Winning the Cowboy Billionaire - Emmy Eugene Page 0,59

being completely crazy as she imagined the fun, flirty texts she and Blaine could’ve exchanged all night.

Her fantasies ran wild until she finally drifted into unconsciousness.

19

Olli organized, cleaned, scrubbed, and polished, her tears dormant. She let her anger drive her to get the perfumery spic and span. When it was spotless, she stood back, her gloves hanging from a couple of fingers.

In the morning, she’d return and put out the fresh flowers she’d cut from her garden. The three new scents she’d developed for next quarter sat on the end of the table nearest to the entrance, and she was ready to show them all to Frank Renlund.

She had note cards she’d go over in the morning one last time, and she had a new speech she needed to prepare. Surely Frank would ask her about her boyfriend or husband, and she needed to be assertive without being defensive.

She nodded to the perfumery, as it was all she had left. Turning away from the sterile room, she left the building and headed home. After tossing the gloves in the trashcan, Olli washed up in the kitchen sink, scrubbing all the way to her elbows.

She looked out the window above the sink, the lights at the ranch twinkling. A sob gathered in her stomach and grew. When it was too big to hold back, it surged up her throat and out of her mouth. She spun away from the lights and sank to the floor, everything she felt for Spur flowing through her.

He’d sat right on her steps and admitted how he felt about her. She’d never told him in so many words, but she’d thought her actions had shown him how she felt. She could hear his voice in her head, so demanding and so desperate to know how she felt about him.

“Of course your opinion is important,” she said amidst her tears. “It’s the only one I care about.” She could make him a personal cologne, but if she wanted to sell the masses of male cologne wearers, it was smart business to do a test panel. “Why didn’t he understand that?”

The better question was why Olli hadn’t just walked away without breaking up with him. “You always take things one step too far,” she told herself, her self-loathing combining with the fact that she’d failed again.

She cried right there in the kitchen, wishing her cat wasn’t a hermit or that she had a dog to come lick her salty tears from her face. When her tailbone ached and her legs had started to go numb, she got to her feet and headed down the hall to her bedroom.

She lit her Serenity candle and placed it on her nightstand. She changed into her pajamas and used the body spray she hadn’t released to the public yet. It was called Sleep, and she’d infused it with lavender, jasmine, and warm vanilla.

Most people didn’t know there was a difference between warm vanilla and cold vanilla, but Olli knew. Other things produced a rounder, more whole scent when warmed, and she always toasted almonds and cinnamon before infusing them into oils.

Almonds were not very pleasing, and Olli had given up using nuts of any kind in her concoctions.

She picked up the tester bottle of cologne she’d made for her demo tomorrow and spritzed her pillow with it. While that dried, she went through her nightly routine, hating looking into her bloodshot eyes and seeing her wet eyelashes. When her skin was clean and her teeth brushed, she exhaled heavily as she climbed into bed.

She took an extra pillow from the other side of the bed and hugged it as she rolled onto her side, her misery complete and endless. The notes of Spur’s cologne—literally a cologne she’d created and named after him—floated into her nose and reminded her so much of the man she’d started to fall in love with.

She wasn’t sure how she fell asleep, but the next thing she knew, her alarm woke her.

“It’s Saturday,” a woman’s voice chirped. “Time to get up and make this weekend the best one yet.”

She reached over and swiped off the alarm, which was a thirty-second snippet of a wellness podcast that repeated if she didn’t turn it off in time. She always turned it off on time, as she wasn’t a very heavy sleeper.

She went through the motions of getting ready for the day. Ginny had laid out her clothes days ago, and she stepped into the navy blue pencil skirt and bright