The Tourist Attraction (Moose Springs, Alaska #1)(96)

It was beyond annoying.

“You want to talk about her?”

“Nope.”

Graham stared at the stump. Nothing. It looked like nothing but a busted-up, mangled mess. “The irony of this project isn’t just annoying, it’s becoming prophetic. Remind me to become a hermit.”

There was nothing much to say to that, so Easton didn’t. Instead, he looked up at the sky.

“Storm’s coming in this afternoon. Gonna be a bad one.”

“And?”

“And I saw your woman this morning. I went to the big house to see Jax before he leaves. She looked like she was having a tough time of it.”

Grunting, Graham finally reached for a beer, popping it open on the arm of his lawn chair. “Zoey’s not my woman. And it ended last night, whatever it was. Or wasn’t. Can we talk about something else?”

“She still planning on that ATV tour?”

Apparently, they couldn’t.

“She wouldn’t go out in that. Zoey’s not an idiot.”

“She went out with you.”

Frowning, Graham took a long pull of his beer. “What’s that supposed to mean?”

“It means you’re the idiot. You knew what you were doing.” Easton leveled a look at him. “When you walked over to her in Rick’s, you knew exactly the kind of mess you were stepping in. Punishing her for it now, when things are exactly how you knew they’d be, is cruel.”

A muscle in his jaw twitched, but Graham said nothing.

Settling deeper in his chair, Easton scratched a thumbnail under the condensation-softened label. “I suppose picking a fight with her was a lot easier than sticking around until the end. This way, it’s on her.”

“If you’re trying to be an ass, you’re succeeding.”

Easton didn’t even blink at the acid in Graham’s tone.

“Man up. If you care about her, then don’t let her go home feeling bad. It’s not like you can go find her next week and apologize.”

“East, buddy, I want to show you something.” Pulling his cell phone out of his pocket, Graham smacked it down on the arm of his lawn chair a little too hard. “It’s this new technology that somehow manages to connect people all across the world. All you have to do is pick it up and make the call.”

“You plan on making that call?”

They both knew he wouldn’t.

“The storm’s going to be real bad.” Easton looked up at the sky as the first streaks of lightning flashed in the distance. “They’ll cancel the tour.”

Of course they would. And like Graham, it would just be one more disappointment for her.

*

Zoey had always known ending things with Graham would hurt. How could it not? Whatever this was, it was real. Temporary, maybe, but always real.

Zoey really, truly loved him. Of all the ways she’d thought they would say goodbye, a blowout in her hotel room was not anywhere close to the plan. Instead of bittersweet, there was only bitter tears and pain.

Mostly, there was just pain.

Throughout the worst, Lana stayed by her side. Between the ice cream for breakfast for Zoey and a massive Bloody Mary for Lana, they decided men in general weren’t worth half the amount of annoyance they caused. They plotted the havoc they would wreak on the people who had messed with Lana and spent more than the recommended time in the steam room, sweating away the night before. And not a bit of it did any good, beyond increasing her blood sugar and opening her pores, because there wasn’t an indulgence in the world as good as having Graham Barnett smiling down on her, his hands in her hair, his lips pressing soft kisses along her skin. Seeing Easton and Jax in the lobby had been awkward and awful, both men giving her sympathetic looks that only made her feel worse.

Sometime in the late morning, a mass of heavy storm clouds rolled in, and by the time Zoey should have been getting ready for her final Alaskan adventure—an ATV tour—she was sitting on hold, trying to find out if the tour had been canceled instead. Logic would have assumed Moose Springs Adventurers would have called to let her know, but the helpfulness would have been inconsistent with their consistently bad customer service.

“Well, they canceled it,” Zoey finally said with a sigh, ending the call. “I guess my vacation is officially over.”

“You still have today and tomorrow, love,” Lana answered. “We’ll find something worth doing. What do you think? Should we scooch everything over a bit?”

Lounging in a chair at Lana’s conference table in the penthouse suite, Zoey turned a slow, lazy circle. By scooch, Lana meant move the entirety of the planned condominium complex over, cutting into land Zoey was fairly sure was a national forest.

“Maybe not so much,” she replied, turning another circle. The shadows of dark grays and even darker blues across the mountainsides were as striking as they were ominous. Still, it burned at her to spend today in a hotel, staring out a window instead of being out there, where all the best experiences were.

“Hmm. Killian, I need your advice.”

So far, Zoey had done a decent job of ignoring the three people in the corner of the suite. Like Zoey, they were lounging, but with far more indulgence. Haleigh had called room service twice in the time Zoey and Lana had been there, and Enzo was deep in a bottle of cognac. Sober but clearly bored, Killian craned his neck to see what Lana was doing.