Getting His Way: Sapphire Falls Book Seven by Erin Nicholas Page B

was really going on here. A pet lingerie show would be… Yeah, okay, that was maybe a bad idea.
    “You all know this isn’t really happening,” she said to the women. “No need to get all worked up.”
    “But a pet fashion show, Tess,” Stella said. “That would be a lot of fun.”
    Tessa took a deep breath. “Okay, we can think about that for next year. But we’ve already got everything set up for this one.”
    Bryan tried to intervene. “I was just helping the women—”
    “I know what you were doing,” Tess said, looking at him with a combination of exasperation and, if he wasn’t mistaken, affection. It was a tiny bit, but he was pretty sure it was there.
    “You ladies can go. Thanks anyway,” Tess told them.
    Bryan frowned as the women dispersed, still talking about pets in pajamas. “We weren’t finished.”
    Tess crossed to the edge of the stage and jumped to the floor. “There’s not going to be a lingerie show, Bryan. I talked the ladies into playing along for this. They got caught up—in you, big shock—and kind of forgot.”
    He wasn’t sure what to say to that. Actually, he wasn’t sure he should say anything to that. “There’s no show? But I thought you did this every year.”
    “There’s going to be a show, just not a lingerie show.”
    Ah, he suddenly got it. “You were trying to scare me off.”
    “Yep.”
    She was clearly unapologetic, and that almost made Bryan smile. He wasn’t used to Tessa being anything but completely accommodating.
    Well, they’d already established that she’d been trying to get him to quit, but the rest didn’t make sense. “The show is off? Because Susan got sick and Cora doesn’t want to do it? I really think I talked them into it.”
    “Of course you did,” she said, crossing to his chair where he’d left the script.
    “What’s going on?” He made his way to where she was standing.
    She handed him his crutch. “We’re having a fashion show, but it’s summer wear—shorts, tees, summer dresses. All the women are in it and more than happy about it.”
    He narrowed his eyes even as he felt like smiling. He liked Tessa. She was funny and maybe just a bit sassy. He didn’t know she could be sassy.
    The other night when she’d stood up on the stool at the Come Again and announced to the town that he wasn’t in charge of her love life, and then in his office when she’d faced him about the whole situation and turned down his boyfriend offer, it had been the first time he’d really ever seen Tessa raise her voice or be spunky. And he’d liked it. A lot.
    He loved her sweetness. He’d been counting on that sweetness. But he really liked this spark too. He dated sassy women. He liked them and was very attracted to that type of confidence.
    Of course, that had been when he was a pretty confident himself. Cocky even. For a guy like him, a woman needed more than a little self-confidence to not get rolled over by his own. He liked women who would tell him to shut up and fuck off when needed.
    But he wasn’t that cocky guy anymore. He was confident. He was sure of himself and what he wanted and could do. But the cockiness had been knocked out of him on that mountainside. He wasn’t invincible after all. So now he liked to think of it as a softer, deeper confidence than he’d had before.
    Before the accident and rehab, his confidence had come from the things he could do and the way he could push the people he coached to do more. Now, he’d learned that sometimes he needed to be pushed, and that he couldn’t do everything just because he wanted to. He couldn’t run a 5k now no matter how much he wanted to. He couldn’t mountain climb like he did before no matter how much he wanted to. He had most definitely gotten a lesson in humility during his hospitalization and rehab, and now his confidence came from somewhere even deeper than it had before. Because now he didn’t just know and believe in his strengths, he knew his weaknesses