A Game Of Brides (Montana Born Brides) (13 page)

“
I have a better idea,” she said into her phone, and she didn’t have to fight for that cool, calm tone. It came naturally, at last. “Make me a reasonable offer, Stephanie, and I won’t come back at all.”

It took less than fifteen minutes.
When she ended the call, she had an appointment with Human Resources for her exit interview the following week, a very nice package, and a brand new life to figure out because she’d thrown away the old one.

Maybe it was no surprise she felt dizzy.
She sat on the chaise and stared at the phone in her hand and wondered what the hell had just happened.

“
That sounded very intense,” Margery said, making Emmy jump.

Emmy hadn
’t heard her come back over. She stared up her sister in a kind of horror, still clutching her phone while panic pounded through her. Had she lost her mind? She had rent to pay! She’d had that job for years! Could she call Stephanie back and get her job again before any of this was made permanent? That was obviously the smart thing to do. What had she been
thinking
?

“
Emmy, what’s the matter with you?” Margery asked, frowning down at her. “You look pale.”

“
I have no idea what just happened or why or if I’ve been taken over by a body snatcher,” Emmy said after a moment, and her throat was so dry that her voice was raspy and sounded like someone else’s, “but I just quit my job. For absolutely no reason.”

Margery gazed down at her for a beat, as if waiting for more.
“That’s not why you’re upset, is it?”

“
I can’t tell how upsetting it is yet,” Emmy gritted out, “because I’m too busy having a full scale panic attack.”

Her sister only shook her head, visibly unmoved.
“Did you ever even like that job?”

Emmy blinked at her.
“I’m good at it!”

“
I’m good at being a bitch,” Margery said, her mouth moving into one of her cat-like smiles, “but that doesn’t mean I should make it my life’s work.” Her smile deepened as Emmy only stared back at her in disbelief. “And it’s time for your massage. Try not to get snippy with the massage therapist, if you don’t mind. I can only tip so much.”

The realtor was a tool.

Griffin had hated him on sight, but that wasn’t a good enough reason to punch him. So he refrained, slumped there in the passenger seat of the idiot’s Bronco listening to a thousand things he didn’t need to know about Marietta’s retail market because he had eyes, thank you. He could see the empty storefronts and the
For Sale
signs, although there were far fewer of those today than there had been last fall.

“
Stay there,” he ordered the other man when they stopped in front of the space he’d gone into the realty office to ask about, a few doors down from the rowdier bar in town. The perfect place to collect the kind of clients he’d want to attract. A little walk on the wild side for the more conservative types and an easy stroll for people like him who hadn’t seen their skin without some bold color on it in too many years to count.

He watched the realtor
’s too-red cheeks get even brighter with a certain fascination, but then forced himself to smile politely, to take the sting out of the order. Because this was Marietta, not the big city, and his grandmother would tear a piece out of his hide if he growled at her friends.

Not that he thought Gran Martha would give this guy the time of day, but he
’d lived in Marietta long enough now to understand that small town politics were like tangled roots. He might not see them beneath the pretty trees that graced the parks and would be that deep, lush green all summer long, but they were always there beneath the surface, interconnected and overlapping in a thousand ways an outsider could never hope to understand.

“
I’ll check it out myself, if that’s okay,” he said, forcing another smile, and he wasn’t surprised when the realtor—why couldn’t he remember the guy’s name?—dropped a set of keys in his hand and waved him toward the front door, swallowing hard like Griffin was as disreputable as the pair of bikers who stumbled out of the front door of the Wolf Den a few doors down and stood there on the sidewalk, looking ornery.

If he was honest with himself, he thought as he opened the front door of the little shop
and stepped through the doorway, he didn’t particularly mind what the realtor thought about him.

Inside, he took a deep breath and looked around, soaking it in.
It was only a shop, like any other. A glass window in front and a narrow space within. Brick walls and wood floors. But Griffin knew. He stood there with the door shut behind him and that irritating realtor on the other side, and he knew.

He liked the art.
He liked tattoos. He’d never wanted to do anything else.

And he had no idea how he
’d ever thank Emmy for getting him to finally say that out loud. For making him face that truth he understood, now, he’d been running from for much too long, because facing it would mean a whole host of consequences. For finally allowing him to look beyond GriffinFlight and figure out what might come next.

He hadn
’t realized how little hope he’d had until she’d showed him how much there was to hope for.

That
shook him. He stood there in the middle of what would become his future—he knew it, the way he’d once known GriffinFlight would be big whether he wanted that or not—and realized what he’d known on some level since he’d set eyes on her in that airport: that he didn’t want a future without her in it.

She has a whole life back in Atlanta,
he told himself then.
She told you this was nothing but a fling. You shouldn’t have broken her heart all those years ago, dumbass.

But there was no going back in time.
There were only the few days he had left with her and when they were done, he had to let her go. Drive her to the airport himself and smile while she walked back out of his life, because that was what they’d agreed. That was what she’d signed up for. That was what a good man would do, and Griffin might not have as much experience with being a good man as he probably should, but it was high time he started. He owed her at least that much.

He would let Emmy go home.
He’d wave her goodbye like he meant it and he’d keep his damned feelings to himself.

No matter how much it was going to kill him to do it.

By the time Emmy made it home to the cabin—not that it was her
home,
not that it was even really
his
home, not that she should let herself think that treacherous word and all the things it implied about this relationship that had been over before it started—she was not in a very good mood. Or she was in a very dangerous one.

Six of one, half dozen of another,
Gran Harriet would say.

She slammed her way into the cabin, absurdly let down when Griffin wasn
’t sitting there at his desk the way she’d expected he would be, hunched over his Wacom tablet or a sheet of paper. She stood there for a moment, unwilling to investigate the feelings that surged inside of her, as if quitting her job had unleashed a thousand other things within. The longing for a kind of domesticity that wasn’t and never had been on the table here chief among them.

Exactly how many ways are you planning to be a complete idiot today?

“You all right?”

Griffin
’s voice was mild and perfect and too much to bear, and Emmy took her time turning her head to find him in the doorway to the bedroom, tucking the sort of button down shirt she’d have thought he abhorred into a pair of trousers much nicer than his usual jeans. She could smell his soap from across the room. She could see the dampness in his black hair.

And there was no reason at all s
he should feel like crying.

She told herself it was this
tornado inside of her instead. It was tearing everything up and flinging what it didn’t destroy back down and she had no idea how to go about putting herself back together.

“
My sister pointed out to me that I’ve been acting like a little brat for the past two weeks,” she said. Possibly with more aggression than necessary, she thought, when Griffin’s green eyes narrowed.

But his voice was as calm as it had been before.
“Surely that particular pot is way blacker than any kettle could ever be.”

“
Only if you think it’s reasonable for a maid of honor to storm around muttering and rolling her eyes and generally being a big old raincloud over the proceedings,” she retorted, which was, she was still ashamed to admit, a fairly adequate description of her behavior in and around the wedding festivities since she’d arrived in Montana. “When she’s not running off to have sex with the next door neighbor, that is.”

He eyed her for a moment.
“Why do I feel like there’s no way for me to participate in this conversation without it becoming my fault?”

“
It’s already your fault.” She hadn’t moved from her position in front of the door and she curled her toes into the floor beneath her, not caring if he could see her do it because of the pedicure-friendly flip-flops she was wearing, because she couldn’t let herself drift over to him the way she wanted. He was worse than alcohol, all blackouts and bad behavior and regret. And she craved him far more than she’d ever wanted a drink. “I quit my job.”

His smile was like light and Emmy didn
’t want light. She wanted darkness and brooding. She wanted this raging
thing
in her to cause damage, to the two of them most of all. Maybe then she’d find a way to make sense of it.

“
Good for you,” he said.

“
How is that good for me?” She took a step toward him and stopped herself, cursing at her own weakness. At the magnetic compulsion that made it impossible to keep her distance from him. How was she going to leave him on Monday? “I’m not rich. I’m not the widely celebrated creator of a lifestyle brand that everyone wants a piece of. I write stupid commercials about fucking allergies and I don’t even enjoy it anymore. But it’s the life I built. It’s safe and it’s solid and it’s careful and peaceful and
mine.
And I threw a hand grenade in the middle of it for absolutely no reason except a single conversation with you.”

It was only when she stopped that she realized she
’d been yelling. Her last boyfriend had hated it when she did that. He’d pulled himself up into the very picture of offended dignity and had walked away from her, saying things like,
why don’t you tell me when we can discuss this like adults, Emmy. Your volume is inappropriate.

But
Griffin’s green eyes gleamed. He propped a shoulder against the doorjamb, crossed his arms over his chest, and laughed at her. Like all the yelling in the world wouldn’t bother him at all, and wasn’t there something wrong with her that she found that so attractive?

“
I didn’t tell you to go kamikaze on your job, Bug. That was all you. I hope you asked for a decent severance package.”

“
Yes,” she said, and her voice sounded far away then, even to her own ears, because the tornado was spinning too fast and ripping her apart, and maybe she should have been a little more careful what she’d wished for, because this
hurt
. “As a matter of fact, I did. And my boss was only too happy to give it to me, because she hates my guts and was thrilled to get me out of there.”