I took the stool beside her. “Hey,” I said.

The bartender bulged her eyes at Pearl, silently asking some kind of question. “Is that him?” was what I guessed she was thinking.

Pearl gave a subtle nod.

The woman glared at me in a way that said Pearl had already unloaded my dirty laundry. “I’ll have what she’s having,” I said. I still felt a little of the wine we’d had and didn’t want to pile more impairment on top of it. I’d seen what a bad idea that had been around Pearl in the first place. Getting tipsy again wasn’t even remotely smart.

The bartender filled my water, gave Pearl a wink, and headed off.

“I was thinking we could patch things up,” I said. “We got of all the dirty stuff out of the way, and I’m ready to do what you wanted. We can work together to make this look real, and I’ll start leaving you alone when we’re behind closed doors from now on.”

Pearl watched me with a tight expression. She nodded. “I think that would be smart.”

“Yeah?” I asked.

“Yeah.”

“Great.” I got up, dusting my hands. “That was easier than I thought it’d be.”

Pearl’s smile felt a little more like she was baring her teeth at me, but I decided to ignore my intuitions and what they were telling me she really felt. Asshole. Heartless. Coward.

“Well,” I said. “I’m going to go up and get some sleep.”

I saw that Pearl was barely holding back some kind of emotion. Was she on the verge of tears?

Fuck. I could be an asshole to a degree, but despite what she might be starting to believe, I had a heart. I leaned in and gave her a hug–partly telling myself it was for show if any of the others at the bar were watching. I planted a kiss on her cheek, then put my lips to her ear. “I enjoyed the shit out of that, by the way. You were great. I just don’t think it’d be wise to go down that road again.”

There was a flicker of light in her eyes when I pulled away from the hug. A flicker that spelled potential danger for me. I’d nearly snuffed out the flame of possibility between us, and I’d been too much of a coward to let it stay snuffed. My words had just heated the embers, and not only for Pearl.

21

PEARL

With only a few hours left in Asheville, I was beginning to think me and Dean could actually make this work. Did I still have some very serious confused feelings about what we’d done days ago the night after our dinner? Absolutely. But each day, I was finding it a little easier to stuff that all in the back of my mind.

Our first days at the conference were relatively easy as far as work load went. But keeping my distance from Dean was much easier after that, because the Pollards had our days stacked with meetings, guest speakers, and team building exercises. Thankfully, Dean wasn’t required to attend any of those because of his “employee but not an employee” status. I got a question or two about why my boyfriend wasn’t there to hang out with me and found it pretty easy to blow them off with the excuses Dean and I worked out.