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“You declined my offer to come in on the first date. I desperately wanted you. Even then. You made me wait for weeks.”
“I did,” he acknowledged. “That anticipation made it all the better, I think. I had feelings for you. I wanted to be careful.”
“And now that things have progressed?” she asked, shivering when he grazed her throat with his teeth.
“I want to love you and do absolutely filthy things to you in equal measure.”
Lilly let out a low moan and asked him, “What kind of filthy things?”
He pulled away, straightened to his full height, and said, “Well, you’ll just have to come upstairs and find out, now won’t you?”
Lilly tilted her head back and groaned in frustration. “You’re evil.”
“So I’ll see you later then?”
“I’ll be up after my shift is over. I don’t know how I can possibly say no to whatever filthy things you have planned.”
He gave her a grin and then said, “See you soon.”
She grinned sheepishly and nodded. What this man did to her.
After he left, she had another forty-five minutes to kill, so she worked on her paper on management and ethical business practices. She smirked as she considered the ethical quandary her own position presented. Being in love with your boss would surely be frowned upon.
She managed to get in almost four pages before her shift ended. After she had turned in her till, she clocked out and then headed upstairs. Talan had told her to keep the key. She felt weird just going inside when he was there. Should she knock?
Ultimately, she decided to use her key. He had given it to her and told her to come upstairs. Why shouldn’t she?
When she entered, he said, “Ah, there she is.”
“Yep,” she agreed. “I couldn’t turn down promises of filthy behavior.”
He was seated on the couch with a laptop in hand. A solemn look on his face, he asked, “St. Joseph?”
She froze. The look on her face must have given her away because he cu
rsed, set the laptop down, and then pulled her into his arms.
Her eyes filling, she said, “That’s right across the border. Are you sure she was there during that time?”
“No, love. The postal service is though.”
“And there’s nothing we can really do, is there? I mean, I never saw her. I heard her voice once, ten years ago. That’s not enough to go on. They wouldn’t have even caught any of them if they hadn’t gotten them on camera at another house. They just confessed to my family’s murders.”
“I don’t really know,” he admitted.
Numb, she let him lead her to the couch. His arm wrapped around her shoulders as he said, “I’m so sorry, Lilly. I only wanted to put your mind at ease. What were the odds that she was actually...I’m so sorry.”
The tears spilled over onto her cheeks as she rested her head against his chest. Could she have no comfort where her family was concerned, she wondered angrily. The tears continued to flow, partly from sadness, but it was more about anger at this point.
Swiping at her face, she said, “I always had the comfort of knowing that even though they were gone, at least justice had been served. It wasn’t a lot, but it was something. Now they’ve officially taken everything, Talan. I don’t even have that anymore. The one thing that made the whole fucking situation livable was to know that at least those animals were gone. They destroyed my family, but that they wouldn’t destroy anyone else’s.”
Talan said nothing and just continued to stroke her hair as she wept. All of the pent-up anger and sadness poured out. She didn’t know how long they sat there on the couch, but she cried so hard that her nose was plugged and her head pounded.
“I’m so sorry, love,” Talan said softly. “I’m so sorry.” He rocked her until she finally calmed down.
When she was finally able to stop sobbing, she started taking deep breaths. She would not let this destroy her. She had come too damned far to turn back into that terrified little girl standing in her basement. This had been an ugly cry, but she was officially done with it now.
She looked up at Talan, ready to apologize for her emotional outburst, and was shocked to see his own cheeks were wet. Unbelievably moved, she reached up and wiped them. “Don’t cry for me. I’ll be be okay,” she reassured him. “I always am.”
