Good Girl(61)

The Crock-Pot. That'd be why it smells like someone fucking cares in here.

"How much more do you need?"

"What?"

"I want you to stay. So how much more do you need? I'll talk to Vince and take care of it."

She slow-blinks at me for several seconds as my phone pings with another goddamned message.

“I’ve got a lot of calls to make, but I want to take care of this. Today. So what’s your price?”

Lydia turns away and places a frying pan I didn't know I owned on the stove. Scratch that, I'm sure I don't own a frying pan. She must have procured it from somewhere. I wonder if she ordered it from room service with the groceries? I wonder if I'll ever stop finding her so endlessly fascinating.

Lydia is fiddling at the stove, ignoring me, so I return to the bedroom to grab my phone, tapping out a text as I return to the kitchen.

"Say something to me, Rhys. Say something to me that is not what you just said."

"I'm not sure what you want me to say." I want to know what the fuck she was talking to Vince about last night. I want to know how she feels about me. I want to resolve all this uncertainty. My phone pings again and I glance at it before sending the call to voicemail.

"Do you know what, Rhys? I think you're so afraid of anything real that you hide behind work and strip clubs and general stupidity."

What? Okay. I blow out a breath. Okay, I might have this all wrong. "Wait, so—”

"No, I don't want to wait. I'm not much of a waiter, Rhys. In case you haven't noticed. I'm a doer and I've done everything. You're a decade older than me. You're the one with all the experience and confidence and life skills and yet I'm the one doing everything. Every. Freaking. Thing." She says that last bit slowly, like she's punctuating the words.

"Okay. Let's slow down here. If this is about breakfast we can always order from room service."

"Oh, my God." She snaps the stove off and puts down a wooden spoon. I didn't know I owned one of those either. "Yeah, Rhys. This is about who makes breakfast. Listen to yourself. You're thirty-four years old. Wake up. Pay attention to what's going on in your life for half a second. How about that?"

"I am,” I snap back. “I paid attention to your little pow-wow with Vince last night. Which is why I—”

“You think I’m having secret meetings with Vince, Rhys?” she interrupts again. “In the middle of the grand opening in front of everyone? Yes. Absolutely. I was lining up my next assignment before I came upstairs to Google Crock-Pot recipes for breakfast.”

“I don’t want you with anyone else, Lydia.”

“But you don’t quite want me yourself, do you? Not for real.” She shakes her head and presses her lips together before taking a deep breath. "Ask me how this feels, Rhys.”

It feels suspiciously like I've taken a wrong turn this morning.

"Never mind. I'll tell you. It feels like… like being empty." She shrugs when she says it but it's a sad shrug, maybe even on the side of belligerent. "It feels like getting to an amusement park and finding out they're filled to capacity and you can’t get in. It feels like someone just told me Santa isn’t real before I was ready. It feels like it's raining inside my heart."

I notice a moment too late that she's grabbed her handbag and looped the strap over her head as she walks to the door.

"Just for the record, I was ninety-three percent in love with you. I deducted five percent for being financially irresponsible because you could have had me for free if you weren't so afraid of your stupid feelings. And two percent for being an idiot. I'm probably double-counting the idiot percents with the money percents but you know what, I don't care."

"Lydia, wait." I attempt to catch the door with my hand, to keep her from opening it, which is just shitty and she rewards me with a look that says as much. And then she's gone.

Fuck. What the hell just happened?





Thirty-One





RHYS



I fucked that up. I fucked that up and I've got no idea where she went. I called Canon as I was getting dressed, one hand on the phone and one yanking a shirt over my head, and asked him to track her from the door of my suite, hoping that she was somewhere in the hotel. Knowing she wouldn't be.

She wasn't. She took the elevator to the parking garage, got in her car and exited the property just under two minutes later. And she's not going to answer if I call because her phone is sitting on the nightstand next to my bed, charging.

Fuck.

She probably wouldn't have answered anyway, but I hate that she's without her phone. What if her car breaks down or she runs out of gas or she wants to call anyone who isn't me?

I don't even know who her friends are, outside of Payton, or if she's made friends yet since moving to Vegas. I tell Canon to get hold of Payton with instructions to call me if Lydia goes back to her apartment. Then I open the Goodwill app on my phone as I get into my car. Would she go to the one between the Windsor and her apartment? I don't think her car has GPS, so she won't be able to find locations she hasn't been to yet, but that doesn't eliminate a single store because she's probably been to every fucking one of them.