Jamie knew the first thing he would purchase when he got to L.A. A Bluetooth headset. He couldn’t stand the people who walked around the city looking like they were talking to themselves, but now that cities and states across the nation were making hands-free phone usage laws—and seeing as how he could have spent the entire drive convincing Brynn that he was wrong for pushing her away and that everything about them was right—he could use a freaking hands-free headset.
He tried calling her before he left Holbrook, but it went right to her voicemail. He didn’t exactly want his big Eureka moment to be a recording. Jamie thought about stopping more than once along the way to try calling her again, but that would only get him to L.A. later, which didn’t bode well for him professionally or personally.
Now here he was, eight p.m. already, and checking in at his hotel. Jeremy had texted that everything went well and they were all set for tomorrow. Brynn had texted, too, only to let him know she made it safely, and he was at the very least relieved to hear that. Now he just had to find her.
“How long will you be staying with us?” the woman behind the counter asked him.
Jamie peeled his eyes from his phone. “Just through the weekend. I head back to Chicago on Monday.”
She handed him a pamphlet with a folder that held his room key, but all he could focus on was whether or not he’d be leaving here Monday alone.
“Checkout is at noon,” she told him, and he nodded his understanding. She smiled warmly, but he could barely muster the same in response. He just wanted to get upstairs, throw his crap in his room, and find Brynn.
He glanced to his left, at the swanky bar in the equally swanky hotel he had hoped he wouldn’t be staying in alone. Jamie had promised himself that by the end of the trip he’d tell Brynn how he felt, and if things went well, maybe he’d get to spend the night with her in a place like this. He did the first part—the telling—but then he fucked it all up.
His eyes landed on a group of people standing near the bar’s entrance, only about twenty feet away. Specifically, they landed on the back of a woman who wore her hair in a braid that fell over her shoulder, exposing the bare back of her black halter dress. She was deep in conversation with a man in a suit, and Jamie laughed quietly to himself as he noted his own attire—a T-shirt and a pair of jeans that were getting ready to walk themselves to the hotel room’s laundry bag.
Something tugged his eyes up once more, and his gaze locked on the woman’s back. A momentary pang of guilt rose inside him as he saw his attraction to this stranger as some sort of betrayal to Brynn. But then it clicked. The guy in the suit—the tailored suit that only a dude from L.A. could pull off—Jamie recognized them both now. And the man staring back at him recognized Jamie, too.
Jamie’s jaw ticked as he woke up his phone and pulled up Sleepy Jean from his contact list. The guilt vanished as he pressed send and waited.
The woman in the halter dress reached in her purse and pulled out her phone. She hesitated—fucking hesitated—before answering, and that small reaction was enough to crack Jamie’s heart wide open.
“Jamie.”
But it wasn’t his name he heard, not at first. It was Spencer’s low hum of a voice, caught in the few seconds of delay from Brynn answering the call and actually speaking.
“…knows you’re staying with me, right?”
He remembered Spencer’s text, the one he shouldn’t have read. He’d booked a room for them. And then Jamie put her on a bus. He let out a long breath, but he couldn’t form a single word in response. Spencer’s eyes found Jamie’s, and he tapped Brynn on the shoulder and pointed behind her. She turned.
Nope. Jamie was wrong. This cracked his heart wide open. Even in that awful Cubs T-shirt, pajama pants, her glasses, and a bun on top of her head, Jamie thought Brynn was the most beautiful woman he’d ever seen. But tonight she was magnificent, and the only thought in his mind was that she dressed this way for another man, one she was staying with tonight.
She took a step toward him, but Jamie held up his hand.
“It’s okay, B,” he said, his voice hoarse but at least able to articulate a few words. “I wanted you to be happy, either way. This was what I wanted, right? For you to figure this out. A heads-up you were staying with him would have been nice, but what’s done is done, isn’t it?”
We’re done, he thought and started backing away, but he couldn’t take his eyes off her. Not yet. Because as soon as he looked away, broke that last semblance of connection, they really would be done.
“Jamie…” Her voice pleaded with him. She moved in his direction again, but something in his gaze must have stopped her because she only made it a couple of feet. “We should talk about this.”