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And I wanted her to love me back.
Telling her about Janice, and what she’d done, would poison the beauty of last night. I couldn’t allow that to happen. Thank fuck the locks had been switched out. I didn’t need Janice showing up and confronting Brooke, and something told me she might try it when she returned from Hong Kong. This proved just how unstable Janice was, and I needed to figure out how best to deal with her. Because I wasn’t just going to let this one go. She’d crossed way over the line with this shit.
I made a decision. I gathered up all of the mess and trashed the whole lot of it.
I went into my home office and logged on to Target.com. I ordered new condoms and selected the option to pick up in the store. I forwarded the confirmation to Victoria and told her to pick them up and bring them to the penthouse. I didn’t obsess over the awkwardness of my request, either. She was my personal assistant, and I paid her very well to do a job. If I needed her to pick up condoms, then her job that day was to pick up condoms—what I was fucking paying her to do.
Jesus, I was tense. I needed Brooke to de-stress me with her own particular brand of magic. X-rated images danced through my mind at the thought of exactly how she could accomplish it, too.
Aaaaaand that just led to wondering about what was happening tonight. We hadn’t discussed it, and I imagined she would want to go home to her own house. A fucking depressing thought. I didn’t want her on the Blackstone Island Ferry anymore. The weather was unpredictable and could sink a boat in minutes under bad conditions. The risk to her safety made me mental.
We needed to have a serious talk about a long list of things, but mostly I just wanted to be with her again tonight. I wanted to be with Brooke—pretty simple.
Now that I’d found her I couldn’t be without her.
Pussy. Pussy! PUSSY!
“And what is your point?” I said to my inner demons.
“I have a problem.” There’s something to be said for unburdening your true feelings to someone you care about, because the minute the words were out of my mouth, I felt instantly better. I knew Brooke’s beautiful voice would soothe me even if the building were in flames and crumbling down around me.
“Oh? Tell me about it.”
“Well, I met this beautiful girl, and she has completely captivated me in just a short time of knowing her. Last night . . . aaah, we shared the most amazing night together, and now I can’t stop thinking about her, or wondering when I can see her again.”
She laughed softly into the phone, and I pictured her lips as she did it. “You say this is a problem, but if you like her and she likes you, then why do you call it a problem?”
“Well, that is a very good question. Have I told you yet, how smart you are? If I haven’t, then I’ve been remiss, because I think you are very, very smart.”
“So do you have a problem or not?”
“Oh yes, I have an additional problem.”
“Will you share it with me, Caleb?” she asked with a hint of teasing.
“All right then. You won’t laugh at me?”
“Ahhh, I might possibly laugh, but not at you—only with you—because you are funny.”
“Back to my problem, Brooke.”
“Right, the elusive problem you can’t seem to spit out for the life of you.”
It was my turn to laugh. She could string the simplest of words together in a statement, but coming out of her mouth, it transformed into pure poetic prose. “I’m going out of the country on a business trip the day after tomorrow on a red-eye. And I want another night with her before I have to leave for a week, because I know I will miss her every day that I’m away.”
Silence. And then the soft sob I’d heard this morning when her emotions blasted her. Shit. I made her cry, again?!
“Brooke . . . baby . . . it’s okay.” I waited and tried to remember what she’d told me this morning, about how this—whatever the fuck they were: sudden emotional episodes—never happened to her before the accident.
“I’m fine,” she breathed back at me after what felt like an eon of time. “You just surprised me with another wonderful moment, Caleb. You should maybe slow that down a bit.”
I laughed again, and I felt so fucking relieved to know that if I was making her cry, at least it was the wonderful-moment kind and not the other. “I will try, but it’s probably impossible to limit my wonderful moments with you, Brooke.” Straight-up truth.
“I think I have a solution to your problem, Caleb. Would you like to hear it?”
“Yes, I’d love to hear it.” It sounded like she might take pity on me and stay over again. I mentally crossed my fingers.
“Well, I am going home tonight. I need to be in my normal environment and go about my usual routines. I visit Nan at physical therapy, and there is the wedding coming up, too, which I work on planning at night, and also getting her things packed up to move into Herman’s house in a very short time. She’s being released from the hospital this Thursday, and I’ll be taking the rest of this week off work so I can be home to prepare, and to help her get settled.”
