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“Flash, you know I’m sorry, right? About everything?”
And he was sorry. After he broke it off with Flash he’d determined to put the whole thing behind him. He’d let his father set him up on blind dates with preapproved women, mostly the daughters of friends and business colleagues. Ian had done it; he’d gone out with his father’s choices. Every last woman he went out with on these father-ordained blind dates had been elegant, sophisticated, with long hair, understated makeup, no tattoos and no piercings other than the earlobes. They were all in respectable lines of work—one professor at a Catholic college, one doctor of internal medicine, one financial lawyer who sat on the board of one of Dad’s favorite charities. All wonderful women—smart, attractive and accomplished. When his father demanded to know why Ian hadn’t asked any of them out on a second date, all Ian had said was, Sorry, she’s just not my type, when what he meant was, I’m not over Flash and I don’t know if I ever will be.
“I regret it,” Ian said when Flash didn’t say anything to his apology. “And I’m not proud of myself. As much as my father loves me and I love him, there was a damn good chance he’d fire me if he found out what was going on. I’d not only slept with an employee, but I’d gotten caught sleeping with an employee. I didn’t want you to lose your job. I didn’t want me to lose my father’s respect.” Ian rubbed his face and groaned before dropping his hands to his knees and meeting her eyes again. “I made the wrong choice by not telling you the truth. It was a weak thing to do and I don’t like thinking of myself as a weak man. I wanted to beat Haggerty for threatening to do that to me, to us. Literally physically beat the shit out of him so much it scared me. I scared me. My feelings scared me. So I...” He shrugged.
“You cut your losses.”
“That’s what I thought I was doing,” he said. “Cutting my losses. I lost too much when I lost you. And when you quit work and walked out of the building, it felt like I was about to lose something I couldn’t live without.”
“Dammit, Ian, I wish you’d told me all of this back then instead of keeping it from me,” she said.
“I do, too,” he said. “Can you forgive me?”
It felt like an eternity passed before she finally answered him.
“Yeah, I can forgive you.”
“I don’t deserve it. You’re a better person than I am.”
“I know,” she said, the tiniest hint of a smile on her mouth.
“I want to be with you,” he said. “In any way you’ll let me be with you. If you want to have sex—just sex—I can live with that. It’s not what I want but if it makes you happy, if it makes up for what I did, I’ll do it.”
“What do you want from me? And don’t say you want to be my friend. We both know that’s not it.”
“I want you. As much of you as you are willing to give me. I can’t deal with watching you walk out of my life again. You did it yesterday and I lasted three seconds before I was chasing you across the parking lot. You did it last night and I lasted two seconds before I was running to the garage to stop you. I screwed up last time. I’m not going to screw up this time. Please tell me you’ll give me another chance, Flash. That’s all I’m asking for.”
“I’m here,” she said. “I drove to the top of a volcano that’s covered in two feet of snow to give you a gift I made with my own hands today. Did I mention the volcano part?” She turned to point at the top of Mount Hood, its snowy peak glowing a red and sunset gold in the window.
“The volcano thing makes you nervous, doesn’t it?”
“You make me nervous,” she said, turning away from the window to meet his eyes.
“I make you nervous? Me? Ian Asher makes Flash Redding nervous? That’s like saying David made Goliath nervous.”
“David killed Goliath,” she said.
“But David didn’t make Goliath nervous.”
“If Goliath were smart, he would have been nervous,” she said. “I’m smart enough to be nervous.”
She raised her chin and looked him hard in the eyes, daring him to take this where he knew they both wanted it to go.
“Tell me why I make you nervous,” he said. The time for questions was over. Orders only.
“Because I have very strong feelings for you,” she said.
“I have strong feelings for you, too.”
“Anger? Fear? The usual dark-side stuff?” she asked.
“Attraction, fascination, adoration, affection, erection.”
“Is ‘erection’ an emotion?” she asked.
“It’s definitely a feeling.”
“What’s it feel like?” she asked, walking right into his answer, which he knew she did on purpose, because she wanted this as much as he did.
