Chapter 151: Chapter 151

“I do.” I nod at him. “But why do you have to tell Landon?”

Hardin runs his hand over his hair, and his eyes concentrate on reading my expression. I get the feeling that I’m missing something here.

“Answer me,” I say, using his own words back at him.

“He’s babysitting your dad.”

“Why?” Why would my father need a babysitter?

“Your dad’s trying to get sober, that’s why. And I’m not stupid enough to leave him at that apartment by himself.”

“You have liquor there, don’t you?”

“No, I tossed it. Just drop this, okay?” His tone is no longer gentle; it’s urgent, and he’s clearly on edge.

“I’m not going to just drop it. Is there something that I should know? Because I feel like I’m being left out of the loop here, again.” I cross my arms over my chest and he takes a deep, dramatic breath, his eyes closing with the gesture.

“Yes, there is something that you don’t know about, but I’m begging you to just trust me, okay?”

“How bad?” I ask; the possibilities terrify me.

“Just trust me, okay?”

“Trust you to do what?”

“Trust that I will take care of all of this shit so that by the time I tell you what happened, it won’t matter anymore. You have enough shit going on right now; please, just trust me on this. Let me do this for you, and let it go,” he urges.

The initial paranoia and panic that always come with these types of situations flutter through me, and I’m moments away from snatching Hardin’s phone from him and calling Landon myself. The look on Hardin’s face, though, stops me. He’s pleading for me to trust him on this, trust that he’ll be able to fix whatever it is that’s going on; and to tell the truth, as much as I want to know, I don’t think I can handle another problem on my already full plate.

“Okay.” I sigh.

His brows furrow, and he cocks his head to the side. “Really?” He’s astounded by how easy it was to persuade me to back off, I’m sure.

“Yes. I’ll do my best not to worry about the situation with my dad as long as you can promise me that it’s better for me not to know.”

He nods. “I promise.”

I believe him, mostly.

“Fine.” I finalize the agreement with the word and try my best to push my obsessive need to know what’s happening to the back of my mind. I need to trust Hardin with this. I need to trust him of my own resolve. If I can’t trust him with this, how can I entertain a future for us at all?

I sigh, and Hardin smiles at my acquiescence.

Chapter one hundred and two

TESSA

Looks like I’ll be filling out these thank-you cards to the guests who made last night’s club opening such a big success,” Kimberly says with a wry grin and a wave of an envelope when I enter the kitchen. “What are the two of you planning for today?”

A look at the stack of cards she’s already addressed, and the pile she’s still working on, makes me wonder just how many businesses Christian has invested in, if all those people she’s writing to were “partners” of some sort. The size of this house alone has to mean he has more enterprises going on than just Vance Publishing and a single jazz club.

“I’m not sure. We’ll figure it out when Hardin gets out of the shower,” I tell her, and slide a fresh stack of small envelopes across the granite countertop.

I had to force Hardin into the bathroom to take a shower alone; he was still irritated with me for locking him out of the bathroom while I took mine. No matter how many times I tried to explain to him how awkward I’d feel if the Vances knew we were showering together in their home, he’d give me a weird little look and argue that we’d done much worse in their house than shower together over the past twelve hours.

I stood my ground despite his pleading. The events in the gym were motivated by pure lust and were entirely unplanned. The love we made in my bedroom isn’t an issue, because it’s my bedroom for now, and I’m an adult having consensual sex with my . . . whatever it is that Hardin is to me right now. The shower thing, however, makes me feel differently.

Being the stubborn man he is, Hardin still didn’t agree, which led to me asking him to get me a glass of water from the kitchen. I pouted, and he fell for it. The moment he left the room, I jetted down the hall to the bathroom, locking the door behind me and ignoring his annoyed demands for me to let him in.

“You should make him take you sightseeing,” Kimberly tells me. “Maybe throwing yourselves into the culture of the city will help him with his decision to move here with you.”

This kind of weighty conversation is not something that I want to deal with right now. “So . . . Sasha seemed nice,” I say, to not-so-covertly move the conversation away from my relationship issues.

Kimberly snorts. “Sasha? Nice? Not so much.”

“She knows that Max is married, doesn’t she?”

“Of course she does.” She licks her lips. “But does she care? No, not at all. She likes his money and the expensive jewelry that comes along with seeing him. She could care less about his wife and daughter.” The disapproval in Kim’s voice is heavy, and I’m relieved to find that we’re in agreement on this subject.

“Max is a jerk, but I’m still surprised that he’d have the nerve to bring her around other people. I mean, doesn’t he care if Denise or Lillian find out about her?”

“I suspect that Denise already knows. With a guy like Max, there have been plenty of other Sashas over the years, and poor Lillian already despises her father, so it wouldn’t make any difference if she knew.”