Had a man ever gotten her more?
“What the hell’s all that?” Kent asked.
“It’s blank notes for me to use to jot down all my random thoughts,” she said.
“Huh.” Kent shook his head. “You should marry that dude.”
“Can’t,” she managed around a clogged throat, shaking her head. “I messed it all up.”
“As badly as I messed up?” he asked. “I mean, you yelled at me and I got it. I know we’ve been slow on the uptake but we’re trying to change, I can promise you that. I also know it’s only been a few days but I can tell you that we mean it. I’m sure we’ll screw up more than a few times but we heard you, Colbie. And we’re working on it. Sometimes it’s that simple.”
“Not this time,” she said.
“Because you let your responsibilities here hold you back,” he said. “You let us hold you back. If San Francisco turns out to be your jam, we’re going to try real hard not to hold you back anymore.”
Her breath caught. “No?”
“No.” He laughed softly. “I mean, we might all follow you out there, but hey, that’s how family works, right?” He pulled free and smiled at her.
“Right,” she said and shook her head. “How did you get to be smarter than me?”
He ruffled her hair just as Kurt came into the room.
They looked at each other, his expression hooded. “Hey,” she said softly. “Nice to see you. I’m glad you’re here.”
“I told you I would be,” he said.
“I was wrong to tell you what to do,” she said. “We’re equals in this family. We take care of each other because we want to, not because we have to.”
“You really believe that?” Kurt asked.
“I do,” she said and looked at the both of them, so identical and yet so different. “I’m sorry I left the way I did, without coming to you and telling you what was wrong. But I’m not sorry I went. I needed it. I . . .” She broke off, her throat constricting at what she’d found for herself in San Francisco, a world away from here. “I loved my time there.”
“We know.” Kent pulled out his phone, accessed his photos, and brought one up of . . .
. . . Colbie and Spence. It’d been taken outside of the Pacific Pier Building where the paparazzi had caught up with them. She was staring up at Spence with a silly smile on her face. It’d be embarrassing except that Spence was smiling down at her as well, his eyes lit with humor and something else—affection.
The cool, calm, unflappable, stoic man who didn’t easily show his feelings was practically glowing with how he felt for her.
And her heart stopped. Just stopped. She didn’t realize she’d taken Kent’s phone into her own hands and zoomed until he nudged Kurt.
“See? I was right,” he said. “She does really like that dude, a lot.” He held out his hand.
Kurt sighed and went to the junk drawer, where they kept an envelope of petty cash. Mostly it was used for emergency convenience-store runs or tips for deliveries, and it was funded by Colbie. Or at least it always had been. She realized she’d probably left it low on funds and hadn’t given it a second thought.
But the envelope was full now. “Tell me you didn’t rob a bank,” she said.
“Overtime,” they both said in unison, and while she stared at them, Kurt pulled out a twenty and slapped it into Kent’s hand.
“You bet on my love life?” she asked with disbelief.
This was met with a stunned silence as they both gaped at her, mouths open. “Wow,” Kurt finally said. “You actually just said ‘my love life.’ You’ve never said anything like that before.”
“Okay, that can’t be true,” she said. “Can it?”
They both slowly nodded and she realized they were right.
“All you ever do is work,” Kent said. “You don’t do life, at least not yours.”
“Things change,” she said softly. And how. “I guess we’ve all done some changing and growing up, huh?”
Kent smiled. “What exactly happened to you in San Fran?”
“A lot.”
The front door opened, and in came Jackson, carrying bags of presents. Probably the presents she’d asked him to have delivered to her family via an e-mail before she left.
He didn’t expect to see her. She watched it cross his face, the surprise chased by a flash of something she’d never seen from him.
Uncertainty.
“Hey,” he said. “You’re here.” He sounded genuinely glad to see her. “Can we talk?”
Her brothers vacated the kitchen and she and Jackson sat and stared at each other across the table.
“I’m not sorry I left,” she said. “And I didn’t come back for you.”
“I know. Colbie —”
“But what happened between us is my fault,” she said. “I should never have mixed business with pleasure. And—”
“No,” he said quietly. “It’s on me. I was wrong to do the same.”
She nodded, relieved they were going to be civil about this. “I appreciate that,” she said. “But this is my career, and I gave you too much free rein over it because all I wanted to do was write. It was lazy of me, and I shouldn’t have done that. I also shouldn’t have left you in charge of my personal life. That’s on me too. But I’m a writer, Jackson. Not a public speaker. Not a celebrity. I need you to get that.”
He started to say something, but she held up a hand. “I know what the books have become and what our world is like, but it’s not for me and it’s never going to be. I’m always going to want to leave the red carpet for someone else to stumble over. When I asked you not to book any live engagements for me, I was serious.”
He grimaced, and in the not too distant past she would’ve rushed to try to please him by agreeing to stuff she didn’t want to do. But no more. She was standing firm.
The problem was, her heart was aching for Spence so much right then that she could already scarcely breathe for all the emotions battering her from the inside out. But something good had to come from walking away from him. “I mean it,” she said. “If that’s the type of person you want to represent, we’re not going to work out.”
“Colbie —”
“And something else,” she said. “I like my new book. I know it’s a departure, but it’s flowing for me and I’m happy with it. And I think Andrea will be too because—”
“It’s good.” He reached for her hand and gently squeezed her fingers. “After I got over myself, I read the chapters again, and there was something there.”
She stared at him. “Yeah?”
“Yeah. I called Andrea and she agreed too.” He stood and tugged her into him for a hug. “And I’m the one who’s sorry,” he said against her hair. “I knew how you felt about me and I was enough of an egotistical asshole to be flattered by it. I even egged it on because it seemed to make you write faster. You were right and I’m so sorry.”
She closed her eyes and shook her head. “Thanks for saying that. You were an egotistical asshole. But I put a lot on you, asking you to deal with so much more than you should’ve had to. Let’s just move on, okay?”
“Considering that I was certain you’d fire me, I’d like that very much. But . . .” he paused “. . . are we really okay?”
“You mean is my crush over?” she asked dryly. “I can promise you it most definitely is over.”
“Good to know,” he said on a short laugh. “But I meant can you move on from San Francisco?”
She stared at him, wanting to say yes but unable to do so.
“Because I really thought you’d come back here just to tell all of us that you were moving there,” he said.
“I couldn’t just move.”
“Why not?”
She paused. “I . . .” Huh. She didn’t know.
He tugged on a lock of her wild hair. “We all deserve our happy,” he said. “And I want that for you. Think about it. Let me know.” And then he was gone, leaving Colbie in the middle of her kitchen, feeling more than a little lost.