Chapter 14
Sick of His Shit
SARAH
The stench of burning plastic filled the car as smoke puffed over the windshield.
My heart pounded—the bang had scared me so badly I’d let out a little shriek.
But then panic set in. Shelly was on fire.
I fumbled with the handle. But before I could even pull, my door swung open and Jamie was leaning over me, cutting the engine.
“It’s okay,” he said, his deep rasp right in my ear. His massive shoulder pressed gently against my chest as he popped open my seatbelt.
“Fire!”
“It’s not fire. You’re safe. But you shouldn’t be breathing this stuff.”
Relief rushed through me. I wasn’t about to blow up. Jamie’s huge presence and reassuring voice felt like a life preserver I wanted to cling to.
But despite his surprisingly gentle tone, there was no kindness in his expression. His jaw was hard, his eyes not meeting mine.
He was back to being his hard-ass self.
“Out,” he barked, after retracting his torso from my car.
My senses returned like a splash of cold water. This was Jamie, my boss. The one I was leaving behind because he made my life miserable. Barking commands at me like I wasn’t a person with feelings.
Anger rushed through me as I got out of my car. Not just at the way he’d talked to me, but at the way his demeanor change exemplified how things had become with him. Kind. Sweet. Gentle. Then cold, hard, distant.
I knew he’d been upset with me for practically throwing myself at him.
After that night at the wine bar, he’d been cold and dickish to everyone.
But eventually he’d gone back to being our kind boss.
Except not with me. To me, he’d stopped replying to my emails right away like he used to.
He cut off the impromptu coffee meetings we used to have before everyone else came in.
He stopped telling me I was doing a great job and started telling me all the places I was fucking up.
If he was in a group and I came over, he’d leave.
I’d wanted so badly to talk to him about it. But every time I tried to talk to him—at our deeply uncomfortable check-ins where he never met my eye and barked things at me from behind his computer screen—he’d immediately steer things back to work. And whatever problem I was somehow a part of.
The sad part was, I kind of understood why. The last time I’d opened up to him, I’d been tipsy and devastated. I’d told him the truth about how I felt and I’d crashed and burned.
But he could at least give me the fucking grace I deserved and not be a dick about it, couldn’t he?
I remembered, in that moment, that I no longer had to put up with his shit. Not if I was leaving. Which I was. This conference was the perfect networking opportunity. I was taking it as fate.
I stood up fast, raising my chin. “Jamie, you don’t get to talk to me like I’m not a human bei—”
“Step away from the car, Cooper.”
I hated that he called me that now. Like I was one of the bros.
“I’m not—” My words were interrupted by a sudden strangled feeling in my throat.
He clamped his hands on my shoulders and pulled me toward him as I started to cough, the acrid smoke burning my lungs.
“This way,” he grunted, guiding me away from Shelly.
I took a deep breath, and this time, I was far enough away from the car—and close enough to him—that I inhaled the clean, woodsy scent of his soap instead of the sharp tang of my burning engine.
My hands, I realized, were pressed against his massive chest. I’d leaned against him as I coughed my lungs up. Now, I was just leaning against him.
And he was letting me.
I looked up with the intention of meeting his eyes, but I only got as far as his throat, stemming from the collar of his coat. His skin was weathered, his whiskers silver over his Adam’s apple and the soft pulse next to it.
My insides went warm. My eyes dragged up, over his beard, over the hard slash of his lips. I locked eyes with him, and for a moment, Dick Jamie was gone. There, in his deep, almost navy eyes, was a different man. One that made my chest burn. One that made me—
I shoved myself backward like I’d been burned. Jamie stood there a moment, stiff as a board. Then he spun and strode around Shelly, using his arm to slide snow off the roof and onto the smoking hood, dampening the black plumes.
Mortification rushed through me. What the hell had I just done?
A beat passed. Then Sam cleared his throat.
Oh God. I’d forgotten all about Sam.
“I think that car wants to get out,” Sam said as a vehicle revved to life on the other side of the parking lot, snow cleared from all its windows.
I’d forgotten about the rest of the world in that moment in Jamie’s arms.
“Maybe we should get your car out of the driveway,” Sam said. “Looks like the smoke’s cleared.”
“Yes,” Jamie said. “We’ll push; Cooper can steer.”
The embarrassment of having not only Jamie see me look at him like that but Sam, too, made me want to dive into the snowbank next to the parking lot. All I could do was nod.
We navigated Shelly back into my parking spot with the two of them pushing and me behind the wheel.
Once in place, I pulled the emergency brake.
I needed a minute to gather my thoughts and make a new plan.
But the two men would probably think I’d lost my mind if I just sat here, so I popped the hood and got out, ostensibly to peer at the engine.
My embarrassment was replaced with despair when I saw melted black ooze, still sizzling.
Shelly had broken down before, but not like this.
This was her death knell; I knew it in my bones.
Sam appeared next to me. I turned away to hide the tears burning in my eyes.
“You okay?”
Too late.
“Yeah,” I said. “Just the end of an era.” I gave him a quick smile.
He returned it, sympathetically. For a moment, the two of us stared at the mess under Shelly’s skirts.
“You know,” Sam said after a moment, “I thought I’d never leave my life down in Guatemala. I loved the agency I was working with and the friends I’d made down there. I’d been thinking about coming home, but I’d been gone so long, and I was scared as shit to start over. ”
Why the hell was he telling me this now?
“Oh yeah?” I said politely.
“But then I got robbed at gunpoint.”
I gaped at him. “What?”
“Yeah. You could almost say it was my own fault. I was in a bad part of town at the wrong time of night. I was set up by a pretty girl.” He sighed. “It was shitty as hell.”
The way he recounted this was so self-deprecating I almost laughed.
“They didn’t get much,” he said, “but I was rattled. Only now, I’m grateful. Because all I could think about when I was looking down the barrel of that gun was that I didn’t want to die yet. I hadn’t done half the shit I wanted to.”
He must have seen the confusion on my face, because he shrugged. “All I’m saying is sometimes it takes a shitty thing to knock you out of your routine, you know? To make a change.”
This time I did laugh. “I guess you’re right. Not that I saw my life flash before my eyes just now.”
“Good. I wouldn’t recommend it.”
I smiled. “Thanks, Sam. I appreciate it.”
I did, too. He was good people. And he was right.
Shelly dying made a kind of cosmic sense.
Though I’d carry her spirit with me—just like her namesake, who I still liked getting yelled at from time-to-time down at the diner—it was time for the next chapter in my life.
I’d get a new car to go with my new town and my new job.
I’d leave Jamie and my confusing mess of feelings for him behind.
It would be great. It was all going to be great.
Just then, a thud startled me. I stepped out from behind my hood to see Jamie had flipped open the lid of a giant stainless box in the bed of his truck and was swinging my hard-side suitcase inside with another thud.
For a moment, I couldn’t quite register what I was seeing. That case had to weigh seventy pounds—I’d been sweating by the time I wrestled it down the stairs and through the snow to my car. Then alarm hit me.
“Hey!” I exclaimed. “What are you doing?” I wasn’t riding with him to the conference. There was no way.
But Jamie didn’t even do me the courtesy of throwing me a glance. Or an option. He’d already slammed the lid of the box and was latching it shut. “What are you going to do, Cooper? Take the bus?”
That sounded preferable, honestly. But I wanted to be there this afternoon. I needed the time to practice my presentation. It was critical to the next steps of my career that this weekend went off without a hitch.
“No, I…” I glanced back at Sam, my mind spinning. I couldn’t ride with Jamie. Six hours in the car with him? He’d throw me off my forward momentum. My future was away from him. As far away as possible.
“I’m going to ride with him.” I blurted, pointing to Sam.
Sam’s mouth fell open, but I threw him an eager smile, like I’d been thinking this all along.
“Really,” Jamie said. It wasn’t a question so much as a single word of skepticism. “He’s with a firm I don’t know about?”
My stomach twisted. This was an industry invite-only event. And Jamie knew every builder in town.
“He’ll be my guest,” I said.
I expected Jamie to have some kind of snap-back at that, but he only shot a glance at Sam as he walked toward Shelly’s passenger-side door.
Sam now looked deeply uncomfortable. I’d backed him into a corner. I’d already told him he might not get in.
“Are both of those going, too?” Jamie was ignoring my needs as usual, his eyes on the two backpacks in Shelly’s passenger seat.
“Jamie, I said I’m going with Sam.”
His jaw worked. “Really? Because except for a few standby tickets, guests have to be sponsored by an outside company. Or approved by the conference committee. But I’m sure you knew that.”
Heat flared in my chest. I didn’t actually know that. Now I was trapped. Why was he like this? Why couldn’t he just be nice to me for once?
Like he had been by coming by to check on you? Like he was being now, loading all your stuff and giving you a ride?
Okay, the actions were nice. The way he was doing it was not. No one would argue that.
“It’s okay,” Sam said. “Jamie’s right. It was a crapshoot.” His eyes went to mine, apologetic.
He was abandoning me.
Jamie trudged around to the driver’s side. “Get in the truck, Cooper.”
“No.” My heart thudded.
“No?”
I was being obstinate. But I didn’t care. “Not without Sam. You can get him into the conference.”
And he could be my buffer.
Jamie twitched slightly. He glanced at Sam.
“Even if you weren’t on the committee,” I said, “you’re the keynote speaker. The belle of the ball, really. They’ll do whatever you ask.”
This was very unlike me. I was normally nice. Sweet. Agreeable. But I was so sick of Jamie’s shit. And like I remembered from a moment ago, I didn’t have to put up with him anymore.
My words had made Jamie scowl so hard I was surprised clouds didn’t coalesce over his head.
“Come on, Sam,” I said.
“Sarah, that’s really nice of you, but I’m fine—”
“No,” I said. “Don’t worry. Jamie’s a nice guy.”
Jamie blinked, his eyes hard now.
He knew as well as I did that he was not a nice guy—to me.
But I also knew that if I wasn’t around, Jamie would have offered to drive Sam. Because he was a nice guy to everyone else. He liked doing nice things, even if he acted like he didn’t.
He just didn’t want me to get my way.
Jamie’s temple pulsed. Finally, he let out something that sounded like the noise a bear might make if you interrupted its lunch.
Then he looked over at Sam. “I can’t get you into the hotel.”
Sam nodded. “Of course.”
“Get your bags,” he barked.
Sam grinned at me, and I knew I’d made the right choice. For Sam and for me.
I could get through anything so long as I didn’t have to be alone with Jamie Reilly.