“Delivery for Miss Granger,” the voice said.
“I didn’t order anything.” I moved closer to the door.
“It’s from Ryan Stark.”
At that I turned the handle and looked out.
“Pizza delivery for Doris Granger. Pepperoni,” a young man said and pushed a pizza box towards me.
The smell wafted over to me and my mouth watered. I reached for the box, but then stopped.
“I don’t have money, I can’t . . .”
“It’s been paid for,” the pimply-faced delivery guy said and walked off.
Wow!If I thought Ryan Stark couldn’t confuse me anymore, this pizza had just thrown me over the edge.
CHAPTERTHIRTY-SEVEN
Ryan
Unraveled . . .
That was really the best word to describe this whole thing with her. He felt unraveled. She was unraveling him. Whenever he was near her, he felt all these strings and loose ends that he’d carefully tucked away inside himself being pulled at. Tugged on. By her! She was loosening him up, and a part of him wanted to let it all go, but another part of him, the logical part, was telling him to keep it together. These contradictory thoughts and feelings were making him feel dizzy.
At first he’d been genuinely confused by his attraction to her; she had bad hair, terrible glasses, bad clothes and a kind of ditsy, clumsy, ridiculous way of being in the world that infuriated him, but inevitably always brought a smile to his face. No matter how hard he tried to conceal it. At first he’d thought he was alone in this strange attraction to her, but then they’d had the meeting in the boardroom and he could see that he wasn’t the only man in the room to find her strange ways completely beguiling.
He was approaching home and suddenly realized that thoughts of her had consumed his entire drive. He pulled into his driveway and stopped when he got to the top of it. New thoughts consumed him now. Emmy. He had no idea what kind of a mood she would be in, or whether she would even come out of her room for dinner. He climbed out of the car, walked over to his front door and slipped his key into the lock. Sudden images of Doris’s door and her totally inadequate locking system plagued him.Fuck it! Why couldn’t he stop thinking about her?He walked in and looked around. Emmy was nowhere to be seen, so he dropped his bag on the floor and walked into the kitchen. His housekeeper, Tamlin, was still there.
“Hi,” he greeted her.
She looked at him and shook her head. Tamlin had worked for him for well over ten years now. She was amazing with Emmy and, outside of work, she was the only other person he spoke to on a regular basis.
“What?” he asked. But he already knew the answer.
“Emmy,” she said softly. “I heard her crying in her room and she wouldn’t come downstairs for dinner, even though I cooked her favorite.”
He nodded at her. “Thanks. I’ll see what I can do.”
“It’s at this age that a girl needs her mother the most,” Tamlin said as she exited the kitchen.
“I know,” he replied. But there was nothing he could do about that. He couldn’t wave a magic wand and make everything better. If he could, he would. In fact, if he could have swapped places with Rachel, he would have. It was so unfair that she had been the one who’d gotten sick, especially since she hadn’t exactly had the easiest life. Her downfall, in his opinion, had been her propensity to always lead with her heart. She had been all heart and never any head. That’s what had caused her to think she was in love with that idiot from the video shop. To run off on that romantic, whirlwind trip and come back pregnant and all alone when she realized that Lance wasn’t in it for the long haul. In fact, having a child at the age of twenty-two wasn’t part of his plan and never would be. Their parents had been very disappointed with her, obviously. Having a daughter with a child out of wedlock wasn’t part of their plan either. But Rachel had adapted and made Emmy her total focus. Emmy was her world, but life as a single mom hadn’t always been easy. He’d helped out as much as he could, financially and emotionally, but it hadn’t been a bed of roses, that’s for sure. He sighed. He felt so lost in the world without his twin. As if a fundamental part of him had been severed.
He walked up the stairs to Emmy’s room and this time he knocked on the door. But when she didn’t answer, he pushed it open and peered inside. She was fast asleep. She looked like a perfect cherub lying like that, her dark hair tumbling over the pillow, with her long black lashes, her pink cheeks. He walked in slowly, careful not to wake her. As he got closer, he could see that she was holding a photo of her mother in her hands. Slowly, carefully he bent over and gave her a tiny kiss on her forehead. Her hair smelt sweet, like jasmine. He turned and walked back towards her door and then an open magazine on her desk caught his attention. He walked over to it; it was the teen magazine that she’d bought the other day. He took another step closer to the magazine and read the page . . .
“What the hell!?” He said it so loudly that Emmy shot out of bed.
“What . . . What . . .” she stuttered sleepily. “What are you doing here?”
He grabbed the magazine and held it up, reading the headline out loud. “ ‘The Science of Kissing; how to up your make-out game’.”
“Oh my God, Ryan, what are you doing in my room?”
“I came to say good night and then I found . . .this!” He waved the magazine around.
“This is such an invasion of privacy!” She jumped out of the bed and tried to snatch the magazine away from him. He held it in the air above her head.
“Is this the kind of stuff you’re doing now? Did you really want a bra, or did you bunk off school to ‘up your make-out game’?” He gestured air quotes.
