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“I didn’t say you weren’t going crazy,” she says with a teasing note. “But maybe it’s a good kind of crazy. Maybe it’s the kind of crazy that will bring us happiness in the years to come.”
I know what she’s envisioning, the same thing I am.
A family, laughter, the picture-perfect future we’d both started to believe was impossible for me.
Because the truth is I’m usually a cold bastard.
But there’s something different about Macie, something special, and I can’t get her out of my head.
Not that I want to.
“Just call her,” Mom says. “Promise me that, okay? One call.”
I sigh, nodding, knowing she’s not going to quit. “Okay. I’ll call her. But I know she’s going to be pretty damn freaked out if I let her know how I feel.”
“Perhaps you’re right,” Mom says. “Or perhaps she feels the same. You won’t know unless you try.”
“I’ll call her, alright?” I laugh at her insistent tone.
“When?”
“In a few hours. I’ve got some work stuff to take care of.”
I know I won’t be able to focus on my work after I’ve spoken to my woman after I’ve heard her voice whispering to me down the phone.
“Make sure you do,” Mom says. “Because I can hear it in your voice. I can hear… I don’t know. You sound like you did when you were a boy, before your Father, God rest his soul…”
She trails off, a croak creeping into her voice.
“I know, Mom. I’ll call her. I swear.”
Unusual nerves make my stomach tighten.
I never normally feel like this, so vulnerable, so human.
But then I’ve never had Macie as my obsession before.
Chapter Five
Macie
I pace up and down in my bedroom, tapping a pen against my teeth, my laptop open on the desk. I’ve got the curtains closed and the lights off, the only source of light coming from my laptop screen, a glowing white rectangle.
Usually, I’m a sprinting sort of writer, manic finger-hammering out sessions, and then I go back with a meticulous eye and edit.
But this evening I find myself doing everything except for writing.
I abandon my laptop and give my two-bedroom apartment a tidy up. I’m renting this place with the money from Jackie’s will, but I haven’t splurged too much. It’s a simple apartment, with an office and a bedroom kept neat because that’s my habit.
Neat house, neat mind, Aunt Jackie used to say, and it’s a lesson that stuck.
What she usually left out of her pithy statement was the fact she had cleaners to handle all of this for her. I suppose I could pay somebody to tidy my apartment, but it just seems so indulgent when I can do it myself.
Once I’ve finished the dishes, I return to the bedroom, glancing at the word document on my laptop.
The…
That’s the only word I’ve written all night. It’s freaking pathetic.
But every time I sit down I find my thoughts straying to Miller and the way he glared at me as I left his office, as though I’d somehow offended him, and now my overactive mind is preoccupied with going over the meeting with forensic precision to try and work out what I did.
But I can’t think of anything.
Was it how nervous I came across?
Or maybe he could tell how badly I wanted him and it disgusted him.
I’m supposed to be working on the fourth chapter of my fantasy romance novel, about a woman who falls for a giant, born from a race who, sometimes, are born somewhere approximately human-sized. I already have all the chapters mapped out so it’s a simple case of breathing as much into the scene as I possibly can.
But every time I try to write about this woman and this giant, my fingers itch to do other things, to take me to other places that have nothing to do with my fantasy world.
Or maybe that’s wrong.
They have lots to do with fantasies, but not the exact fantasy that I am supposed to be plucking into existence.
I sigh and slam the laptop shut, pulling out my cellphone to see if Lexi has texted. When I see she hasn’t, I think about messaging her. But my best friend is on holiday with her boyfriend in Australia, and I don’t want to impose too much on her. She and Ryan have been doing so well lately, after a few roller coaster ups and downs over the years, and I don’t want to spoil that.
No, I need to deal with this on my own…
Not that there is a this.
It’s all in my freaking head.
Either that or it’s burning around my body in patterns of surging starlight, making every inch of me ultra-sensitive and alive to the tiniest friction against my body, as though I could pull on a T-shirt and cause an orgasm to thunder through me from the contact of the fabric against my nipples alone.
