Southern Sinner (North Carolina Highlands 3)

I swallow. “If that’s how you feel.”

“That’s how I feel. I’m sorry.”

“I am too.” Looking down, I toe at an invisible pebble. “I’m so sorry, honey.”

I look back up. Her tits rise on a sharp inhale.

“Goodbye, Hastings.”

“Bye, Daph.”

I watch her push through the revolving door. She’s inside. She’s safe.

I put the car in drive and head home.

The house rings with silence.

Closing the door behind me, I take in the disaster that is my home. Can I even call it that anymore? A home? I thought that’s what I was doing with Stevie—turning a series of boxes into rooms, rooms that held stories and memories and marks of a life. A life that was lived, not endured. Not held up as some kind of trophy.

I turned this house into a home.

Now, though, it just looks and feels like a sad, disgusting pigsty. Like a roving pack of dumbass college kids had their way with it. I half expect to find one of them passed out on my couch, a cigarette tucked behind his ear and an overturned Solo cup of jungle juice on the floor beside him.

The son my mama raised doesn’t feel right about leaving the mess. But it also doesn’t feel right to clean it up yet.

I’m also really fucking tired.

I toe off my shoes at the foot of my bed and fall face-first onto the mattress. Jeans and all.

Just my luck, I land on the pillow Stevie used, and it smells like her—girly shampoo and toothpaste.

For several beats, I can’t breathe.

My phone vibrates in my pocket. I know without looking that it’s Beau, and he’s calling under the guise of checking in when really he wants me back in the office. Not because he wants me to work but because he knows it’ll be good for me. As Daddy used to say, idle hands are the devil’s workshop.

Tomorrow. I’ll start tomorrow. Even though the thought of going back doesn’t exactly fill me with excitement at the moment.

But hey, things will be different this time around. Stevie was only here for three days and nights, but I learned a shit-ton from her, mostly the difference between what I thought success looked like and what it actually means to me.

What kind of life do I have, though, outside my job? This weekend I had Stevie. I had her to cook for, to bring coffee to, to laugh with and write music with and fuck to the point of pain.

Now I have the gym and . . .?

An invisible weight settles on my back and presses me into the mattress. My legs ache, and so does my dick.

I understand it now: I wasn’t so much in love with Emma as I was with the life I’d always dreamed about having.

A life I’m starting to think will never actually happen because the woman I could imagine it with is currently putting hundreds of miles between us. Literally and figuratively.

Fuck.

Chapter Twenty-Five

Stevie

“You okay, Stevie?”

Swallowing hard, I glance up from my laptop screen to see Ria looking at me, pen poised over her notebook, her brow furrowed.

“Do I look that bad?”

“You look . . . tired.”

I let out a mirthless laugh, the knot in my gut tightening. “Didn’t we all just read a book about the importance of radical honesty?”

“I was the second member of Lady Luck’s book club. Of course I read that one, along with everyone else in this office.” Ria hesitates. “Okay. Yeah, you’re looking rough today.”

“Really rough,” Alan, my social media guru, adds as he pushes his glasses up the bridge of his nose.

Shooting him a glare, I say, “I said radical honesty. Not asshat honesty.”

“Sorry.” He lifts a shoulder. “It’s the truth.”

“Want me to pour you a beer?” Paige, our intern, offers.

“You’re sweet,” I say. “It’s also eight o’clock in the morning. Do I really look that bad?”

“Yes,” all three reply in unison.

Ria peers at me. “Everything go all right this weekend? You sounded like you were on cloud nine when you called me Saturday after the tasting.”

“Maya said Blue Mountain placed a huge order,” Alan says. “I feel like we should be celebrating.”

“But instead, you look like you got punched in the face,” Paige says.

Alan gasps. “Did you get punched in the face?”

My eyes burn, and I close them. “No, I didn’t. Of course I didn’t. I—” Fell for my fake boyfriend and now I miss him so much I haven’t eaten or slept since I left him yesterday, and now I’m about to burst into tears in a meeting.

This isn’t like me. I’m a professional, goddamn it. I cried in meetings in my twenties. A decade-plus of practice later, I now save my tears for the bathroom stall farthest from the door or for my car, thank you very much.

But here I am, struggling not to burst into tears at my first meeting on my first day back.