LITMIR.BIZ

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are you all right?”

      She clutched the phone harder, feeling ridiculous and needy and weak and hopeless and sad. “I’m, uh…” She put her hand over the phone, swiped at her eyes and then groped for a tissue with her white-gloved hand.

      “Sam, talk to me. Please. What’s the matter with you?” He sounded so worried, so…scared even. For her.

      He was worried for her.

      That meant a lot.

      And then he said, “Sam, I’m coming over there. I’m coming over there now.”

      “No!” The word escaped her trembling mouth on a sob. “You can’t. Uh-uh.” She ripped a tissue from the tasteful beige box on the nightstand. “You know you can’t. You can’t even see me. Not until my final test.”

      “Forget the test,” he said and really seemed to mean it. “It doesn’t matter. None of it matters if you’ve had enough. It’s not a big deal. We can call the whole thing off right now.”

      Call the whole thing off. He wouldn’t mind or be mad at her if they called the whole thing off.

      She could, she realized. She could do that. Call an end to this torture, give it up. There was no law that said she had to stick it out.

      She could give it up and head straight for her private hideaway in San Diego. Walk on the beach, soak up some rays.

      And then sign up for a new job on a different rig, go back to the challenging and profitable life she had made for herself.

      “What about—” another sob escaped her “—your mother?”

      “I’ll find some other way to get her off my back. Don’t worry about that. Just say the word, Sam. And you’re off the hook. I mean that. Sam? Did you hear me? Sam? Are you there?” Travis seemed really worried that she might have hung up on him.

      But she hadn’t. She was sniffling. And thinking…

      And coming to realize how very much she wanted this, how seriously invested she was in seeing the whole thing through.

      “Damn it, Sam. Say something.”

      And she did. “No, I don’t want that. I don’t want to give it up. I want to…get through this. I want to make good at it because it does matter. It matters a lot. And that’s why you can’t come over here. Because Jonathan wants it that way. And that’s fine with me. I am doing exactly what Just frickin’ Jonathan tells me to do.”

      “Uh. You are?”

      “Yeah. I am—and don’t you dare tell him I said the word frickin’. Got that?”

      “Absolutely. I won’t. Whatever you say. But—”

      “I can do this. I will do this. I am sticking with this program and I am going to get some serious girly going or I will die trying.” She blew her nose, good and hard. By then, well, it didn’t seem to matter all that much that Travis would figure out she’d been crying. “Sam.”

      She sniffed, shamelessly that time. And it felt kind of good, really. It was kind of a relief. To let go. To cry and not care that someone might know it. “What?”

      “Are you…crying?” He asked the question in a kind of awed disbelief.

      “So what if I am, huh?” She grabbed another tissue and scrubbed her soggy cheeks. “So what if I am?”

      “But you never cry.”

      “Well, I’m crying now. Or I was.” She ripped out yet more tissue. “But at this point, I’ve moved on to mopping up the mess.”

      “So, uh, what’s happened?” He sounded totally flummoxed.

      She tried to explain. “Nothing. Everything. This is even harder than I thought it would be.”

      “It is, huh?” His voice was gentle. Understanding. “Listen. I meant what I said. If you want to back out—”

      “Uh-uh. No way. I’m not giving up. I’m going through with it, no matter what.”

      “If you’re sure that’s what you want…”

      “I am sure, yes. So stop asking me.” She settled back against the pillows, gave one last sniffle. “I guess I kind of expected to be bad at this. I just didn’t expect to care so much.”

      “Who says you’re bad at it?” He seemed honestly puzzled.

      “I say. And I ought to know—oh, and Jonathan, too. He thinks I suck the big one. He looks at me in that pained, superior way of his….”

      “Wait. Jonathan told you that you suck?”

      “He didn’t have to tell me. It’s written all over his snooty, pointy little face. As far as he’s concerned, I can’t do anything right.”

      “But that’s not what he said to me.”

      She snuggled back into the pillows. “Huh? Said to you when?”

      “When he called me a few minutes ago to let me know how you were getting along. He said you were making great progress and he was really impressed with you, that he hadn’t realized at the beginning how much potential you actually had.”

      Now she sat up straighter. “He didn’t. You’re lyin’, trying to make me feel better.”

      “God’s truth, Sam.”

      She gave a very unladylike snort—the kind of snort she wouldn’t have thought twice about making just a few days before. “And you think it would kill him to say that to me?”

      Travis snorted right back. “Come on, you know how you are. The madder you get, the harder you work. Maybe he’s figured that out about you.”

      She fiddled with the phone cord, twisting it around her gloved index finger. “Well, then why are you telling me he said nice things about me? Maybe I’ll get lazy now I know he’s only pretending to look down on me.”

      “Not a chance. You haven’t got a lazy bone in your body—and it was pretty clear to me you needed encouragement.”

      She pulled her finger free of the coil of cord, feeling better about everything, feeling ready to face tomorrow. Feeling she could even handle the awful, disgusting shopping that would happen the day after that. “You’re a good man, Travis Bravo. Thanks.”

      “You need me, you call me.”

      She made a soft sound low in her throat. “I think I can make it now.”

      “I’m here. Just remember.”

      He said goodbye a few minutes later. She hung up the phone thinking that she was a lucky person to have a friend like Travis.

      Turning off the light and pulling up the covers, she lay on her back in the dark with a smile on her face. Jonathan had said he was impressed with her. Travis had been there to talk her down when she needed it.

      She knew now she could make it. In only a few days, she would be ready.

      She would go with Travis to San Antonio and play his bride-to-be for his family. Yes, it was a big lie and she didn’t believe in lies.

      But no one was going to be hurt by the deception. She was just giving Travis’s mom an excuse to take a break from her never-ending matchmaking, giving Travis a break, too. For a while, anyway, he wouldn’t have women thrown at him constantly when he wasn’t interested in anything like that.

      He’d loved Rachel Selkirk, loved her deeply and completely, the way only a good, true-hearted man can love his woman. And he didn’t want to go there again, didn’t want to take the chance of being hurt like that again. Just like Sam didn’t want to be hurt.

      Sam folded her hands on top of the covers and stared up at the dark ceiling above and thought about how, maybe,

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