Finding Mr. Write (Business of Love #5) - Ali Parker Page 0,61
gnawing on it for the last ten minutes.
“You’re starting to worry me,” I said. “What happened, Briar? You can talk to me.”
She swallowed and looked down at her hands in her lap as the cloudy afternoon broke. Sunlight streamed through a patch of blue sky and poured in through the windshield. It immediately warmed the car up, so I rolled the windows down halfway.
“I just had a really bad customer, that’s all,” Briar said softly.
I frowned. “All this over a bad customer? How bad were they?”
The thought of someone being so cruel and irate with Briar over coffee made me want to pull out of the parking lot and head back to the coffee shop to give them a piece of my mind. She was a strong woman. I knew that for a fact about her. What had someone done to push her over the edge like this to the point where she felt her only viable option was to run?
Briar shook her head and looked away. “It was dumb. I don’t really want to talk about it.”
“Briar, I—”
“Please, Wes?” Her voice was desperate, and when she turned back to me, her eyes were as well. She was pleading with me to leave this alone.
But something told me I couldn’t.
I’d never seen her distraught like this.
“What did this customer say to you?” I asked.
She sighed. “Nothing. It’s hard to explain.”
“I’m a good listener.”
“Please,” Briar said. “Stop being so nice to me right now.”
None of this was adding up. I was missing something.
I reached for her, but she pulled away.
Frustration rose up inside me. What had I done that was making her recoil from me? Had I said something? Done something? Would she have preferred I just keep driving in tense silence knowing full well something was wrong? I couldn’t do that.
“I don’t understand,” I said.
“I don’t deserve it,” she whispered.
“You’re not making any sense.”
She pinched her bottom lip between her teeth and lifted her eyes to meet my gaze. There was pain behind her eyes, and for a moment, it looked like she might start crying.
She didn’t.
Instead, she said, “I did something really stupid, Wes.”
“Okay,” I said slowly. “I do stupid shit all the time. I was signing some of my books to send to fans and I spelled my own name wrong. I mean, that’s about as stupid as it gets.”
My little shot at humor did nothing to lighten the mood.
Briar massaged her temple with two fingers so hard her fingertips went white. “You’re going to be mad at me.”
“I doubt I could ever be mad at you.”
She laughed bitterly. “Hear me out and see if you still feel the same way.”
My stomach rolled over with nerves. “Okay. What’s this about, Briar?”
No more pussyfooting around it. She needed to spill. I didn’t appreciate being strung along like this.
She swallowed, licked her lips, and continued to stare at her lap as she started speaking. “A journalist came into the coffee shop this afternoon.”
I waited for her to say something else.
She didn’t.
“All right,” I said slowly. “And?”
“She was there to ask me questions.”
Again, I waited. And again, she stalled.
I was beginning to get frustrated. “Briar, I need you to just come out with it. Stop dangling this like a carrot in front of me and making me ask questions to pull it out of you. I can take it. I’m a big boy. What happened?”
Briar sniffled. “She wanted to talk to me about you.”
“About me?”
“About W. Parker.”
“Why would she come looking for you to talk about that?”
She glanced at me. Her eyes were glassy. “I accidentally slipped up with a co-worker last week. I told her that I’d met you. Not you, you, but W. Parker. I told her we were seeing each other. I didn’t tell her anything personal,” she added hurriedly. “I didn’t tell her what you looked like or where you lived or anything like that. I didn’t even do it on purpose. I’ve never dated someone I had to keep a secret before and I—”
“And this co-worker of yours told a journalist?”
Briar went quiet for a minute. “I’m not sure how she found out.”
“Your co-worker talked. That’s how she found out.” I hadn’t meant for my tone to be so sharp, but it was.
Briar flinched. She drew inward, tucked her chin, and sniffled again. “I’m sorry, Wes. I wasn’t thinking. Everything was so fresh and new and I was thrown into this life that felt almost magical. I let it get to my head. I shouldn’t have