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Chuckling, he bent over and kissed the top of her head. “I’ll come back and check on you in fifteen minutes to make sure you’re still awake.”

“Or...”

“Or...?”

“You could stay and talk to me to make sure I don’t fall asleep.”

“Sienna,” he said with another laugh. “We’ve been talking for almost ten straight days.”

“We have a lot of time to make up for.” She slid a little further down in the water and moaned with pleasure. “You know, if you just would have called once in a while to let me know how you were, maybe we wouldn’t have so much to talk about.”

In an instant, he looked devastated.

“Are you alright?”

Slowly, he sat on the edge of the tub, but he wouldn’t look at her.

“Mick?”

“I did call you,” he said quietly. “Once. But...I hung up.”

Sienna pushed herself to a more upright position. “You did?”

He nodded.

“When?”

“I had been in L.A. for almost two years. It was the night I signed my first band. Shaughnessy. It was almost three in the morning and I was so damn excited because up until that point, I wasn’t getting anywhere. So there I was on the precipice of something big and I had no one to share it with.”

Then he finally looked at her.

“But I wanted to share it with you.”

“Then why didn’t you? Why would you call and then hang up?”

“I realized how wrong it was to open that door when there was no hope for us at that time. I knew you were upset that I had left and it seemed wrong for me to call and disrupt your life, so...I didn’t.”

So many emotions swirled around in her head, but the main one was anger.

Closely followed by disappointment.

“You know something, I get that you are very good at what you do and I know that earlier we said we were going to stop focusing so much on the past. But here’s the thing, I’m not one of your clients and you had no right to make that kind of decision about what was right or wrong for me. Actually, I find it insulting. I’m an intelligent woman and even at eighteen, I was far more mature than most of my peers. And you knew that. You always knew that. But instead of taking a risk, you just...” With a huff of annoyance, she waved him off. “Never mind. Just...go and read or something. I’d like to be alone.”

And much to her surprise, he didn’t argue or to change her mind. With a slight nod, he walked out of the bathroom, quietly closing the door behind him.

How dare he! She thought. If he had called and talked to her—even just that one time...

Then what, genius? What would have changed?

Nothing, she realized.

Absolutely nothing.

“Well, shit...”

Yeah, she’d just had a little hissy fit and for what?

Probably because she was exhausted and a little emotional today and...she needed to hit something. Instead of doing that literally, she did it with her words, and he didn’t deserve that.