Secrets Whispered from the Sea - Emma St. Clair Page 0,33
heels.
For half a second, I considered what it might be like to stay here. To put down my own roots in this sandy soil and build a life on Sandover. Even sleeping on Nana’s couch, this felt more like home than my Houston apartment ever had.
But this wasn’t the life I had planned. I was a city girl. I loved the hustle and the challenge of it working with teams and pitching campaigns for big brands. I couldn’t stay somewhere so small and out of the way as Sandover.
Ann made a frustrated groan. “This would be so much easier if—”
“If Nana had put you in charge? Well, she didn’t. And I’m not giving up.”
“I was going to say if you’d just stop being stubborn, but that works too.”
Before I could respond, she hung up.
I dropped my phone in the cup holder and gripped the wheel tighter. So much for trying harder with her. That thought, which seemed so shiny and hopeful the night before while reading Nana’s journal, now seemed totally out of touch with reality. Ann didn’t want to be close to me. We never had been. We never would be.
The anchor in my belly dropped even further when I saw a black truck parked out front of Nana’s. But it wasn’t the black SUV that had me muttering a choice word under my breath. It was the handsome jerk of a man leaning casually against the hood, waiting for me. Probably waiting to fine or evict me for sleeping there.
“I’m not staying here,” I said, as soon as I stepped out of my car. Which clearly made it seem like I was, in fact, staying at the house.
“I didn’t say you were.” His eyebrows went up, and he looked between the house and me. “Though the lady doth protest too much.”
“Save the Shakespeare quotes. Why are you here?”
With a sigh, Alec peeled himself off the hood of his car. With every step that closed the distance between us, it felt like my body was twisting its volume knob up, up, up, all the way up. All I wanted to do was to press the mute button, but it was not happening. It was pretty hard to distinguish anger from attraction right now.
“I want to help,” he said.
What had I been expecting—an apology? I shook my head and turned away, heading for the stairs. Of all the condescending things … he tanked our proposal and now wanted to help? Despite the attraction still flooding me, raw and powerful and out of control as a summer storm, I had the urge to run Alec over with Nana’s jeep.
“You’ve done enough helping for one week, I think.”
“Clementine.”
The way my name sounded on his lips, rising over the sounds of the summer insects and frogs made electricity zip up my spine. I stopped on the fourth step and spun around to find him at the bottom.
I was glad for the dark. Glad for the distance between us. And glad that I was still furious with his handsome face. Because otherwise, I don’t think I could have trusted myself around this man. I wasn’t this woman. I never had been. But Alec made every cell and nerve ending in my body fire up in some way. Good or bad, it didn’t seem to matter. He lit me up.
There were millions of reasons not to be swayed by this man. He was the jerk who ridiculed the part of the plan I suggested to raise the ceiling in the living area and put in beams. That was only one of the areas he shot down that felt intensely personal. I swore while sitting there in that room that he knew somehow it was my idea. He couldn’t have, but it felt that way. Maybe because every encounter he seemed to view me with more and more disdain. None so much as tonight though.
At least until now, when he had the decency to look somewhat apologetic. Not that he apologized. He probably wasn’t capable of it.
But even if he gave the best apology in the world and stopped behaving like a behemoth, there was the fact that Chuck and I broke up a little over a week ago. I was smart enough not to trust the first feelings after a breakup. Like I needed any more reasons to stop thinking about this, Alec was older. Not like my-dad-and-Nadia older, but enough that it gave me pause.