“You told him a lot about me,” she said as she glanced around the coffee shop.
“He believed you were a woman who gave yourself freely and you’re not. But it’s more than that.” Jason leaned forward. “You are something rare and he wanted something mass-produced. He’s the kind of guy who would toss out gold for dross because the fake stuff was shinier.”
Claire rubbed her forehead. “I don’t know, Jason.”
He felt a glimmer of hope. She hadn’t immediately rejected his words. “If you take a minute to remember how I treated you when no one was around, you would realize that I find you exciting. I jumped at your invitation to start a real fling and I couldn’t keep my hands off you. That wasn’t pretend, Claire.”
Claire’s cheeks turned pink and she quickly looked out the window as she considered her words. “It was a shock to hear you say those things,” she admitted.
“I was trying to speak Max’s language. I was betting on the fact that he wouldn’t hire you if he suspected you weren’t the efficient personal assistant he needed. And I couldn’t stand the idea that he would try to force his attentions onto you. I couldn’t let that happen.”
She slowly faced him. Her face was curiously blank. “Why did you think you had to warn Max off?” she asked.
Jason waved his hands around as he tried to put his thoughts together. “Because he was going to offer you a job and it was a bad deal.”
“How can you be sure?” She spoke with no inflection.
“He said he was going to mentor you but I knew he was going to trap you in a contract.” He splayed his hands out in the air. “You would be stuck doing slave labor while he took all of your ideas.”
She watched him closely. “And what made you believe that?”
He flattened his hands on the table and it shook underneath his palms. “It’s common sense.”
Claire tilted her head. “And I don’t have common sense?”
Jason drew his head back as if he sensed a trap. “No, I knew you would figure it out but it may have been too late.”
“And you wanted to save me from making a bad decision. Or making any decision.” She leaned back in her chair. “Did you consider that I might come to the right conclusion? Or that I understood Max’s motives as well as you did?”
Her questions flustered him. “I was trying to protect you.”
“For my own good?”
“Yes.” He winced. “No, that’s not what I meant.”
“I have lived independently for years, Jason. I have to make decisions every day. Not all of my decisions have been right and I have had people try to take advantage of me, but I can protect myself.”
“There is nothing wrong with me taking care of you,” he said in a low growl.
She crossed her arms. “There is something wrong when you are taking choices out of my hands and making the decisions for me.”
That wasn’t what he’d been doing. He’d been helping her. “How is this different than the culinary school?” he asked. “You were pushing me to go in that direction.”
“I gave you information about the school. I wasn’t going to hide alternatives the way you were trying to make Max’s job offer disappear. And I didn’t make the decision for you to apply. That was all you.”
Jason exhaled sharply. He closed his eyes and dragged his hands over his face. He understood what Claire was saying but he didn’t like it. He didn’t think he had questioned her common sense or decision-making, but maybe he had.
“I’m sensitive about people questioning my intelligence,” Claire said. “But if you presume you can make these choices for me, then any relationship we have is doomed.”