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“I have no doubt of that. But that’s not what’s going on.”
“Isn’t it? Granny told me she’d spoken with you about putting in a cedar closet for my mother while she was on vacation as a surprise for her birthday. I’m pretty sure that’s not twenty-five thousand dollars’ worth of work.”
Emmett sighed. He wished that Adelia had told him she’d devised a cover story. Maddie must have pushed her about it. Did someone tell her he’d been to the house? Or did she see Adelia come by the bar to bring him the check? Either way, suspicion had been cast and he’d been unprepared.
“You’re right. It’s not. A gold-lined closet wouldn’t cost that much. That’s because this check doesn’t have anything to do with a closet. Your grandmother was just covering for me. I’m not building a closet or a shelf or anything else for her.”
“Then what is this?” she asked, holding up the check with a tight jaw. “A low-interest loan? Did you talk her into buying an interest in the bar? What, Emmett?”
Emmett’s hands clenched at his sides. He wanted to explain everything to her, to calm her down, but she wasn’t listening. It was just like when they first clashed over the noise at the bar. Every word out of her mouth made him want to dig his heels in further and further. “It’s none of those things, I swear. Just sit down, take a breath and I’ll tell you the whole story.”
Maddie narrowed her eyes at him, making no move to sit or relax.
Okay, fine. “I’ll admit there are things I kept from you, Maddie, but there are parts of my life that no one knows about. If I told you, I’d have risked everyone in town learning the truth.”
“You don’t think you can trust me to keep a secret?”
“I didn’t know if I could or not.”
“What could be so terrible that you had to hide it from everyone, including me? Do you have some kind of criminal past? Are you on the run from the cops?”
“No,” he insisted. “It’s nothing bad. Why do you always think the worst of people? You seem to have believed that I’m a criminal from the beginning and you’re using the flimsiest of evidence to make that conclusion. My first brush with the law came the same day yours did, Maddie. I’m not running from the law and I’m not trying to swindle your grandmother. As a matter of fact, I don’t need your grandmother’s money, okay?”
Maddie snorted and crossed her arms over her chest in contempt. She had made up her mind and nothing he said was going to convince her that she was wrong. That look was back on her face—the tight lips, the arched, disbelieving eyebrows, and slightly upturned nose. It was that smug, holier-than-thou expression that made him grit his teeth and do anything to aggravate her. Emmett was on the verge of telling her the truth, of letting his secret out, as much as it pained him, but now he was beginning to wonder if she was worth the sacrifice. He thought so, but if she could turn so quickly on him, he might’ve misjudged her.
“There you go again,” Emmett said. “You think you know so much, but you don’t know anything, Fancy Pants. I must not know much, either, because I thought that you and I were really making progress. I thought that someday we might . . .” His voice trailed off, unable to finish what he wanted to say.
“Don’t give me that wistful romantic crap,” Maddie snapped. “You’re just like all the other guys who saw me standing around looking lonely with a giant target on my chest. I’m nothing but a means to an end, a way to get to my family and everything they can offer you. I thought you were different, but you’re just another Joel with a surfer’s veneer.”
“You’re comparing me to the guy who drugged you and tried to rape you?” Emmett shouted. “Are you kidding me?” He ran his fingers through his wet hair. This wasn’t even close, but her reflex to not trust men was stronger than her common sense. “You know what? Forget it. Forget this whole thing.”
Her eyes flickered with a painful emotion that quickly faded. Her arrogant expression returned, projecting to him and anyone else that she didn’t care what the unwashed masses thought of her. “Go ahead, break it off now. You got what you wanted.” She held up the check mockingly.
“You know, if you have that little faith in me—in us—then our whole relationship is just a ruse. Everything that’s happened over the last month is nothing but forced proximity at work.”
“You’re right. I fell for your smile and your charms, but my first instincts to stay away from you were right. You were just out to use me and get back at me for calling the cops and getting you in all that trouble.”
Emmett took another deep breath to try and calm himself and keep from saying something he would regret, but it wasn’t helping. She wanted to play hardball? Then he’d play. “You know,” he said in a scathing tone, “for someone who practically lives off the money her family gives her, you don’t have a lot of room to talk.”
Her blue eyes grew wide with aggravation and surprise. “Excuse me?”
“You heard me,” he snapped bitterly. “If it wasn’t for Mommy and Daddy and Granny, you’d be living in a cheap-ass apartment behind the sporting goods store and scanning groceries at the Piggly Wiggly.”
By this point, she’d damn near developed a nervous twitch. “That’s not true,” she said with nearly a wince of pain.
“Oh yeah?” Emmett challenged, ignoring her. “Who paid for your schooling in Paris? Or that Mercedes? Who paid for the bakery and all your fancy, frilly renovations? Who gave you the down payment and cosigned for that Victorian house you call home? Admit it,” he said. “You’re less worried about being used than you are about someone else puttin
g their hand in your private golden honeypot.”
Her face had turned a mottled red, running down her neck and around her ears. She was so angry; she seemed as though she’d nearly lost her grasp of English. She sputtered and stumbled through a response, finally looking as though she were about to go primal and just roar at him. “How dare you!”
Her anger just fueled his words. He laughed at her frustration. She wasn’t used to being challenged or having someone force her to look in the mirror. It wasn’t pretty. “You know what, Fancy Pants? I dare. I dare because I don’t give a shit about your family and their money. I don’t care about how important they think they are or how paranoid they can be about people just wanting to use them. I say what I want because I don’t need them or you to condone my life and make me feel like I contribute.”
He wanted to shout the truth at her now. That he could buy and sell her. That even if that check were going to him and not into her grandmother’s investment account, he didn’t need a dime of it from her or anyone else. He didn’t even need the money from the bar; it just gave him something to do and some business expenses to keep the IRS from eating him alive. He would’ve happily paid those five-hundred-dollar noise fines until she was blue in the face because it didn’t mean a damn thing to him.
But he wouldn’t tell her. If she couldn’t love, trust, and accept him as a broke bartender, she didn’t deserve to know he was rich. Or that he was dumb enough to have fallen in love with her.
Maddie had no response. She stood, searching for words, and when she couldn’t find them, took it out on the check. She tore it into twenty pieces, tossing them in the air before she marched out of his apartment and slammed the door.
