? I should start volunteering just to get myself out there, get myself out of my own head and onto the streets for a while.
I sent in a few volunteering applications and closed down the laptop, flopping back on the bed to take a breath. I felt exhausted. My mind had been running so fast since I last saw Scott, and I hadn’t had a second to myself—my brain was always full of him, my brother, and of everything that came with being stuck between them both.
Most of all, though, I was busy beating myself up about getting into this kind of mess in the first place. I should have been smarter than that, I really should, but there was a part of me that just wanted to throw caution to the wind and fall into bed with the last man on Earth I should have even been looking twice at.
I hadn’t spoken to Shelby about it yet, though I knew I probably would have felt better if I’d had her take on all of it. I just...I was sure she would judge me for getting involved with someone like him, and maybe she would have been right to. She was always the one with these crazy dating stories, not me, and I doubted she would ever have let me live it down if she found out I’d been hooking up with a gangster.
All of this was just too messy for me to wrap my head around. I wasn’t sure where to start. Maybe if I just kept my head down and hoped it went away on its own? All this chaos had to resolve itself eventually, didn’t it? Even if I felt like I was going slightly crazy right now, stuck out here without anyone to talk to. Mark would give up the game after a few more days. There was no way he was going to keep being this mad with me, even if he might have had good reason to.
He was my brother. And the two of us, we were the only family either of us had left. Maybe that was why his emotions were so concentrated on me for now. Maybe it was why he was so mad at me, because he felt as though I had betrayed him, as though the one person in the world he could actually trust had just turned around and stabbed him in the back.
But he was the one who had brought Scott into our lives. Sometimes I wanted to point that out to him. I would never have met Scott in the first place if Mark hadn’t started working with him. I would never have had any reason to come into contact with Scott. It was that simple. But Mark had decided to make him part of our family business. Did he really think that someone like Scott Stewart was just going to play by his rules, no matter what? Surely, he couldn’t have been that stupid...
Or maybe I was the stupid one. The one who saw a softness in a man who was anything but, the one who believed there might have been something else to him if I had just looked hard enough. I wanted there to be because otherwise, there would have been no reason for me to get close to him—no reason for me to allow myself to get drawn in to his sweetness, to believe in a part of him I was sure could never have really existed.
I rubbed a hand over my face, and tried to pull myself together. Shit, I didn’t know what was wrong with me, but I felt like I was losing it. I wished I could talk to Scott again to get a feel for whether or not he had just been playing me when he had convinced me of the kind of person he was before or if there was really something to it.
