“Indeed.”
I set the iPad down on my desk and flipped through the list of things for the day. Margaret would cancel all the extraneous items, but I had a lot to catch up on.
“What’s with the late start, bro?” She hopped off the desk, landing on her sky-high heels, and grinned down at me.
“I slept in.”
Morgan’s eyes widened in disbelief. “Yeah, right! You don’t sleep. You’re a vampire.”
I shrugged. I had no response to that because, up until last night, that had been true. “Don’t know what to tell you.”
“How about who you were fucking when you slept in this morning?” she asked with a mischievous light in her eyes.
I stared back at her with a blank expression on my face and then nodded at the iPad.
“Wait…do I even want to know?”
“Probably not,” I told her.
That was a lie. Morgan would love the juicy details. She adored gossip. She read all those trash magazines just to laugh at the absurdity of it all.
“Okay, whatever. Landon called this morning,” she said.
My head snapped back up to her. “What for?”
She tilted her head. “Miranda, of course. Why? Why do you look so scared?”
I painted my face back into a mask of indifference. “What did Miranda do now?”
“She wants to keep him in Tampa for Christmas,” Morgan said with a wave of her hand.
“He’s not considering it, is he?” I asked.
She sighed. “I guess he is.”
I grabbed my office phone off the desk. “I’ll call him right now and set him straight. He can’t stay there because of Miranda. It’s Christmas, for Christ’s sake.”
“I know, Jensen. Miranda has it in her head that Emery Robinson is here to win Landon back,” Morgan said with a roll of her eyes.
“That seems very unlikely,” I said. I made sure to keep the edge out of my voice. “She’s leaving in a few days.”
“What?” Morgan asked. “No, she’s not. Landon said she was staying here for a while.”
“He…what?” I asked, my mouth going dry.
“He tried to tell Miranda that she’d be leaving soon to get her off his case. But she didn’t believe him, and it turned out, she had a reason. Emery told Landon at Sutton’s wedding that she was staying here indefinitely. But I mean…I don’t know why Emery is back in town, but it sure isn’t for Landon. He doesn’t even live here. Miranda is out of her mind.”
I was completely silent. My head was spinning. Landon had said that Emery was leaving only to appease Miranda. I’d never brought it up with Emery because I thought I already had all my cards in order. She was supposed to be leaving in a few days to head back to Austin. She was supposed to be finishing her PhD. She was not supposed to stay in town after we fucked all night.
“Shit,” I hissed.
“Right? So, you have to call and convince Landon to bring Miranda here for Christmas. Do whatever you have to, all right? I mean…I can even call Emery or whatever and ask her to stay away from Landon if that helps…” Morgan trailed off when I said nothing. “Why have you gone pale.”
“Morg,” I said, meeting her worried gaze, “I fucked up.”
Chapter 14
Emery
“And he just threw my clothes at me and then drove me home!” I recounted to Heidi over lunch.
“Bastard!” Heidi said on cue. “What a bastard!”
“Right? I mean…we had sex for hours last night, and then this morning, it was like a light switch had been flipped. Walking into this, I just knew it was a bad idea. He totally used me.”
“And it sucked, using him back, right?” Heidi asked, digging into her pad thai—our requisite best friend meal—at the downtown Thai Pepper.
“Dude, the sex was phenomenal,” I told her for the hundredth time. “The turning into a jerk in the morning and dumping me at Kimber’s, like a dorm-level walk of shame, not so much.”
I twirled my own extra-spicy pad thai noodles on my fork and dug in. I was famished after my late-night sexcapades. I’d only had two tacos, half of a bag of marshmallows, and some Hershey’s chocolate in the last eighteen hours, and I was starving.
“Yeah, well, at least you had some fun,” Heidi said. “That was good for you after Professor McJerkface.”
I snorted into my food and then hacked and coughed to clear my airway. “Professor McJerkface?”
Heidi shrugged and winked at me. “Pretty much.”
“Well, it was a good time. But, you know…it was more than that.” Thoughtfully, I set my fork down and sipped on my water. “I kind of like him.”
“A Wright brother?” Heidi asked with wide eyes. “Aren’t you President of the Anti-Wright Family Fan Club?”
“Something like that,” I agreed. “But he was different.”
“Oh, boy! Here it goes,” Heidi said.
“What?” I demanded.
“You’re doing that thing.”
“What thing?”
“You know,” Heidi said. “The whole the guy is a jerk, but he’s different with me. News flash, Robinson, he’s not different. He just wanted to fuck you.”