“I will never accept that you’ve chosen to waste your life here,” her father answered stiffly. “I gave you every opportunity to make something of yourself, and you’ve chosen instead to throw it all back in my face.”
Looking disappointed, but not really surprised, Annie nodded. “I’m sorry you feel that way. If you ever change your mind, I’m willing to talk. Mother, you have my number. Use it whenever you like.”
Mona glanced nervously from her daughter to her husband. “I’ll call you,” she whispered.
Dixon was still having trouble getting the message. “You’re giving up everything we could have had together?” he asked Annie incredulously, then motioned toward Trent with open contempt. “For him?”
“No,” Annie replied, her fingers tightening warningly on Trent’s arm again. “I’m giving it up for me. Trent,” she added, smiling up at him, “is a very nice bonus.”
Ignoring the others, Trent reached out to snag the back of her neck and pull her toward him for a quick kiss. “Thanks,” he murmured when he released her.
“I’m not going to stand around and watch this.” Dixon spun angrily on one heel and marched toward the door. Trent watched him leave with great satisfaction.
Annie’s father followed. “Neither am I. Annie, if you come to your senses, come home. If not, I hope you’re happy here.” But he didn’t sound as if he really hoped that, at all.
Annie’s mother hesitated, looking from her daughter to the doorway, and then moved after her husband. “I’ll call,” she promised on the way out.
The snap of the door closing behind them sounded unfortunately final.
“Have you ever noticed,” Trent asked thoughtfully, looking after them, his arm wrapped bracingly around Annie’s shoulders, “that your father tends to talk in clichés?”
“Yes, I’ve noticed.” She straightened her shoulders and turned to face him. “Actually, I first started to question my relationship with Preston when I realized that he had the same annoying habit.”
“You were actually engaged to that jerk?”
She grimaced. “Let’s just call it temporary insanity and let it go at that.”
He wanted to see her smile again, wanted to do something to ease the sadness in her eyes. He kept his tone deliberately wistful when he said, “I wish you’d have let me punch him. I’m sure I could have taken him.”
“With one hand tied behind your back,” she assured him. “But he isn’t worth it, Trent.”
He dropped the light tone, placing his hands on her shoulders. “I’m sorry about your parents, Annie. It must have hurt very badly to watch them leave that way.”
“Not as much as it would have hurt to go back to being my father’s little puppet. He made every decision for me when I was growing up, including telling me which man to marry. I was suffocating in that life. It all kept building inside me until it finally exploded on my twenty-sixth birthday. I can’t live that way anymore.”
Trent thought of the money, the security, the social position she’d walked away from. “You gave up a lot.”
“I gave up things. I found freedom. Of the two, I much prefer the latter.”
He nodded thoughtfully. “I can understand that. You must have been slowly suffocating in that household. I’m surprised you didn’t bolt long before you did.”
“There were so many times I wanted to. But I always let my mother talk me out of it. This time, she didn’t even try, not really. Maybe she knew it was inevitable.”
“Your father seemed to know a lot about your life here. You think he really was having someone keep an eye on you?”
She bit her lip, looking so distressed by that possibility that he was tempted to go beat someone up again. And then she smoothed her expression and shrugged. “If he was, he’ll know now that there’s no reason to spy on me any longer. I’m getting along just fine without him—which, of course, infuriates him.”
She turned and rested her hands on his chest, looking up at him with suddenly glowing eyes. “Even though I could have handled that scene myself, it was nice to have you here supporting me. Thank you.”
He lifted a hand to her cheek and shook his head with a rueful expression. “You’re so determined to be self-sufficient that you can’t admit that everyone needs help sometimes.”
“Even you?” she countered.
“Even me,” he surprised them both by answering.
He could see her pulse begin to beat a little faster in the hollow of her throat. His own was suddenly racing. “What do you need now, Trent?”
“You,” he answered steadily. “I need you, Annie. Not because I can’t live without you—but because I don’t want to.”