Wherever It Leads (27 page)

“Brynne, I . . .” He stumbles on his words, reaching for something to say when there isn’t anything he can say.

“Good luck, Grant. I mean that. I hope you figure your life out and end up in a good place . . . but tonight marks the end of any connection we’ve ever had. Don’t call me or lure me into meeting you. If you have something you want to say, call my Dad. I’m done.”

Turning away, I head towards the parking lot.

The walk to my car is quiet, the warm air billowing my hair behind me. I fill my lungs with air and let my heartbeat steady, relishing the sense of tranquility that’s washing over me. Not much was discovered at dinner, but one thing became crystal clear: the way I felt about Grant and the way I feel about Fenton couldn’t be any more different.

I climb in the car and back out of the space. My phone rings before I even put it in drive. I click the button on my bluetooth when I see Fenton’s name.

My plan was to play it cool, make him wait before caving to him. To his benefit, my body is still on a high from being around him, so I give in immediately. It’s not a fight I’m fit to win.

“Hey,” I say, my voice swollen with a smile.

“Are you okay?” His smooth tone wraps me up and makes me feel like he’s right beside me. Like he’s pulling me into one of his tight hugs.

“I’m fine.”

“I’m really asking, rudo. Are you really okay?”

The smile breaks across my face at his insistence and his compassion. “Yes. I’m really okay, Fent.”

His sigh streams through the phone and the touch of frustration is not lost on me. “Are you alone?”

I pull out of the parking lot of Pano and onto the road leading to the freeway.

“You mean you aren’t following me?” I only half tease. It wouldn’t surprise me. And it wouldn’t anger me either. The thought of seeing him, just the two of us, makes me want to dance in the seat of the car.

“You didn’t answer my question.” Fenton’s voice comes out in a strained breath. “Are. You. Fucking. Alone?”

“Yes, I’m alone,” I mock him. “But just for giggles, what would you do if I weren’t? What would you do if I said that I was with Grant and his fingers were dipping insi—”

“Brynne . . .”

“What if I told you his lips were—”

“I’m trying to be calm,” he interrupts, making me giggle, “But you’re pushing the fucking limits of my self-restraint.”

“Ah, poor you.”

He snorts. “It’s going to be poor you if you keep it up.”

“I might like it.”

He growls, the sound lighting me up from every which way. “Turn around and come back here.”

“I need to get home.”

“Just give me a few minutes.”

I laugh. “It’s never
just a few minutes
with you.”

He chuckles, the smoothness warming me. “No, it’s not and it won’t be. I’m not that kind of guy.”

“Thankfully.”

“So turn the car around and come for me.”

“I can go home and
come
, Fent.” I grin as I steer down the exit towards my house. Just knowing I’m turning him on, listening to him get worked up is better foreplay than I’ve ever had with anyone else. Having an effect on a man of this caliber is exhilarating.

I wait for him to respond and he doesn’t. He sits on the other end of the phone, completely still, not uttering a word.

“You still there?” I ask.

“I’m trying to decide how to handle you.”

I burst into a fit of laughter.

“This isn’t funny, Brynne.”

“Oh, no, it really is.”

He seems to struggle with his words, starting to speak and then stopping a few times in a row. My laughter ceases and a dubious feeling takes its place.

“In all seriousness, can I see you tonight?”

The way the words hit me makes me lose my breath. He’s not being playful, not teasing me with sexual innuendo. I’m not sure how to read what he’s saying, but there’s some overriding quality that makes me still.

“I have to work in the morning,” I reply, my voice wobbly.

“I’ll triple it.”

I can’t help but smile. “We’ve been here before. You can’t buy your way all the time.”

“Isn’t that the truth?” His words are so low, I can barely make them out.

A heaviness sits on my chest, an odd sense of trepidation taking over. There’s something in his tone that makes me curious, but also one that wants me to keep my distance.

“I can send someone to pick you up if you’re almost home by now,” he offers as I pull into my house.

“I, um, I really can’t tonight, Fenton.” I flip off the ignition and inside the car. “I have a few questions for you before we see each other again.”

He sighs, but doesn’t miss a beat. “Shoot.”

A million things flutter through my mind, a host of questions and clarifications I need. I don’t even know where to start.

Presley’s Mercedes pulls in beside me and she jumps out and waggles two bottles of wine in the air.

“Now’s not a good time. I need a few minutes to get my head together. It’s been a crazy night.”

“All right,” he sighs. “Can I see you tomorrow?”

“I thought you had work to do and you couldn’t see me?”

“I do have work to do and, honestly, I probably have no business seeing you. But what can I say?”

I grin. “Ah, Fent, did you fall in love with me?”

“No, but I’ll pretend to love you if you’ll come over tonight.”

Laughter rolls off my tongue and I open my car door. Presley is standing there waiting for me. “I really can’t tonight. I have a date.”

“It better be with Presley.”

“I—”

“I’m warning you,” he growls, “If you fuck with me again and pretend you’re with someone besides Presley, I’ll be at your door in ten minutes.”

“It’s with Presley,” I reply sweetly. “Now I gotta go.”

“Talk to you soon.”

“Bye.”

T
he white wine flows smoothly in the glass, the sound music to my ears. Presley fills it to the brim, way past the acceptable level, and sits the bottle back on the table.

My legs curled under me, I take a sip of the sweet liquid. “I needed this,” I say, licking the tanginess off my lips.

“I always need this.” She pops her feet up on an ottoman across from me and takes a long drink. “So good.”

“What did you do tonight?” I ask, wondering if I can divert the conversation away from me for a while. I haven’t had time to play it all out in my brain and I really need to do that, if at all possible, before I’m inundated with Presley’s gazillion questions.

“Oh, no, my beautiful friend. Don’t even try it.”

I slump back into the sofa.

“Spill it,” she demands.

“Well, Grant was waiting on me when I got there.” I search for the words to describe everything. “It was just . . . weird, Pres.”

“Why? Because you haven’t seen him in so long? That’s normal.”

“Yeah, because of that, I guess. But it was more than that. He seemed so . . . was he this immature when I dated him?”

The wine sloshes in the glass as she laughs. “Yeah, Brynnie. He was.”

I shake my head. “I didn’t remember him like that. He talks about racing and cards and the same old stupid stuff. You know?”

She grins knowingly. “So, basically, you’re comparing him to Fenton?”

“No!”

“Yeah, you are.”

I release a breath. “Yeah, I guess I am. It’s amazing how different he seems now. But a part of me wishes I hadn’t gone. He had nothing. He tricked me into seeing him and I let him. But it won’t happen again.”

“You needed to hear him out,” Presley says, “But, yeah, don’t go again.”

“He wanted me to go home with him.”

“Thank God you didn’t!”

“There was no chance,” I laugh. “It’s just strange that after all the years we spent together, I feel absolutely, positively nothing towards him. Nothing. Not one iota. Especially since he cheated on me and is tied up in this Brady thing, I still expected to feel something. I did the other times I’ve seen him, you know? But I don’t now.”

“Compared to Cashmere, how could you?” she laughs. “This is one of the reasons I thought you needed to see Grant. For closure, yeah. But also to see if you even liked him, because Brady will come home and it would be so easy to fall back into old habits. Before they left for Zimbabwe, you were living in this bubble of missing something that maybe seemed a lot better because you were seeing it through break-up goggles.”

“Wait a minute. Break-up goggles?”

“Yeah. Like beer goggles. Only this is a skewed view of a relationship after you get dumped. Things are always remembered better after the fact. Like when someone dies and in reality they were a complete asshole. Have you ever heard the eulogies? No one says that. No one says, ‘Uncle Gerald was a complete dick that grabbed my ass last Christmas and cheated on Aunt Mildred a hundred times and drank entirely too much.’ Instead it’s all, ‘He was a saint that lived a humble life of love and giving. God broke the mold with the benevolent Uncle G.’“

I choke on my wine. “Where do you get this stuff? And I wasn’t dumped.”

“It just comes to me. It’s a gift,” she winks. “But the point’s the same. I think you’ve just realized that your relationship with Grant wasn’t what you thought it was.”

“For sure,” I say, catching my breath. “I know now, after being with Fent, how different things can be.”

“So you’ve properly rebounded! I knew you could do it!”

“Will you shut up?”

She rolls her eyes and tosses a lock of hair behind her ear. She doesn’t pop me with a quick retort and that catches me off guard. I watch her, perplexed, before she leaps off the chair and disappears into the kitchen. Things shuffle around before she comes back with a box of oatmeal-chocolate chip cookies.

“Here,” she says, taking one and stuffing it into her mouth before slamming the box at my chest. “If you’re getting bitchy already, I’ll just get the cookies now.”

“I’m not getting bitchy,” I say, slipping a cookie out of the sleeve. “But if these are raisin and not chocolate chip, I’ll be at nuclear-bitch level in about a half a second.”

“I bought the raisins by accident one time! Get over it. It was an honest mistake.”

“And I about died of raisin ingestion!”

“You’re trying to distract me,” she says, swiping another cookie before settling in her chair again. “And it won’t work. I’m your best friend. Getting the details to everything is a part of our deal.”

“I didn’t know we had a deal.”

“It’s in the girl code. Now get talking and you can even do it with your mouth full and I won’t comment. Even if you spray me with crumbs.”

“You’re so disgusting.”

“Talk.”

I lift the cookie to my lips and take a bite. I chew purposefully before making a point to swallow and then take a long sip of my wine. “Okay. I’m ready.”

“Finally,” she sighs. “Okay, so I’m assuming Grant didn’t have anything important to actually tell you.”

“Nope. Not a thing. Just that he loves me so much and apparently is still into dirt bikes.”

“That weasel!”

“I know,” I say, taking a nibble of my cookie. “But there was a little surprise tonight.”

“What’s that?”

“Fenton showed up.”

“What?” Presley leans forward in her chair and sets her glass on the table. Her jaw hangs open. “At Pano? He was there? Dining?”

I shrug. “He owns it. He conveniently owns the restaurant where Grant and I had dinner. And he just sidles up to the table like it was nothing.

“The odds of that being random are like one to I’ll-get-to-fuck-Thor. Not good.” She leans back in her chair, her brows pulling together. “Did you ask Fenton about it?”

“Not yet. Grant did say he got a gift certificate yesterday while at the marina.”

“That’s odd.”

“That was done intentionally,” I propose.

“But how could Fenton have known that? And why?”

I shrug and pick up my wine. I down it in one long slurp. Presley has the bottle primed as soon as I finish and refills it to the brim.

“You’re going to have to talk to Fenton,” Presley points out. “You need to get to the bottom of this. But I’ll be honest, I’m not sure how I feel about that. Did he know Grant? How did you all show up at the same spot? This is a big freaking city.”

“I know. I get it. I just don’t have the answers.”