His smile was tight. “At the very least, you enjoyed the ass show.”
“Hang on to it with both hands, because right now, it’s all you’ve got.”
A lump moved almost discreetly in his throat. “Quitting already?”
Josephine’s irritation graduated to the next level. “Is that what you were trying to do? Test me to see if I’d quit?”
He crossed his arms. “Are you?”
Something about his belligerence and the challenge in his eyes made her recall their conversation early that morning. Maybe I take chances and set them on fire. Buck isn’t the first one to get sick of my shit and bail. Well, if he expected the same of her, he hadn’t been paying attention. Nor would she give him the satisfaction of being like everyone else. “Nope! I’m staying. If for no other reason than to piss you off.” She looked down at her phone helplessly, knowing she could try to call back the number, but it probably wouldn’t connect. She’d tried several times in the past after getting disconnected. Reception was horrible where Tallulah was working and she was allotted only so much time on the landline.
Dammit.
A very dramatic bubble expanded in her chest and she needed to get upstairs before it burst. “For better or worse, I’ll see you in the morning. Good night.”
She shouldered past a stone-faced Wells on her way to the bar. After a brief apology to Ricky that he seemed to understand—since the entirety of the bar was now silent in the wake of her argument with Wells—she left some money for her drink and beelined for the lobby elevators. One of them opened right away, thankfully, and she stepped into the empty car.
Before the doors could close, a big hand slammed down between them, trundling them back open. Wells had followed her? Brave man.
After observing Josephine for the barest moment, he moved into the elevator beside her, both of them staring at the numbers overhead as they ticked upward, the air between them vibrating like the tail of a rattlesnake.
“I shouldn’t have hung up the phone.”
“We’ll pile it onto your mountain of transgressions.”
She sensed him wincing. “A whole mountain, huh?”
“By the end of the week, we should have a full range. We’ll call it the Dumbass Alps.”
“You really intend on staying that long?”
“I’m not going to answer that question again. If you thought I was going to quit so easily, why did you ask me to caddie for you in the first place?”
As soon as the doors opened on her floor, she practically leapt through the breach, leaving her question hanging in the air. Wells’s heavy footsteps followed behind her. “Whether you’re going to bail or not is a valid concern, Josephine. Hell, you’re quitting this conversation pretty easily, aren’t you?”
She threw her head back and groaned at the hallway ceiling. “Only so I don’t put you on the injured list for the rest of the tournament.” Having reached her door, she slid the key card out of her clutch and slapped it down on the sensor, making the green light flash. Her intention was to go inside and shut the door, restore her calm in the peace and quiet of the enormous bathtub or perhaps one of three seating areas, like Goldilocks’s angry cousin. But something had been in the forefront of her mind for the last twenty minutes. She couldn’t stop thinking about Ricky’s skeptical reaction about Wells’s unexpected arrival after the hurricane. So she stopped with a hand on the door and let her mouth take over, because anger had disengaged her brain. “Who were you visiting in Palm Beach? When you just happened to swing by Rolling Greens?”
A shutter dropped down, rendering his face expressionless. “What?”
“Who were you visiting?”
His cheek twitched. “I don’t like questions, belle. Remember?”
Surely, fire was bursting from her ears. “Oh, really? Well I don’t like this feeling that you’re playing games with me.”
That statement made him jerk back, visibly baffled. “I would not play games with you.”
“All day, you ignored me and brushed me off because you want me to quit, because it would justify your whole screw-the-world philosophy. That’s not a game?”
He blinked, staring at the wall for a moment, as if only now realizing what he’d done. “I . . . wouldn’t. Not intentionally.”
“Right.” She exhaled sharply. “I’m just so glad I get to ruin that expectation for you.”
“Everyone before you has quit,” Wells said through his teeth, taking one purposeful step toward her. Then another. A third. Until he was so close, she could taste the soap from his shower when she inhaled. He cupped the back of her neck and turned her around, then slid his fingers up into her hair, tightening them around the strands and drawing her head back as his mouth moved closer from above.