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“There you go,” I say with a can-do attitude, just shy of giving her the good old thumbs up. “Now you’re getting it.”
Blair huffs and pulls my coat tighter around her, and for just a split second as the chill seeps into my bones, I regret giving it up, but knowing that she’d be freezing out here has me ready to peel off the rest of my clothes and hand them over too. Hell, I’m starting to think that maybe we should get naked. I hate seeing her freeze.
Her chattering teeth are loud enough to hear across the open cab, and the sound has my hands balling into fists. Hell, keeping myself rooted to my seat is proving to be a challenge when all I want to do is grab her and pull her into me to shock her system for just a moment. I wonder if her blood would start to pump if I kissed her, but not one of those pathetic little pecks, a real fucking kiss that makes her realize exactly what she threw away. All I know is if I keep hearing her shiver, I’ll lose any semblance of control.
“What’s your plan?” I ask, both of us needing a distraction from the cold.
“Huh?”
“Your plan? For the house? For Blushing? How long are you going to be here?”
“Wow. Trying to get rid of me already?”
I scoff. “Acting as though that’s not your main goal is insulting, Blair. We both know your time here is limited. I just want to know how limited so I can gauge how much damage you’re going to cause before you jet out of here and leave me to clean up the mess again.”
“Fuck me, Nick,” she grunts. “You didn’t even pretend to save my feelings on that one.”
“Like how you’ve done for me over the past six years?” I question, arching a brow. “Sucks, doesn’t it?”
Her gaze falls away, getting straight back to her shivers when she lets out a sigh, choosing not to dwell on the bullshit. “I don’t know how long I’ll be here,” she finally says. “It really depends how soon I can bring Nana’s house into the twenty-first century.”
“You’re selling it?” I question, though I already know the answer.
“That’s the plan,” she says. “As for the timing, who knows. Considering the time of year, I’ll be lucky if I can source everything I need. Most stores are closing up for the Christmas break, but if I get in quick, I could get most of what I need from Hardin’s before John closes up. But accidents happen, and I really have no idea what I’m doing. I had to look up how to patch drywall on YouTube last night, and while it doesn’t seem too hard, there are more steps than I realized. I think this renovation is going to take a serious bite out of what little savings I have.”
“So, when are you planning on putting it on the market?” I ask, doing what I can not to drop to my knees and tell her that I’ll teach her everything she needs to know.
Blair shrugs her shoulders. “I really don’t know. I was hoping to get it on the market before Christmas, but Estelle, the real estate agent, let me know I was dreaming. She won’t be able to get it listed until mid-January, assuming I’ve completed everything I need to do. And as for an actual sale, she thinks it could be months.”
“Fuck.”
“My thoughts exactly,” she says. “I need to get out of this place as soon as I can.”
Again, her words are like a slap across the face, a shot right through the chest. “Yeah, well fuck you too. Having you back in town wasn’t exactly my Christmas wish, but you don’t need to go acting as though being in the same area code as me is giving you hives.”
“I didn’t . . . that’s not what I . . . Fuck, Nick. Why do you always have to take everything so personal? I didn’t mean I wanted to get out of here because I can’t stand being around you. The thought of getting to be in the same damn room as you is the only reason I haven’t hightailed it back to New York yet,” she says, the cold forcing a little honesty into her words. “I was referring to my new business. I need to get home so I can start figuring out my next steps.”
“What are you talking about? What business? You went to New York for your dream job. What happened to that?”
“What do you think happened?” she mutters. “I fucked it up just like I fuck up everything else.”
“You got fired?”
She nods, shame flashing in those beautiful blue eyes. “I mean, it’s not the first time. My boss and I . . . we don’t often see eye to eye, and he certainly doesn’t understand my . . . humor. He’s fired me a handful of times before, but our clients love me, and every time he lets me go, they’ve pressured him to bring me back, and I always go willingly. Only this time . . . I don’t want to go back.”
“So what do you want to do?”
“I’m going to start my own firm,” she tells me, sounding somewhat sheepish as though admitting one of her dreams is the hardest thing she’s ever done. “My best friend, Rena, is going to help me get off the ground, and I already have a great rapport with my clients from SC Corporate, so considering their current contracts, I think many of them will happily come with me. And I just . . . I don’t know. I think I have a good chance of succeeding with this.”
“Of course you do,” I tell her. “If anybody is going to build a successful business from the ground up and absolutely kill it against the bigwigs in New York, it’s you.”
Blair presses her lips into a hard line, her gaze falling back to mine. “You really mean that? You’re not just saying that because you feel like an ass for saying having me back in town isn’t exactly your Christmas wish?”
“I don’t feel like an ass for saying that. I was being honest. And yes, I really meant it. I think you can achieve anything you want.”
“You really are an ass,” she throws back at me, getting catty again, crossing her arms over her chest, pulling the coat even tighter as she picks up her pacing, probably wearing a hole through the ground by now.
I clench my jaw, the cold clearly fucking with my head as I storm out of the truck and stride around the front, goosebumps quickly spreading across my chilled skin. “What the fuck do you want from me, Blair?” I demand, holding my hands out wide. “You want me to lie to you and tell you that seeing you back in town is everything I ever wanted? Because it’s not. I’ve dreamed about bringing you home ever since the day you left, but actually seeing you again is like tearing the wound wide open. You fucking killed me when you left, and I’d give anything not to have to relive that pain again. You think I’m here, getting in your face because I enjoy this? Fucking hell.”
