“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.
She should’ve felt good. Her editor was happy. Her agent was happy. Her staff, her family . . . all happy.
But she wasn’t. Because her brothers and Jackson had been right. She needed to find it for herself. And she had. She’d just left it three thousand miles behind.
God, she missed San Francisco. She missed the people in it. She missed the Pacific Pier Building. She missed the courtyard and the fountain and writing in front of it, listening to the water falling to the copper base. She missed sex. She missed Spence.
She missed sex with Spence.
She really had fallen in love with him. The truth was, she’d never really thought about love before—the heart-pounding, can’t-live-without-you kind of love that grows in the pit of the stomach and spreads outward until you’re warm all over. The kind of love you know is real because you’ve got not one single teeny, tiny doubt that he’d be there for you, no matter what.
Maybe she’d never given thought to love for herself because she’d never seen her mom in that kind of relationship. Or maybe it was because she wasn’t really sure she believed in that kind of relationship.
But something had changed, shifted inside her, because suddenly she did believe in love. And more than that, she wanted it for herself. She wanted what she’d had with Spence. Only she didn’t want it just for a vacation from her life.
She wanted it for her life.
“I shouldn’t have run,” she said.
“You can’t help it,” her mom said, coming into the room. “It’s in your blood.”
Colbie looked up. “Hey, Mom.”
Her mom smiled and hugged Colbie. “I thought I was dreaming when I heard your voice!” She tightened her grip and Colbie patted her on the back, trying to drag air into her lungs. “Can’t. Breathe.”
“I know.” Her mom loosened her grip only very slightly. “But you came! It’s a Christmas miracle!” Stepping back from Colbie, her eyes filled with huge tears.
“Oh, Mom. It’s okay, don’t cry.”
Her mom cupped Colbie’s face. “Thank you. Really. Thank you for coming when we called. You didn’t have to, and we shouldn’t have asked, but it’s really great to see you—no matter why you’re really here.”
“What does that mean?”
“I had my cards read and was told that you’ve fallen deeply in love but that you ran from it.”