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Sleep evades me.
“Damn it.” I fling the sheets back and jump out.
I stalk down the hallway and peer around the door into Ava’s room. Everything is peaceful. She’s no longer crying. I start to close the door to head back to my room.
A whimper, almost inaudible, comes from the bed. It’s so slight it might have just been a sound outside.
Or it could have been her.
Closing her door, I join her in the bed. I don’t pull her to me. I just lie beside her, listening to her breathing, making sure she sleeps.
“What have you found?” I drop my skipping rope onto the low stone wall that edges the terrace and swipe up my towel, wiping the sweat from my bare chest.
“He’s in Thailand,” Hayden says.
“That’s where we’re going, then.” I gather up my rope and head toward the back door, walking the long way around the house.
“We? Ava going with you again?”
“That a problem?”
There’s nothing for her to do. She knows it. I know it. But she won’t back down. And I’m not about to leave her at Rochwell when Ed might decide to come over. I saw the way he looked at her.
“No problem.” Hayden chuckles before asking, “Do you think Callaghan will listen now that he’s been offered the San Jose slots?”
“I’m counting on it,” I grumble as I enter the house through the back door.
“You know there’s still—?”
“No.”
My mind wanders to Ava’s serene face when I woke this morning. She’d ended up in my arms with her head on my chest.
“That’s still not on offer,” I say.
“Just making sure nothing has changed.”
“It hasn’t.” I walk up the hallway toward the kitchen.
“All right. Well, I’ll send you the flight details.” Hayden yawns. “You know it’s the middle of the fucking night here and I’m still in the office.”
“You help us get this deal and I’ll give you a raise.”
“Twenty percent?”
“Ten.”
“Fifteen,” he counters.
Silence blankets us, before he laughs. “Okay, you tight bastard. Ten percent. And the promise not to kill me when I tell you that you need to look for a new PA when you come back.”
“Jesus. Can’t you keep your dick separate from business?” I clear my throat as the events of last night come into full vivid technicolor in my mind. Ava beneath me on the table. Ava crying out my name. Ava’s eyes holding mine as she came for me.
“I’ve never come so hard.”
She was right to call me a hypocrite. I had no right to blur that line between us.
“I mean, I could… for twenty percent.”
