her.
“You don’t believe me. You don’t trust me.” Neely felt cold. She felt gutted. She felt as if her determined and furious attack on Sebastian’s father, which he had certainly not been expecting when he’d asked for a dance, had all been for naught.
She’d had to give Philip credit. He’d first looked as stunned as Sebastian when she’d told him what she thought of him. But he’d listened. He’d shut his mouth and heard her out. And then he’d talked.
Of course she hadn’t believed every word he said. Of course she knew a sound byte when she heard one. But she also heard some truth in the desperation Philip Savas had expressed. She’d heard a man who had made a mess of most of the relationships in his life, a man who’d lost the respect of his eldest son and knew it. She heard a man who could be both self-aware and self-deprecating, a man who understood his own weaknesses but who hadn’t yet figured out how to compensate for them.
By the end of the dance yes, they’d laughed. But it had been equally tempting to cry—for him and for his son.
“Don’t tell me my father didn’t try to bring you around to his way of thinking,” Sebastian said grimly.
“Of course he did. In his ham-handed way, he wants you in his life. He wants us to design a hotel for him.”
“Oh, for God’s sake! As if I would ever—”
“You could,” Neely said stubbornly. “We could.”
Sebastian shook his head. “I’ll never! And you won’t either if you want whatever we’ve got between us to work.”
“What do we have between us, Seb?” she asked. She was almost afraid to, not really wanting to face the answer. “Do we have love? Commitment? Forever?”
His jaw tightened. “We have a good thing. You know that.”
“I thought so,” Neely agreed slowly. “Now I’m not so sure.”
He raked a hand through his hair. “Why not? Because I won’t knuckle under to my perennially absent father’s demand?”
Neely shook her head. “This isn’t about your father.”
“No? Then what is it about?”
“It’s about whether you’re ever going to trust me to be on your side. Even when I challenge you, I’m still on your side. But you didn’t believe I’d be there for you with Carmody, either.”
“This isn’t about Carmody!”
“No, it isn’t. It’s about trust, Sebastian.”
He shook his head. “If that’s the way you feel, we don’t have anything else to say. I’m giving you everything I’ve got,” he said flatly. “I can’t give you any more.”
“Can’t?” Neely said quietly, looking at him and feeling her heart breaking. “Or won’t?”
HE LEFT.
Neely heard him go.
She had run up to her bedroom and shut the door and prayed that he would come after her. But there were no footsteps on the stairs. There was no light knock on her door. There was no sound of her name.
There was only silence—and then the front door opening and closing.
She ran to the window and looked out to see him walking up the dock. He looked weary and exhausted and alone, and she wanted nothing so much as to call to him, to tell him to come back and to wrap her arms around him and tell him she loved him.
But if she did, he wouldn’t believe her. He didn’t trust her, didn’t trust her word.
So he couldn’t—or wouldn’t—believe she loved him.
He kept walking until he disappeared into the darkness. Moments later an engine started, headlights came on. A car backed out and turned to go up the hill.
He drove away.
She was mad. She’d get over it.
Neely wasn’t silly. She had to see that they were good together. And she had to know it wasn’t worth throwing away over nothing.
He gave her the weekend to come to her senses. In the meantime, he made his sisters double up, his brothers take the sofas, and he moved back into his penthouse. It was a madhouse. Noise, clutter, commotion. It should have taken his mind off her.
It might have if they hadn’t all asked, “Where’s Neely?” and “What are you doing here?”
“I live here,” he said shortly.
But as he took them one by one to the airport over the next day and a half and got his penthouse back, he didn’t feel as if he lived there anymore. The penthouse didn’t feel like home at all.
Home was where Neely was.
Tuesday evening he spent the day listening to Roger Carmody sing Neely’s praises once again— “Makes complete sense, that girl. Got a feel for what makes people tick. Made sense of all that soaring space you like so much. Good thing you sent her to talk to me.”
“She’s very astute,” Seb said in his best politic manner.
Now he hoped she was astute enough to have come to her senses. He’d missed her. He was ready to let bygones be bygones. So he went home.
And when he parked his car and went down the steps to the dock, despite his earlier anger, he felt that increasingly familiar sense of anticipation, of the eagerness he always felt when he was coming home to the houseboat.
To Neely.
Of course she wouldn’t be home yet. He’d left Carmody early and she’d still be at work. But that would give him a chance to be there first, to surprise her.
He opened the door, prepared now for Harm’s immediate dash and skid around the corner from the living room. He was already grinning in anticipation.
But the entry was silent and empty.
“Harm! Hey, buddy! Where are you?”
Seb supposed the dog could be out on the deck. It was a sunny day. He liked to lie in the sun’s warmth. Or maybe Cody had come to take him running if Neely knew she was going to be late. A glance toward the hook told him that Harm’s leash was gone.
But so was his food dish. And his water bowl.
Seb’s stomach did a slow awful somersault and ended feeling as if it had lodged in his throat.
“Harm?” He called the dog’s name louder now, an edge to his voice. A new unwelcome feeling settled in his chest.
Apprehension? Worry? Panic?
No, he thought. No!
But all the same, he strode quickly down the hall into the living area. The sofa was there, and the armchair, the lamps, the desk with his computer, the bookshelves.
But only half the books were there. His half.
The rocker Max had made Neely was gone. So was the afghan he knew her mother had knitted her.
And the coffee table that had been in front of the sofa—the one with the drawers for architectural drawings, the one that Neely had talked Max out of, her pride and joy, the one she wouldn’t let him set his boxes on when he’d first moved in—that was gone, too.
Max could have taken it back, Seb told himself. Neely had said she was “trying it out” to see if it was the one she wanted or if she wanted Max to make her something else.
“Anything I want, he said,” she’d told Seb. “But that’s silly. He knows very well I want this one.”
And