Tony laughed. “Yeah. Me too. I mean, I knew better. There’ve been a few ladies in my past. Just not lately. Hell, there hasn’t been anyone lately that I’d consider something special.”
It had been the same for Reese, not that he was going to say that out loud. He and Amber had parted ways more than six months ago, and if it hadn’t been acrimonious, it hadn’t been particularly amicable, either. He hadn’t thought it would matter so much to him that a woman wanted him mostly for his money, not until the fact of it had been staring him in the wallet.
“What about that one guy you were seeing?” Reese asked.
Tony gave Reese a look. “We didn’t click.”
Reese laughed. “Fair enough.”
“You sure you don’t need me to be in the office for you?” Tony fluttered his lashes. “I could use a change of scenery. Get out of the city, you know? Cast my net on fresher waters? I could try out being straight for a bit.”
“I need you in Philadelphia,” Reese said firmly. “I need to check in on my parents’ old house anyway. I’m thinking about selling it.”
It had been vacant since they’d passed away. He’d sold off the farmland to a developer who’d surrounded replaced the barn and fields with brand-new construction. A property management company had been taking care of the old farmhouse, making sure nobody vandalized it, that the house itself was kept in proper repair, that sort of thing. It had been rented a few times over the years, but was empty now.
“I can work from there as well as I can work from here,” Reese added when Tony didn’t reply. At the sight of his assistant’s raised eyebrows, Reese frowned. “You don’t think so?”
“I know you can work from wherever you want to, man. I’ve watched you do business on the beach and in the back of a cab. And fine, I’ll stay here in the office to keep things up to date if you need something. I just think…”
Reese waited, but Tony didn’t finish. “What?”
Tony moved out of the doorway to sit in the chair on the opposite side of Reese’s desk. He leaned forward to put his elbows on his knees, and gave Reese a long, serious look. “Are you okay?”
“I’m fine.” Reese put his feet on the ground with a thump and frowned. “Look, why don’t you just handle the arrangements the way I pay you to do and leave my emotional well-being out of it.”
Tony’s eyes narrowed, but if Reese had offended him, he didn’t say so. Instead he gave Reese a half smile and stood. “You got it. I called the management company about getting someone in there to clean it up. It’ll be done by the end of tomorrow. I arranged for your personal mail to be forwarded to the office here, and I can take care of whatever looks important to get sent on in a weekly package, or I’ll bring it with me when I come out.”
“Who says you’re coming out?”
Tony grinned. “Hey, look, you can work remotely, and of course I’ll stick around here to keep the cogs greased, but Lancaster is only an hour away from here and I sure think I can be way more efficient if I come out there to meet with you at least once a week. Maybe a breakfast meeting. Nah, too early. Lunch. We’ll just order breakfast.”
“At the diner,” Reese replied with a smirk. “Got it.”
When Tony had gone, Reese turned back to his laptop, though he wasn’t getting much work done. His assistant was right. Reese didn’t need to go back to Lancaster at all to handle business there, much less for an extended stay in his childhood home. It was all about Corinne.
Since showing up back in her life he’d been an asshole to her, and though there was a part of him that wanted to convince himself she deserved it, he knew that wasn’t true. It hadn’t been true back then, either, but somewhere along the way being an asshole had become such second nature to him that he wasn’t sure how to stop.
Amber had accused him of it. So had more than one of the women who’d come before her. None of them had lasted very long. He’d been cruel, Reese could admit, if only in his lack of attention, his sometimes deliberate refusal to give his lovers what he knew they wanted.
Throughout the years, Reese had placed a lot of blame for the past on other people. His father for being unbending and close-minded. His mother for not defending him. Corinne for not giving him a second chance, though even at the time he’d known he didn’t deserve one, not after the way he’d behaved. He’d blamed lovers for walking away when he’d been the one who forced them to go. And in all this time, he’d never stopped thinking about her and the mess he’d made because he’d been too focused on himself. He had let her down, and every success he’d had since then had been somehow hollow. The question was, Reese thought, was he going to have a chance to make things right with her? Was that what he wanted?
Or maybe the real question was, how could he have ever wanted anything else?
Chapter Sixteen
Before