as he goes, those broad shoulders, the determined way he leaves, like a man going to war.
Sutton doesn’t look at me either as he sets up a meeting time on his phone.
For two men who couldn’t pay enough attention to me last night, they sure are avoiding me in the morning. It doesn’t do nice things for a girl’s self-esteem.
“Our fault,” Sutton says, sensing my guilt.
They fought over me. Does that make it their fault? Or mine? We were so close to having the society’s approval. “The table is beautiful,” I tell him, touching the smooth edge of it with my forefinger.
His blue gaze follows my touch. “Yes.”
It’s not beautiful like Medusa with her blue-green lips and serpent hair. She tried so damn hard to be understood. Wanted that more than anything, but the men she spoke to kept turning to stone.
The table is different. It doesn’t need to say anything. It just is. Like the earth and the sun and all the vibrant things in between.
“I just keep thinking… why didn’t I see this when I came here the first time? How beautiful the table is and that you must have made it yourself.”
“You didn’t know me then.”
The founder of L’Etoile was a woman who called herself French royalty, but rumor is that she ran a brothel in Paris. Maybe both of those stories are true.
It makes me wonder if every old building has some dark sexual secrets, irreverent to the beauty of the place. Maybe there was a deviant sex club that met in the library after hours. I could look through those shelves for months, for years, and not uncover every secret the building holds.
I won’t be here long enough to find out.
Christopher managed to push through the permits with bribes and threats and who knows what else. The books are going to be dragged to the landfill, the carved wall torn down like plaster.
I’ll be on a plane out of Tanglewood before it happens, because I can’t stand to watch that kind of beauty destroyed. Not like I’m doing them any good here anyway. I may as well go back home, where I can at least make sure Mom is eating proper food instead of whatever berries-and-twigs diet her herbalist has come up with.
Maybe it will be as useful as the experimental treatment I didn’t get her into.
A knock comes at the door while I’m packing. So they got my awkward little resignation text, the kind you send when you were never really working for someone in the first place. It’s tempting to pretend I’m not in the room, but I’m a grown-up, damn it.
Besides, a perverse part of me wants to say goodbye. Even without knowing whether it’s Sutton or Christopher—I want to see whoever’s on the other side of the door one last time.
I open the door, and Sutton stands there looking like sunshine, vibrant and so bright it’s hard to face him. A half inch of scruff from a long day of work, some of it spent in the sun. Hercules in the flesh, powerful and unreachable and just a little bit mortal.
“Did you come to say goodbye?”
He prowls into the room. That’s his answer, but I already know he didn’t come to say goodbye. This isn’t the kind of man to break my heart and make it easy to leave. Is that what I find so appealing about him? Or maybe it’s the way his muscled body looks in a suit. Hard to say. There’s a lot to love about Sutton Mayfair, for some other woman. Some woman who doesn’t have a plane to catch tomorrow, even if it makes my stomach drop to think about.
His blue gaze lands on my suitcase and then moves away. An obstacle, to a man who must take pleasure in tearing them down. It’s strange that I’m hoping he succeeds even while I steel myself to fight him. That’s the kind of perversity that comes from having parents that loved and hated each other. From being the rope they tugged back and forth for almost two decades, leaving me frayed at both edges.
I might hate the way Christopher pushes me away, but at least I’m used to it.
“How’s your mother?” Sutton asks, throwing me off guard.
That’s probably on purpose. Some kind of battle strategy. Make her think you care about her. Then do something terrible. “I talked to her this morning. She tried to make a kale smoothie but forgot to put the lid on the