Blush by Jen Doyle

Author:Jen Doyle [Doyle, Jen]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 978-1-64197-121-8
Publisher: NYLA

11

He should have put an end to things right then. Should have packed his bags, left the details to someone else, and jumped on a plane. He knew that the moment he walked into the suite and Jeremy headed immediately to the bar for Macallan’s.

He should have done it later that night when the picture of him kissing Nicki went live on ten different websites at once.

He should have done it at one in the morning when his mobile began to ring incessantly, a blatant reminder of the last middle of the night phone call, the one he’d received that night in Vegas.

Although he did answer again, the shrill voice on the other end of the line had the opposite effect that it had had the first time, however. His mother wasn’t harmless; she was too devious and, having kept her true self behind carefully cultivated façade, still had too many people she could pull to her side. She no longer had enough control to manipulate him the way she once had, but there were still plenty of ways she could hurt him and she made no effort to pretend otherwise. After a five-minute long diatribe, she ended with, “If you can’t take care of this, I will. I will crush her, Simon. She will not destroy this family’s legacy.”

Simon had, of course, come to the conclusion by now that Nicki was entirely innocent—that she always had been. That he could explain the situation with the annulment and she’d sign the papers leaving him free and clear without a second thought. Except that also most likely meant she would wash her hands of him entirely. And no matter how much he knew that was the eventual result, he was too selfish to let her go.

Not just yet. One kiss hadn’t been nearly enough.

“I have it handled,” he snapped. Then he hung up on his mother and powered off the phone.

When he turned it back on in the morning after a restless night, he deleted her messages without listening to them and went directly to Nicki’s instead. She said nothing about the kiss, which was probably for the best. Especially when her message was that she’d set up another meeting for him that afternoon at 4:00. And thus began their daily outings to the craftsmen and women of Sonoma and Napa Counties.

Although following her rules got harder and harder as they traveled all over the blasted countryside and one week progressed into the next, he did abide by them. Up one mountain and down another, all twisty and treacherous but breathtakingly beautiful roads.

Somewhat like Nicki, actually.

With the exception of the first day, she’d conceded to let Jeremy drive them in the Rover and, honestly, Simon had been fine with that. He pretended to work on his laptop and not pay attention to the electricity snapping between them, and she pretended her body just had an extraordinarily sensitive reaction to the air conditioning in the car. It would have been an easier sell if her cheeks weren’t perpetually flushed with heat at the same time.

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