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“He sent me a text.” I shake my head. “All it said was that he was sorry and he’d be in touch. I didn’t respond.”
“Good girl.” She turns back to her food. “Don’t chase any man, Piper. Let him fight for you. I learned that lesson the hardest way possible.”
I don’t expand on the conversation. I won’t. It’s digging up painful skeletons of her past.
Jo’s a reminder of what can happen when you invest your heart in someone too fully. I started falling too hard and too fast for Griffin Kent. I have to forget about him since it’s obvious that I’m way more invested in this than he is.
Chapter 39
Griffin
“I’m a dick.” I scrub my hand over my jaw, trying to relieve the tension I’ve been feeling for days.
Piper’s shoulders stiffen before she turns on her heel to face me.
Her eyes lock on mine. “I’m in full agreement with that. Why are you here?”
She’s pissed. How the hell can I blame her for that? We fucked and then I fled. It wasn’t intentional. My family’s world fractured, again, and I went to pick up the pieces.
“I’m sorry,” I offer. It’s so fucking weak. It can’t undo what she must be feeling.
I’ve ghosted on women. Hell, it’s been years since I’ve done it but I remember the guilt that came with it. I saw the impact of my actions in the face of a woman I fucked. She wanted more, but I gave her nothing but silence. I ran into her one night at a club a month after we’d spent a weekend together.
She gave me a piece of her mind along with a stinging slap across the face. It woke me up.
I’ve tried my best to respect women since then but that went to hell when I took off last week.
“You should go.” Her hand shakes as she points at the door of the gallery.
She didn’t notice me when I first walked in because she was too engrossed in a conversation with a woman about one of her sketches. When the woman nodded, I saw Piper’s face light up.
That expression didn’t waver as she rang up the purchase. It shifted the second her gaze caught mine.
I want to be the person who brings that joy to her life. I want to make her feel that valuable with every breath, but I stole her trust. I see it in her body language. I hear it in her voice.
“Let me explain.” I close my eyes. “I should have called to tell you I couldn’t make our coffee date. It was wrong of me to leave you sitting there.”
She bows her head. “There’s nothing to explain, Griffin. We had fun. It’s over now. End of story.”
This is not the end of our story.
“I skipped class last Wednesday because of work,” I start with a heavy exhale. “I was stuck in a meeting with a client that ran for hours. It didn’t wrap up until midnight.”
She shakes her head slightly. “Sure.”
“The next day you sent me that message about drawing you nude.” I close my eyes, picturing her body in my mind. “Jesus, Piper. That set me off. I had to jack off in the bathroom at the courthouse. The clerk came looking for me since we were already back in session.”
Her blank expression doesn’t waver. She doesn’t want these crumbs. She wants to know why I dropped off the face of the fucking earth for four days.
I suck in a deep breath. “My family needed me, my brother...”
“You have a brother?”
That question is always a punch in the gut. It’s easy to answer yet I can never form the right words, so I respond the only way I know how. “Draven. I spent the weekend with him.”
Her expression softens. I can see a million questions in her eyes, but she asks the obvious one. “Is he alright?”
D
