It's in His Kiss
Page 78

Okay, there it was. The two-ton elephant in the room. Finding his own mad, he stared at her, hard. “You don’t want to go there with me right now.”
She lifted her nose to nosebleed heights. “You’re absolutely right.”
“I mean it, Becca.”
Mark started to rise with his plate. “You know what? I’ll just go eat in the other room—”
“You’ll do no such thing,” Becca said, and pointed her wooden spoon at him like she meant business. “Sit,” she commanded. “Eat.”
“Go in the other room, Dad,” Sam said.
Mark gave them a look like You’re both crazy, grabbed his plate, and walked out of the kitchen—but not before bending to drop a kiss on Becca’s cheek.
She sighed, softened, and gave him a quick hug.
And then Sam and Becca were alone. Perfect. Just where he didn’t want to be.
Becca looked at him for a moment, shook her head, muttered something to herself that sounded suspiciously like “jackass idiot,” and then walked out of the kitchen.
He followed after her just in time to catch the double doors as they closed.
In his face.
“Damn it.” He managed to catch her in the living room by the front door—barely. She was ticked off, and she was quick.
But he was quicker.
“Knock it off,” she said, pushing at him. “I’m only here to check on him, not to see you. You’re here now, you can take over, I’m out.”
“You’re out,” he repeated.
“Yep,” she said, popping the p. “Out. As in all the way out.”
He pinned her to the front door. “Not before we discuss this like adults.”
“Seriously?” she asked incredulously, fighting to free herself, nearly catching him in the jaw with her elbow until he leaned in and flattened her to the wood.
Panting, she blew her hair out of her face and glared up at him. “Is discuss like adults what you did yesterday when you flung my own words back in my face? Damn it,” she said, struggling. “Let me go!”
“I didn’t fling your words back in your face.”
“You basically said I didn’t mean them,” she said. “Same thing. I mean honest to God, Sam, you reacted to my I love you like I’d tried to kill you!”
“You don’t tell your summer fling in the town you just happened to ‘pit-stop’ in that you lo—” He fumbled over the word that she seemed to have no trouble with at all.
“My God, you can’t even say the word?” She shoved him again. “And you’re not a pit stop, not for me, and you damn well know it so stop saying it.”
“You’re the one who said it in the first place.”
“I say a lot of things, especially when I’m pissed off,” she snapped. “In fact, I have another thing to say to you—I quit.”
Well, hell. “Becca—”
“Don’t worry, I won’t leave you in the lurch, that’s not how I operate. But I’m giving you notice, Sam. I’ll spend the next two or three weeks finding my replacement and training them before I go, because it turns out you were right, we can’t work together, and do . . . whatever it was that we were doing.”
The past tense killed him. “You’re not quitting.”
“I need to,” she said. “It’s for me. And you’re going to let me go, because you didn’t want me to work for you in the first place.”
Christ. She was killing him.
The soft knock on the other side of the door galvanized them both.
“Sorry,” came Cole’s sheepish voice. “I kept waiting for a good time to interrupt, but it never came. I missed a call from your dad, wanted to make sure everything was okay.”
Becca wriggled out from between Sam and the door, but he caught her hand. “We’re done here,” she said, trying to pull free.
He held on and studied her face, taking in the misery and pain he’d caused her. “I don’t think we are,” he said quietly.
“Think again.” And without looking back, she tore loose and headed back to the kitchen. A minute later, he heard the back door slam as she made her escape.
Sam swore as he hauled open the front door.
Cole was arms-up on the door frame, and gave him a long look. “She said I love you and you flung it in her face?”
Sam started to shut the door on Cole’s nose but Cole was quicker than he looked, and stronger too, and shoved his way in.
Sam turned to ignore him and go after Becca, but Cole got in his way and in his face.
“Don’t,” Sam warned him.
“You going to say it back?” Cole wanted to know.
“We’re not discussing this.”
Cole stared into Sam’s eyes and saw the truth: No, he wasn’t going to say it back. “You’re a f**king idiot,” Cole said, but he wasn’t done. Hell, no. Cole always did have plenty to say, and no one, not man, woman, or God himself, could shut the guy up when he had something on his mind.
“You’re not good with letting people in, I get that,” his oldest friend said. “We all get that, but—”
“You don’t get shit,” Sam said.
Cole ignored this, because he knew, as did Sam, that no one knew Sam better than Cole himself.
No one.
“You go so far with trust and no further,” Cole said, “and I get that, too. You got it from your dad. He let you in and then let you back out again how many f**king times? I can’t imagine it, going through all that, except I can, since I watched you go through it.”