Love Me Sweet (Bell Harbor, #3)

“Dump it out on the bed. Make sure all your stuff is there.” He crossed his arms and stared at the lavender bedspread rather than at her.

She looked at him a minute, watching for any signs of softening, but there were none. She unbuckled the bag and turned it over above the mattress. Her hands quivered, not from the motion of emptying the bag, but from the collateral damage of this whole situation. Stack upon stack of banded bills bounced on the purple-flowered coverlet, along with several loose twenties. She jiggled the bag again, and out came her wallet and her phone. Then she unzipped the side pocket to see that her laptop was right where it was supposed to be.

“Is everything in your wallet?” he said.

She zipped the laptop pocket back up and set the backpack on the bed. She picked up her red leather wallet and unsnapped it. It seemed the same, filled with her license, various debit and credit cards. “It doesn’t look like anything is missing.” She slid it back into the bag and started to scoop up the money.

“Count it.” He ground out those words like a cigarette butt under his heel.

“Excuse me?” Her hands paused in their stuffing of the sack.

“Count it. Make sure your money is all there.”

He was doing this just to aggravate her. She could tell. “Your mother said she only spent five hundred dollars. I believe her.”

“Well, I don’t. She’s as much of a liar as you are. Count the fucking money.” Now he sounded pissed. And it pissed her off in return. Something deep inside snapped.

“Fuck you, Grant. I’m not going to count the money. I don’t care about it. I don’t care if she spent five hundred or five thousand or all of it. This whole trip was never about getting my money back. It was about me keeping my privacy. I know you think I did all this as some sort of publicity stunt, but nothing could be farther from the truth. I have no idea why Boyd released that awful video, but that’s what I’ve been running from. Not to create ratings. Not to make myself famous. And certainly not to make a fool of anyone. The only fool here is me. I should have stayed put in Beverly Hills and taken my hits instead of running away and dragging anyone else into this mess.”

A car honked from the driveway.

He paused for a moment, still staring at the bed and not her, but then he gave an abrupt tilt of his head toward the door. “That’s your cab. I told him you’d need a ride back to the hotel in fifteen minutes. Looks like our time is up.”

Our time is up. No subtle innuendo there. She knew exactly what he meant. They were done.

“That’s it? You think I’m just going to leave with so much unresolved here? Grant—”

His gaze snapped to her, like a slap to her skin. “What’s to resolve? We came down here to get your bag. There it is. You have it. My mother will have to figure out a way to pay you back that five hundred dollars, and the six months of rent. Frankly, that’s not my problem. You can work that out with her.”

She took a step closer. “Could we talk about this, please? I know you’re angry and you have every right to be, but I wish you’d give me a chance to explain things better.”

He scoffed at that. “I think I’m pretty clear on the chain of events, and I think I’ve been more than accommodating, Miss Masterson. Maybe you’re used to people coddling you on your TV show, but I’m not a groupie, and I’ve done my time. You’re on your own now. I’ll be riding back to Michigan with my mother.”

God, he was angry, so angry, but those sweet, loving moments they’d shared had been real, and somehow she had to make him see that. Remember that. She had to make him listen through his frustration and cynicism. She had to make him hear her.

“Grant, do you want to know why I didn’t tell you sooner? Why I couldn’t?”

He looked down and crossed his arms. His chest rose and fell in a shallow breath and Delaney’s heart split in two. His anger was easier to take than this sense of him being wounded.

He shook his head and kept his voice low. “It doesn’t matter.”

Maybe it didn’t matter to him, but it mattered to her, and she knew unequivocally if she held anything back now she would regret it, always.

“I didn’t tell you sooner because I loved the way you looked at me. You looked at me as if I was sweet, like I was somebody worth caring for, somebody easy to love. Not because you wanted something from me, or from my family. And yes, I lied about the details of my life, but what you’ve seen in the last few days is everything about me that’s real. I wasn’t playing. I fell in love with you for a dozen different reasons, but most of all because of how I felt, how I feel, when I’m with you. And the truth is, no matter how much this hurts right now, I’m never going to regret this time together because this has been the best week of my life. No one ever saw me the way you did, and no one else ever will.”

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