Chapter Fifteen

“How did you know who that was?”

It surprised him how quiet his voice was. How level. How cold. How could he speak to Sam in a voice that cold?

But it wasn’t Sam. That woman was a fiction, a lie. She might as well not exist.

“Please,” she said, and although she was trying to sound in command, he could sense the desperation. “Please, Austin. Let me explain.”

But there was nothing to explain. He got it now—how she was glued to her phone but never let him see what she was working on, how she kept pressing him about the deal so she could worm her way in. She hadn’t even told him her last name. He’d fallen for a woman without even asking her last name.

“You’re Samantha Kane,” he said. The words cut like glass in his mouth. Even though he knew it was true, it still hit him like a fall on hard snow when she said yes.

“But that doesn’t matter,” she said quickly. “That doesn’t change how I feel.”

“It certainly changes how I feel.”

She flinched as though surprised by how angry he was. Was she kidding? Was she completely insane?

“You have to believe me, Austin,” she pleaded. “I never meant for you to find out like this.”

He couldn’t believe she had the gall to say that, to stand there and defend herself to him. “You never meant for me to find out at all. All you’ve done this whole time is lie.”

“No. I never—”

“You looked me in the eyes and listened when I talked about the Kanes and the land and the sale and everything and you smiled and nodded and asked bland little questions like ‘What would you do to Gold Mountain if you could do anything here?’ And the whole time you’ve been laughing your head off at how stupid I am, just some small-town hick you can manipulate into giving you what you want.”

His face burned in shame at how he’d been played.

“That’s not what happened,” Sam said, but he wrenched away when she reached for him. He couldn’t bear to let her touch him anymore. She held up her hands, clearly stung, but he didn’t care.

“Maybe it started that way,” she said. “Maybe I thought when I first met you that I could use what I learned for the sale. But then I got to know you, and I—”

She’d been trying to keep her voice level, but it broke and she couldn’t go on.

“And you what? Thought if you pity fucked me a few times, I’d give you my house, too?”

She took a breath, steadying herself. “And I found myself falling in love with you.”

No. No. That was too much. “You don’t get to say that.”

“It’s true.”

He clenched his jaw so hard he thought his teeth might crack. “It’s bullshit. You don’t get to screw me for a few days and make me think that meant something to you, and then brag to your fucking board and your fucking assistant and your shareholders or whoever else you serve that you got the thing you came here for.”

“That’s not what happened!”

“Well, I guess it doesn’t matter now, does it? Considering I can’t trust a damn thing you say.” He laughed, a sound that wasn’t like laughter at all.

“Austin, you have to believe me. I’ve risked everything for you—my job, this sale, the whole future of my father’s project. There are people on my board that want to replace me if I can’t make this deal go through. And the Hendersons aren’t going to sign if I make them keep waiting. I told Steven I’d met with you in order to give us more time. I shouldn’t have done it, I know that, but all I’ve wanted ever since I set foot in Gold Mountain was to spend more time with you.”

“So you could manipulate me.”

“So I could be with you without this awful business deal defining us. I’ve put everything on hold—”

“I didn’t ask you to do that.”

“Everything on hold to be with you,” she plowed on, as though his perspective didn’t matter. As though she thought she could handle this the way she probably handled everything in her office, by being firm and unwavering, the lone voice in charge, the one to whom everybody caved.

But this wasn’t her office, and he wasn’t going to let her walk away unscathed.

“You made me think you were here to ski,” he said. “You said you wanted to remember your dad. Such a touching family legacy that’s turned out to be, daddy and daughter stripping half the state, making money hand over fist.”

Her nostrils flared. “Don’t you dare bring my father into this,” she said in a voice so laced with anger it was almost animal.

“I told you everything,” he cried, sweeping his arm to take in the room, his home, the woods beyond the back door. “I told you about my father, my mother, the truth about my injury—things I barely even tell my best friends.” Then he dropped his hand with a shrug. “But maybe this is just what you do, Samantha. Maybe this is what it means to be some gazillionaire executive with a stack of lawyers at your back. You come into a place and you get people to spill their guts to you, but you don’t care, you already have all the money, the power. You get to play around with the regular folk and in the end you still get everything you want.”

She shook her head furiously. “I never made you tell me anything. And the fact that you don’t share this kind of stuff with your friends—I don’t know what to tell you, but none of that’s on me. And you didn’t tell me about your parents. You yelled at me, Austin, and now it’s awfully convenient that this has come up so you can yell at me some more.”

That was too much. Like it was his fault Sam had decided to play this prank and gotten caught. Like he was to blame for daring to be upset with her.

“When were you even going to tell me?” he asked her, genuinely wanting to know. “Or were you just going to leave me hanging and then send someone in your stead like nothing happened?”

There was a pause, and Austin realized he’d hit a nerve. “I don’t know,” Sam said. But her voice was quiet, different. Far more pained.

“I don’t know, okay?” She started to cry. “I didn’t have a plan, and I always have a plan. Don’t you know that about me? I always have a plan, and then you came along and suddenly I had no idea what to do.”

He could almost do it. Take her in his arms, kiss her forehead, tell her it would be okay. Maybe this was the way he could keep his land, by convincing Sam she cared too much for him to pressure him to sell.

But that was a Kane way of thinking, and it disgusted him that such a thing had crossed his mind. Sam had played him, pure and simple. There was nothing else for either of them to explain.

“I know what you should do,” he said.

“What?” She looked at him hopefully.

“First thing is to get your boots on. Next is to get in the truck. You’ll have a nice long drive to Seattle to work out what to do after that.”

“No,” Sam said, shaking her head. “I’m not leaving like this. Who I am, where I work—it doesn’t have to change anything if we don’t want it to.”

He stared at her like he’d never seen her before. Her, whose body he’d gazed at, ravaged, held. He’d felt so close to her. It occurred to him he might never feel that close to anyone again.

And then he said the cruelest words he could think of, the ones that would cut her as much as she’d done to him. “I want it to.”

They drove to the Dipper in silence. She tried, once, to ask if there was anything she could do to make it better. But the fact that she thought what she’d done was forgivable only showed how different they were.

He thought she might turn around before she got in her car, try one last time. But nothing she could say would change his mind—about their relationship, or the sale.

He drove home gripping the steering wheel until his knuckles turned white. The shame in him was all-consuming, a fire that melted everything inside him down to thick black sludge. He didn’t usually let Chloe up on the furniture, but when he got home he begged her to sit beside him. He felt her weight against him, the warmth of her breathing. Her unconditional love. They gazed at the cold, soot-covered fireplace. He couldn’t even bear to get up and bring in the wood.