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Right then, sitting in the middle of my kitchen in total silence, the weight of my emotions was crushing. It lasted only a second, a sick mixture of grief and confusion and frustration before it disappeared again. But the second was long enough. Too long. Too strong.
My laptop was sitting closed just a couple of feet away from me. I reached over and slid it toward me to start it up. While I wasn’t aiming to work, I knew I was falling into the rabbit hole by just turning the thing on.
Sure enough, the moment I logged in and opened the browser, my email loaded up.
Three hundred unread emails. All right—they weren’t all work. I had a terrible habit of subscribing to websites using my work email, not my personal one because who had time for more than one email?
Not me, evidently.
I scrolled to the last read email, deciding that working forward was my best bet. I moved the website emails into another folder to check, deleted some spam, and then…moved into the folder where I’d just put the sales emails.
Was shopping for new shoes for work, working?
I tapped my nails against the laptop for a moment, lips pursed.
No.
Not this morning, at least.
I didn’t need more shoes, but I wanted them. Or rather, I wanted something to do, and if there was one thing I knew, it was that buying shoes was always a good idea.
I sipped my coffee as the website loaded. I’d been awake now for an hour. Damien said he always woke up early, but here I was, waiting for him to wake up.
Was he that exhausted?
Was he maybe naked in my shower?
Damn it, no. I didn’t need to think about him naked in my shower, but if I followed my shoe analogy…No, no. I wasn’t going to do that. The jury was still out on how freaking crazy I was. I didn’t need to add fuel to the mental fire I had for that.
What I wanted to do was wake him up and ask him a ton of questions. I had so many I probably needed a notebook to write them all down so I wouldn’t forget. I had so many that I was afraid to ask.
Why don’t you talk about your sisters? What about your mom? What happened to make your family so awkward and complicated? What did life do to you to make you so closed-off?
Where did the scar by your eye come from?
That was one was the most terrifying. Would he tell me? Did I have a right to know? To ask? Was it really any of my business?
The answer, of course, was no. I didn’t have any rights and it was none of my business. If it were me, I’d be telling him where to stick it.
I guess what I hated more than anything was that he knew so much about me, yet in the grand scheme of everything, I knew so little about him.
Sure. I knew that he was handsome and cocky and, sometimes, he made me laugh. He was tempting and sexy and a walking sin. Firm and strong, his body was a walking wet dream, and his mouth was so dirty, he could probably make a woman come with just words.
I knew that he had a pain buried somewhere. That sometimes, his eyes belied his words and gave me a peek at that pain. That it was one he carried heavily, tucking it away behind a poker face.
I also knew that somewhere, deep down inside, he was capable of emotion so strong it could bring a person to their knees. There was no doubt about it—I’d barely scratched the surface of the man, and that was both exhilarating and terrifying.
Maybe I’d never really make a dent. Maybe this was all convenient, still part of the grand plan to take what was mine. Maybe he was so good at hiding emotion that he could pretend it, too.
I was either reading too deep or not deep enough. I was either a fool or, well, a fool. Either one was dangerous.
Fools rushed in.
Fools fell in love.
Fools kept the scars.
I didn’t want to be a fool. Not for him.
Anyone but him.
Yet, there I was. Shopping, wearing little clothing, waiting for him to wake up. Waiting to see him walk through the door into the kitchen and smile at me.
Like a fool.
Like I wasn’t vulnerable and a little lost. Like my heart still wasn’t shattered irreparably.
Like he could fucking fix the ache that followed me around constantly. The same ache I now recognized for what it was—loneliness.
I was lonely.
My house was huge and empty, filled with ghosts around every corner. The pictures that had hung in the entryway for years did nothing but remind me of the time in my life when my mom was killed, of when everything changed and I learned that a skinned knee was the least painful thing that would ever happen to me.
