I Have Lived and I Have Loved - Willow Winters Page 0,366

took my wine from me. She grinned. “I’m sorry. I can’t have you spill red wine over this beautiful couch. Let it out, have a good cry, but don’t hold red wine while you’re doing it.”

I laughed, her concern over her couch breaking me out of my misery. “You’re right. This couch is too good to spoil for a man. You pretend you don’t like the finer things in life, my friend, but you can’t help generations of breeding.”

She took a sip of the wine she’d just taken from me. “I know. However hard I try, I can’t help reverting back to type. I have such good taste.”

I laughed. “You do. However much you fight it, you’re always going to be a Park Avenue princess.”

“There, you see? At least I can make you laugh with my ridiculous life choices.” Grace shifted, sitting cross-legged on the couch facing me, giving me her full attention. “Speaking of ridiculous choices, tell me about the resigning thing.”

“Max had a decision to make. He knew how I felt about my father and he didn’t hesitate to pick him over me.” I shook my head. “If he’d just been my boss, if I hadn’t told him how my father had abandoned me, I might have been able to swallow getting kicked off the JD Stanley account. But the way he so easily chose business over me was just too much.” It was as if he’d drawn a line in the sand and said my feelings would never be more important than his job.

“I didn’t realize it was that serious between you two,” she said.

“It’s not serious.” Perhaps it had become more serious than I’d realized.

“But serious enough that you want him to pick you over his job,” Grace said. I didn’t reply. I didn’t know what to say. “What did he give as an excuse?” Grace asked.

“He just said that the client can pick the team.”

Grace winced.

“Don’t you dare say he’s right.” He wasn’t right, was he? “It would be different if Max and I weren’t fucking, but we are. Were. I’m not just his employee.” I wasn’t sure what we were to each other and I supposed it didn’t matter anymore. But he’d owed me something. Some kind of loyalty. Hadn’t he?

“I’m not sure you’d be quite this upset—so upset you handed in your notice—if it were just ‘fucking’. You say it’s not serious but it sounds like it is from your perspective. Do you have feelings for him?”

I scraped my hair back from my face as if it would help me see more clearly. Did I have feelings for him? “I feel like I want to punch him in the face; does that count?” I asked as Grace rubbed my back.

But I didn’t want to punch Max, not really. I wasn’t angry. I felt broken, as if I’d taken a right hook to my stomach. Somewhere along the road, I’d let him in, enjoyed being with him—I’d been happy, and not just when we had sex. I couldn’t remember a time when that had been true of any of my other relationships. My father had ensured I grew up heartbroken, the scars of our relationship creating a barrier between me and other men. No one had ever broken through. No one except Max. It had just been sex—amazing sex—and then somewhere along the line, as he’d revealed himself to me, I’d been forced to do the same. He’d opened me up and I’d let myself care.

“I think maybe you feel more for him than you’re admitting to yourself,” Grace said.

Of course I had feelings for him.

Max was the only experience I’d had of being with a man where I’d not worked out how or when we would end before anything started. I knew I would leave my college boyfriend when we graduated. I knew the guy I saw occasionally at Berkeley would never leave Northern California and I’d never stay. I always saw the end before anything began. And that suited me. It meant I didn’t get attached, didn’t have any false expectations. With Max, I’d never seen the end and so I felt cheated of all the time we could have had together in the future. My expectations of him, of us, had been too high because they hadn’t had limits.

I wanted so desperately for Max to have told my father if he didn’t want me working on the account, Max didn’t want his business. Finally, I wanted a man to put me