Page 27 of In a Perfect World

Chapter 14

Kairo~

While I hadn’t expected Triana to be at the tree this evening, that hadn’t stopped me from showing up anyway.She was beginning to feel like a drug that I was slowly becoming hooked on, and I was the first to admit that it sounded too crazy to be real.Yet, I found myself spending my days thinking about her and kicking myself in the ass for not getting her number or hitting her up on social media.Yeah, I was very aware that my attraction to her couldn’t go anywhere, but I still wasn’t ready to give her up just yet.

At any rate, when I reached the oak tree that stood across the creek from Triana’s cherry blossom tree, I saw her sitting underneath the branches, her arms wrapped around her knees, her dark hair draped like a curtain all around her, and need gripped my heart like never before.

“Baby, is everything okay?”

Triana’s head snapped up, and her eyes were a bit red around the rims, and though she didn’t look a mess, it was obvious that she’d been crying at some point, and that bothered me way more than it should when you considered that I barely knew the woman.

“What...what are you doing here?”

“Tell me what’s wrong,” I said, ignoring her question.

She let out a shaky breath, and it took everything in me not to swim across the damn creek to wrap her up in my arms.She looked like she had the entire world resting on her shoulders, and it made her look fragile and tired, and I hated it.

“I packed up my office today after work because my parents fired me,” she finally answered, flooring me.

“Why on earth did they do that?”

She let out a hollow laugh.“Because I refuse to marry the man of their choosing.”

What in the fresh hell?

I almost choked on my shock.“What?”

Triana let out a tired sigh as she stood up, saying, “We have these family friends, the Fuentezes, and somewhere along the way, my father promised one of their sons my hand in marriage like...like we’re in some goddamn period piece, and when I refused to follow through on his promise, he accused me of dishonoring the family name, and so they disowned me earlier today.”

I shook my head in disbelief.“You have got to be kidding me.”

“I...I just don’t know what to do,” she said brokenly.“Like you said, family is the most important thing, and I’ve just lost mine because I don’t want to marry a man that I don’t love.”

While inappropriate, jealousy crawled up my spine, and even though I had no rights to this woman, I didn’t like to think of her marrying someone else.I mean, logically, I knew that I could never have her, and I knew that what we were doing was ill-advised and dangerous, but I still couldn’t help how I felt.

“I’ve never felt so torn,” she went on.“I never imagined that my parents would do this to me, and I certainly never imagined that they’d ever disown me for something so...so archaic and wrong.”