“What are you doing here?” She looked around, shocked, and he realized that she had gone as white as the snow outside.
He slowly moved from behind the counter, and began to walk toward her. She was the only thing. The only thing. “I might ask you the same question. Because I looked at the books, and your name is not on them.”
“I don’t check into hotels under my real name,” she said.
“Oh right,” he said, “because you’re fancy now. Because everybody knows who you are. Everyone knows everything about you, don’t they, Tansey?”
“Yes. I know you’re trying to be mean, and trying to make it sound like maybe I’m above myself, but it’s true.”
“It seems there’s something else you don’t do. You don’t look to see who owns the hotel you’re staying at.”
Her mouth dropped open. “I’ve been here before. You’ve never been here.”
“I just bought it. It’s mine. And you’re the only guest.” He spread his arms wide. “Looks like it’s just the two of us.”
Chapter 2
Run.
That was all Tansey could think. She needed to run. Because she’d never, ever wanted to come face-to-face with Flint Carson ever again. Not in her whole life.
But there he was.
Maybe if she closed her eyes, she could be not in this moment. Maybe if she concentrated really hard, he would disappear.
Maybe this was a dream.
The whole drive up here had been a nightmare, and maybe it hadn’t even been real. Maybe that was the thing. Maybe the whole drive, with the intense, freezing snow, the white stuff piling up on the road and making it slick and almost impossible to keep her tires on the road, had been part of a nightmare. Maybe the branches falling across the road, the tree that had fallen down after her on the soft ground, and the lack of cell phone service, had all been an elaborate nightmare.
Ending with Flint. Standing right there in the lobby of the hotel.
Like it was The Shining. Except, it wasn’t a crazy groundskeeper; it was her way-too-hot-for-anyone’s-own-good ex-boyfriend, who had absolutely destroyed her and broken her into tiny pieces.
Ex-boyfriend. He was never your boyfriend. He was a guy who had sex with you. And you were an idiot.
Yes. She had been an idiot. And she’d had grace for that young idiot. That young idiot who had known better, whose mother had told her better, who had purposed to not act out her daddy issues in that way, but had done so because Flint was just so charming. Because she hadn’t actually had any experience.
Because she had told herself that she knew getting sexually involved with a man who wasn’t going to fall in love with her could hurt her, but she hadn’t really understood it. Because she had told herself she could handle a fling, and then she had let herself believe that she had been convinced on some level she could change his mind about it being a fling.
She had been like every other dumb twenty-two-year-old who didn’t want to believe that she was, in fact, like all the other girls.
Well, she’d made her peace with that, because she was more than two years past all that, and a heartbreak sure offered a lot of clarity. She didn’t waste her time being outraged at that girl.
No. She knew where to put her outrage. It was on him. And there he was.
If this was a nightmare, she could take an umbrella out of the umbrella stand by the door and start whacking him with it.
She pinched her arm. It hurt, even through her heavy coat. But he was still standing there.
“What the hell are you doing?”
“I’m trying to see if I fell asleep on my way up here. Or maybe hit a tree and I’m unconscious in a ditch, so I’m hallucinating the ghosts of back-when-I-was-stupid past.”
“Well. If you’re hallucinating, then so am I.”
“Great.” And she had fantasized about running into him before, even though she had never wanted to see him again.
That seemed like a pretty normal thing.
In her fantasies of seeing him again someday, she had imagined herself in a beautiful designer dress—not looking soggy from her tramp through the snow up to the lobby, and being caught off guard.
No. She had always imagined they would run into each other at some soiree, not that Flint would have any reason to be at a soiree, but it was her fantasy.
Realistically, she hadn’t thought it would happen, so she could imagine whatever scenario she wanted.
She had imagined that she would be dressed meticulously, looking every inch as wealthy as her music had made her, maybe with a handsome man on her arm—forgetting the fact that she hadn’t been on a single date since she and Flint had broken up—and the look of regret that would wash over him would be profound.
But she would be happy. And she would drink champagne, and she would show him.
Because the best revenge was living well.
She had written it into the song because he had said it to her. He had said that to her about handling her own father’s abandonment. And when she had written the song, she had hoped that he would hear it and appreciate the irony.
And now she found herself horrified by the realization that he had undoubtedly heard it.
Because all the self-protection that she had engaged in when he had broken up with her suddenly didn’t matter. Because she had put it all in a song.
She had known that, but knowing it and coming face-to-face with it were two very different things.
