Page 57 of Rebellious Hearts

Telling Ben anything about my past was just too close, and I couldn’t allow that.

Getting too close meant getting hurt, and I wasn’t up for that anytime soon. I’d managed to recover from the last round of pain when I’d thought I would have it all.

Career. That was what I would focus on.

Ben was a means to an end. The project would look good on my résumé, and even if I decided not to take the job—if Seth even thought I would be good for the position—then a pay rise couldn’t hurt.

This was just business, and I should have known that mixing business with pleasure would just get me in trouble.

I just hadn’t expected that the kind of trouble wouldn’t be professional, it would be directly related to my heart.

17

BEN

Damn it, Sofia was great. And that pissed me off—I didn’t usually think women were great, so it was easy not to get attached, to get rid of them, to walk away without a second thought.

What was I supposed to do when I walked away from Sofia? I couldn’t stop thinking about her, and it was infuriating.

It always irritated me thatsheirritated me. She challenged me, she wasn’t scared to tell me off or get angry with me when she thought I was doing something wrong, and that just infuriated me more.

But what I was pissed off about now was that she wasn’t willing to open up to me. And it pissed me off that I was pissed off about it.

Yeah, I was a fucking anomaly. It didn’t make any sense and I didn’t like that I felt as much as I did with her.

“Hey!” Amy said when she answered the video call. “Are you ready to paint the town red in a couple of days?”

Luke appeared in the picture, too.

“You better have your drinking shoes on because visiting family always drives me crazy and I can think of only one way to forget all my sorrows.”

I sighed heavily. “Yeah, I’m about ready to forget my sorrows, too.”

“What’s up?” Amy asked, picking up on the double entendre. I wasn’t just joking along about drowning my sorrows and Amy was so fucking sharp when it came to my emotions, she always got it out of me.

“This business trip is just getting on my nerves,” I said.

“Is it Sofia?”

I groaned. “Yeah. She’s a pain in my ass and I’ll be happy when this is over. I can’t believe how long I have to be cooped up with her in this shithole of a town.”

“Well, soon we can meet up and you can blow off some steam,” Luke said. “Amy will take Sofia off your hands for a while, right, sis?”

“Thanks for offering my services,bro,” Amy grumbled. “What about we just hang out the three of us instead of dragging her along?”

I didn’t want to do that. I didn’t want to go out without her, and I scowled when the thought lodged firmly in my mind.

“We’ll figure out the logistics closer to the time,” I said.

Amy narrowed her eyes. “Youwanther with us, don’t you?”

“I don’t want to be rude,” I said. “That’s all.”

Amy snorted. “As if you’ve ever worried about being rude. You’re the biggest dick out there.”

“Why, thanks,” I said with a smirk.

Amy rolled her eyes. “Not anatomically. I meant personality-wise.”