will be the perfect mom, someday. She’ll bathe her children in the light of her smile, and they’ll know what true love feels like.
Alice is watching me with a wry half-smile.
“Shut up,” I murmur to her
“Okay.” She nods at me. “You’ll figure it out.” She glances at her husband. “Those two. Am I right?”
“He’d be a fool not to,” Steve agrees, nodding.
“Well, he’s already a fool, but hopefully he’ll be the fool that gets the girl.” Alice winks at me.
On the pretext of having Winona visit Xena, I convince her to come back to the house with us. Of course, Tamara commandeers her for the afternoon. The housekeeper brings Xena out from the carriage house, and they play with the dog in the yard, then they sit down and make jewelry together.
I only sulk a little, and I assure myself that it’s perfectly sane and normal to be jealous of my seven-year-old niece. After all, Winona’s bestowing the kind of smiles on her that would melt anyone into a puddle of goo, and I’m barely getting a glance. What am I, chopped liver?
A couple of hours later, my family hug me goodbye, and they hug Winona goodbye, and they pile into my limo to head back to the airport.
Winona stands next to me in the empty foyer as the limo pulls away.
“Feels so quiet without them here.” She slides her arm around my waist with a sigh. “It must be hard for you.”
Everybody else walks in here and sees this massive house crammed full of luxe furniture and turns green with envy, but Winona gets it. I live with echoes, and loneliness.
She gets me. The real me.
I grab her by the shoulders and spin her to face me. “Spend the day with me? I miss your crazy self. I shouldn’t have pulled a vanishing act. It won’t happen again.”
“I don’t want to throw you off your schedule again, heaven forbid,” she says tartly.
“No, if you stay here, I’ll be exactly on schedule.” I pull out my planner, open it, and show it to her. For the last four hours of tonight, I’ve typed, “Stalk Winona Jeffers”.
Chapter Thirty-One
Winona
“Alone at last.” We flop down onto the parlor sofa, a couple of feet apart from each other. The housekeeper, Marta, has already collected Xena and returned with her to the carriage house. Marta is clearly a dog person, rubbing Xena’s butt in just the right place and talking to her in baby talk. Xena looks happy and healthy. If anything, she’s a little too healthy. Someone’s been getting all the snacks.
I try not to think about how Blake barely looked at Xena. He didn’t look hostile, or angry, or afraid of her, he just avoided her. Must love dogs…
I slouch down against the cushions and swivel to face Blake, and we both start talking at the same time.
“Listen, I want to– ”
“Here’s the thing–”
He laughs. “Let me start. Age before beauty.”
“Pearls before swine.” I cross my arms over my chest. “I know you only disappeared for four days, which isn’t that long, but it was the way you did it that really burned my biscuits. If you’d said, ‘I need to go to France to recruit new designers and I won’t have time to call this week,’ I’d have been sad and I’d have missed you, but I would have understood. Instead, after giving me that big speech where you begged to be my boyfriend and swore you’d put me in your schedule, you did the exact opposite. You sent me a rack of clothes and transferred me back to the personal shoppers’ department, like, okay, thanks for the sex, here’s your payoff, now let me move you as far away from me as possible without actually putting your desk out on the sidewalk. And then you totally ghosted me. Didn’t reply to a single call or text or email. At first I was genuinely worried and then I was really hacked off.”
The words came barreling out of my mouth in one long, furious run-on sentence until I finally have to stop to take a breath. Blake’s eyebrows climb higher and higher as I rant.
“Holy shit.” He sucks in a breath, shaking his head from side to side. “That is not at all… Wow… I could not possibly have more thoroughly messed up the message I was trying to send. I sent you those outfits because I’d been picking them out for you for weeks, and I knew each piece was one you’d