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I turned and gave him a glare. Therapists never said anything by mistake, ever. “You’re an asshole, you know that?”
He gave me a bland look and shrugged. “It seems like a serious thing to do for someone, to buy a building in order to get her boss arrested for the drugs he’s been dealing.”
“I suppose,” I said. I hadn’t told Dr. Weldman about the spanking; I’d finally decided there was something even the guy who regularly looked inside my head shouldn’t know. “It isn’t that I’m not serious about her. I’m serious about fucking everything. It’s that I don’t know whether she’s serious about me.”
“That may take time,” he allowed.
“I’m fine with that,” I said. “I’m not going anywhere. But I’m in it now. All in. If she isn’t—if she really isn’t—then I’ve lost. That’s something I keep coming back to.”
“You’ve done a lot of hard work, Max,” Dr. Weldman said. “Your strength has to come from within, not from another person.”
“That’s true.” I turned and looked at the wall again. “But sometimes another person makes you want to be better.”
“Is that what’s happening?” he asked.
I thought about that. I thought about the rest of the five million dollars I still had in the bank. And suddenly I had the beginnings of an idea of what to do with it.
And the thought didn’t scare me.
“Yes,” I said. “I think it is.”
The money I’d been sitting on, pretending it didn’t exist—the change that had seemed so big I couldn’t take it in all at once. I could see it now. I could handle it. I could even make the best of it, make something that hadn’t been before. And in a strange, crazy way, that was all to do with Gwen.
I wanted to do things for her, but it wasn’t only that. I wanted to do things for myself, to make myself better, so I’d deserve her. She challenged me, she turned my world upside down, she made me rethink everything. She never treated me with pity or fear. She made me remember all the good things I’d thought before the IED happened, all the things I’d wanted to do. I wanted to do them now, except now I had a reason. And now I had a plan.
Maybe it wouldn’t work. Maybe I’d fail. It was possible. And it didn’t matter.
Because I wasn’t quitting. And finally, I realized, there was something only I do.
Chapter 19
Gwen
Who was I kidding? I showed up for dinner.
He made pasta with grilled chicken and vegetables. I was surprised at how good it was, and then I wasn’t. Max had the best body of any man I’d ever seen. He was obviously not a guy who ate a lot of takeout pizza.
I’d thought long and hard about what to wear, and ended up in a jersey dress and ankle boots, my legs bare, my hair down. Some guy catcalled me when I got out of my car at Shady Oaks, and I didn’t even mind. I felt sexy. There was a difference between the sexy feeling of wearing a tiny cowgirl outfit and the sexy feeling of being on your way to get—hopefully—laid by a big, burly, bearded animal with a skill at orgasms and a serious lack of manners. At twenty-six, I was just learning this for the first time. And I was much, much preferring the second kind of sexy.
The day was still spinning through my head. Everything had changed so completely in a few hours. Candy Cane was gone, my career as a stripper was over, and I was unemployed, but I didn’t have to worry about money, at least for the short term. And most of that was because of Max Reilly.
Max. What the hell were we doing? What did I even want us to be doing? What did he want? He had a confirmed bachelor’s life, living alone in his apartment and going to his gym and his bar. I had a single girl’s life, working and dating and never getting serious. The fact was that when we met, neither of us was looking for anything serious. Neither of us had been looking for anything at all. And since that explosive first hour we were together, I had no idea where I wanted this to go.
Maybe he didn’t, either. Maybe he just liked some hot sex after four long years.
But he’d bought a building. As a gesture, it left getting a woman flowers far in the dust. Yet Devon had bought the building, too. Maybe they’d both done it out of a sense of duty to Olivia’s sister, as well as outrage over what Trent had done and the need they both seemed to have to raise shit, especially for lowlifes like Trent. They’d both seemed to have a good time putting him under.
Maybe, for Max, it hadn’t really had to do with me.
He was so ridiculously hard to read. I could stare into those dark eyes, into that dark frowny face behind its sexy beard, and have no idea whether he was mad at me, about to fuck me, or thinking about something else entirely. And words—well, he didn’t have many of those either. I’d always dated men who could talk all night, usually about themselves. I’d never dated a man who used words so sparingly. But I liked it. It meant that whenever Max said something, he meant it.
No one messes with you. Ever.
Oh, yes. He’d meant that.
“Your boss got arrested,” he told me, continuing the Max pattern as he put a bottle of wine between us and sat down across from me at his little table. “It’s done.”
“So that’s it?” I asked. “Trent is toast?”
