Chapter 45 I SHOULD PROBABLY DAPHNE LESS
I SHOULD PROBABLY DAPHNE LESS
Daphne
Ooooooh, shit.
I have a crush on my sister’s ex-fiancé.
She’s going to murder me.
Or maybe she won’t.
Maybe she’ll smile and be like, well, Daphne, if you’re happy, I’m happy, but then she’ll go home and cry about it and pretend she’s not upset and she won’t want to see me ever again, which sucks because she’s the only blood relative I have left who’ll talk to me.
And she matters.
When I was cut off, long-time friends abandoned me. My parents abandoned me. My living grandparents abandoned me.
Even my dog abandoned me—not truly her fault, she was super old—but she did. She died right when I needed her most.
Everyone but Margot abandoned me.
You can tell me until you’re blue in the face that I chose being abandoned when I went no-contact, but they didn’t make any effort to find my new number—which Margot has—and get in touch with me either.
They showed me in no uncertain terms that they were done with me.
And now I’ve gone and done something I can’t take back, and if Oliver weren’t Margot’s ex, I wouldn’t have a single regret.
I like him.
He’s shown me every possible side of himself this week, and even when he’s being an asshole, I get it, and I like him.
How can I not like a guy who wants to give his entire fortune away to make the world a better place? That’s the mission I’ve lived and breathed since I was eight years old.
Starting over is hard. Starting over with an unexpected stowaway—the worst unexpected stowaway—is far more complicated.
And starting over after what’s clearly been a terrible few years is bound to leave his emotions whacked up all over the place.
“How common are fire alarms in hotels?” Oliver asks me while we huddle against the side of the diner across the parking lot as the rain shower that was threatening earlier passes over us.
Like we’re two people who didn’t strip naked and ride each other in the name of teaching him how.
He’s thirty-one years old.
He knows how.
Very, very clearly knows how, and I’ll have the sore body to prove it tomorrow.
Holy fuck.
That’s the only explanation for what that was.
It was a holy fuck. I was possessed by something otherworldly.
Except I wasn’t.
This is what I do.
I mess everything up.
“They happen sometimes.” Firetrucks are here, so clearly, the siren wasn’t a nothing thing.
“I know I said this wouldn’t happen in my family’s chains, but they do.
I remember my dad shut a property completely down once because they couldn’t figure out why the smoke alarms kept going off.
It was getting terrible reviews, so he razed the whole building and put a new one in its place. ”
He shoots me a quick look, then looks back through the rain at the motel. Most of the other guests have gone into the diner to hide from the rain.
Given how much Oliver tipped the staff, we didn’t want to go in and be recognized.
Not after seeing the news with the kids from the lemonade stand this morning, which feels like a lifetime ago now.
“He didn’t talk about individual buildings very much,” I add.
As if that’s necessary.
Oliver surely knows. Doubt he was spending much time on individual M2G stations the past few years unless they had specific, super-bad issues or were significantly outperforming expectations.
It’s never anything in between if the guy at the top knows about it.
Oliver’s chest rises as he pulls in a deep breath.
He grabbed a T-shirt—it was faster than buttons—and he has it on backward and inside out, and I don’t think he realizes it.
“Does rain always smell like this?” he asks.
And my heart melts for this man a little more.
Why?
Why?
I haven’t dated—not really—since I was disinherited. At first, I was too much of a mess and found myself in toxic situations more than not, and yes, sometimes it was me being the more toxic one.
I’ve watched Bea have a few disasters, and then there was the time working on myself, learning how to be part of a family in a healthier way, then finding my job, so dating has never taken priority.
Not to say I didn’t scratch an itch here or there, but I should not have scratched an itch with Oliver.
Not when I was already starting to fall for him.
And now—has he truly never stopped to smell a rain shower?
How is that even possible?
“Rain smells different in spring than it does in summer and in fall,” I tell him.
“How so?”
“In spring, it smells like the world is waking up from a long, cold slumber after the longest night of the year. Like flowers and sunshine are coming, even if they aren’t here yet.
In the summer, it smells like relief from the heat.
Like the earth needed to jump into a swimming pool to cool down.
In fall, it smells like nature is taking a shower to get ready for bed.
Winding down. Putting all of its leaves away and letting the grass turn brown like I’d take off my makeup and soak in the tub for a while before going to sleep. ”
He's watching me without looking straight at me, like he too is realizing we’ve made our lives a lot more difficult.
Like I need to leave this road trip and go back to Athena’s Rest and keep my freaking mouth shut, and he needs to go on without me.
That would be best.
To pretend this never happened.
“So this is summer cool-off scent?” he says.
“You’ve never stopped to smell the rain? I know you’ve seen rain. Everyone’s seen rain.”
He shakes his head and looks back across the parking lot. “When your life is one day after another after another of living up to expectations, with boxes to check and priorities set for you before you’re born…”
I wrap my arms tighter around myself so I don’t hug him.
That wasn’t my life, but it could’ve been.
If Margot hadn’t so firmly taken the role in our family that Oliver filled in his.
Oldest or only child.
Expectations from birth.
Trained for this.
Made for this.
And so very proficient that I didn’t have to be the backup.
You can’t tell me my parents and his parents didn’t talk more about having an heir than they did about having a baby when they decided it was time. I know my parents. I know his parents. I wouldn’t believe you if you told me they wanted to have a baby for normal instinctual reasons.
They wanted to see their family lineage and empires continue to grow under the next generation and the generation after and the generation after that too.
They didn’t have us so that we could take flight and be whoever that magical little spark that made us who we are christened us to be.
He takes another deep breath, like he’s trying to imprint the smell of summer evening rain onto his soul.
I hold my hand out under the overhang to feel the cool drops that are pattering softly over the parking lots. “Have you ever won a giant stuffed animal at a carnival game?”
“I can hear my father asking why I’d waste my time on a game rigged against me when I have the money to buy the damn stuffed animal.”
Mine would ask the same. “What about getting your fortune told?”
“Waste of time when you can make your own fortune.” He snorts softly. “Or be the lucky bastard who’s born into it.”
“Ever eat at a food truck?”
“Hot dog carts are for plebeians.”
I know he’s quoting his parents, and it’s less the sarcasm dripping from his words and more that I’ve heard my parents say the same thing.
“Bea makes a corn dog that’ll change your life.”
He smiles softly. “Spoken like someone who’s never had grits.”
“But I have had tater tots dipped in very bad melted cheese, so I think I know what I’m talking about.”
He makes a face like he’s gagging without putting his heart into it.
It’s freaking adorable.
“What else?” he asks.
“What else what?”
“What else do I need to know how to do to…to live. To be normal. To—to enjoy life on a daily basis. What normal, everyday things have I missed that I can—that I can experience now?”
Yep.
I’m a goner.
Have to leave. First thing tomorrow. No question. No doubt.
So I have tonight to tell him everything he needs to know.
“Water parks. Sometimes you need to spend an afternoon floating on a lazy river through a water park while kids yell and shriek and play all around you. And if you don’t have a favorite sledding hill in winter, you’re missing the opportunity to feel like you’re eight all over again.
And apple picking. It is a moral imperative that you go apple picking in the fall with a hayride and then tease the kids around you about the apple cider having crushed worms in it. ”
“That’s terrible.”
“I didn’t do it. Bea’s brother did it. He’s working on being the new get off my lawn old man.”
“You laughed when he did it.”
I grin. “Maybe a little. But in my defense, Bea’s boyfriend that year had slipped spiced rum into my apple cider, and I was tipsy before the hayride ever started, and I think Ryker was too.
Ryker doesn’t get tipsy very often. He’s very serious.
And grumpy. You’d like him. While Bea and I are sitting on our porch someday, telling our great-nieces and great-nephews all of the stories of the trouble we got into, you and Ryker could be on the porch next door, grunting and scowling and yelling at all of us to get off your lawn. ”
“Wouldn’t it be your lawn?”
“No, no, I have a new plan taking shape. Bea’s going to guilt Ryker into letting us build our retirement home on his farm so that we’re definitely on his land, and he’ll let us because that’s what brothers do.
We’ll annoy him until the day we all croak.
Probably it’ll be a mass casualty event when he gets fed up with us and drives a tractor into our porch. ”
“Jesus.”
“Live epic, die epic.”
He stares at me.
I giggle.
Just a little.
The teensiest amount.
And then the very worst thing ever happens, and he smiles again.
At me.
Like I’m funny, and he’s finally realized it, and he likes it.
“Daphne—” He cuts himself off, shaking his head.
“Yes, Mr. Grumpiest Billionaire?”
That thing about him smiling being the very worst thing ever?
I was wrong.
Not unusual. I’m wrong regularly.
But this wrong makes my heart stutter in my chest, because now he’s doing something even more wrong, and he’s hugging me.
Hugging me, hugging me.
Tight.
Both arms wrapped hard around my ribs, his head buried in my neck while he breathes like he’s now imprinting the scent of me on his soul, the same way he was imprinting the smell of the rain.
“Are you trying to suffocate me?” I ask in the delectable lemon-and-sex-scented heat of his hug. “Because if you are, you’re doing it wrong.”
“I like you.”
It’s eighty degrees outside, and the rain’s not doing as much to cool down the parking lot as it is to increase the humidity levels, but a full-body chill passes through me. “That’s a bad idea,” I whisper.
“Why?’
“Margot—”
“Margot and I are over. Over over. Forever. And I think she’d tell you the same.”
I shiver again. “Look, Oliver, tonight’s been fun—”
“I need fun, Daph. I don’t want to sit on a porch yelling at you to get off my lawn. I want to be the guy being yelled at to get off someone else’s lawn. I want to live. I want to feel things. I want to have fun. I want—I want to know how to be more like you.”
Good thing I already don’t talk to my parents.
Pretty sure they’d disinherit me all over again if they could if they ever found out I was teaching their dream son-in-law how to be more like me.
He tightens the hug even harder. “I’ll buy you all of the brass polar bears you want. But don’t—please don’t run away because of—because of what we did tonight. I’m not ready to let you go. I have too much to learn.”
I close my eyes and do the same thing I’ve watched him do tonight, and I suck in a big breath full of the scent of him.
He’s a disaster.
But he’s my disaster.
Temporarily.
For now.
It’s not like Archie Westmore’s going to step into my shoes and help Oliver figure out all the little ways he can enjoy a simpler life. Archie would have him on golf courses and yachts and private jets.
Not road trips through small-town America with diners and Lava Cheese Puffs and weird souvenirs.
“Have you done your own laundry yet?” I ask.
“Never.”
“I can definitely teach you how to do that wrong. You haven’t lived until you’ve turned all of your underwear pink.”
His breath shudders out of him like he’s been afraid I’d tell him no.
That I’m abandoning him.
As if I could.
Most of my family abandoned me. Most of my friends too.
I won’t do that to another soul who needs me.
Even Oliver, who’s the last person I should be helping, for so many reasons.
I’m not fooling myself. I know when he says I like you, what he means is my life is a mess and you’re helping me and there are too many big feelings for me to sort through all of them and understand the difference between liking you and appreciating the help from anyone who’d be in your shoes.
Even if I know I do like him.
That I’m setting myself up for complete and total wreckage of my heart.
But Bea saved me once. She took in a friend and showed me how to survive when she already had her brothers and a lot of other things on her plate.
And I believe in nothing if not the karmic balance of the universe.
So it doesn’t matter that my toes are still tingling from that orgasm and my recently dormant vagina is hoping this hug goes somewhere else, a clear sign that I need to leave.
Oliver still needs me.
Oliver still wants me.
And so I’ll stay.