He shakes his head, a frustrated exhale clouding the air.“It’s my job to have a plan.The contacts, the protocols.Everything.I should’ve?—”
“Sure, a couple of phone numbers would’ve been helpful, but the night didn’t end any differently than it would’ve if you’d had them.The boys are home.Safe.”
His voice tears through the night, low and rough, spiked with barbed wire.“You shouldn’t have done that.”
The breath catches in my throat, and my shoulders snap back, ready to strike.“You’re welcome.”
He turns fully, his eyes flinty under the sterile parking lot lights.“You can’t throw money around and expect everything to be fine.”
“That’s not what I?—”
He steps closer, cutting me off.“I’m the one responsible for them.Not you.And now Crandall thinks I don’t know what the hell I’m doing.”
There it is—the bruise.It’s his pride, and I’ve trampled right over it.
“Maddox, I wasn’t trying to embarrass you.”
He snorts.“Do you even realize what could’ve happened if anything went wrong?”
“Oh, come on.You did everything right.I just helped.”
“I don’t need help.”
“Clearly,” slips out before I can smother it.“That’s why you were stranded with a dozen teenagers in the middle of nowhere.”
I’m fighting back now.It isn’t what I want, but I don’t let people steamroll me.Not even men with eyes like stormy seas.
A muscle jumps in his jaw.His gaze skims over me, bordering on disgust, and I fight the urge to flinch.
“You think this is funny?”
“No.I think you’re frustrating.”I place my hands on my hips.“You’re so obsessed with being the guy who fixes everything that you can’t recognize when someone’s trying to make it easier for you.”
A rough, humorless laugh escapes him.“You don’t get it.You don’thaveto.You can buy your way out of any problem.Must be nice, huh?Call a bus company and poof.”He snaps his fingers.“Crisis solved.”
“You think I did this because it’s easy?Because it makes me better than you?”
“Don’t tell me it doesn’t.”
I step closer, pulse thudding in my throat.“I did it because I can’t stand watching people struggle when I can do something about it.Maybe that makes you uncomfortable, but it’s called helping, not showing off.”
His breathing turns shallow, tight, and something shifts in his hard stare as if he’s really seeing me for the first time.“You don’t even need to work, do you?”
Straight for the jugular.
“That’s none of your business.”
“Figures.”He shakes his head, a weary kind of frustration bleeding out of him.“A reporter who doesn’t need a paycheck, writing stories about people who actually live in the real world.”
His words land somewhere tender—an old wound I haven’t buried deep enough.My parents may be bigwig movie producers, and I may have an obscene trust fund, but money doesn’t solve everything.
“You have no idea what my real world looks like.”
He looks at me for a long, heavy beat, the anger in his eyes fading into a cold, distant exhaustion, then turns away, his boots grinding into the gravel.
“Go back to the inn, Buchanan.We’re done for tonight.”
I stand in the parking lot with my fists bunched at my sides.His words loop in my head, each replay cutting a little deeper.