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“Honey could you open up? I need to talk to you for a second.”
I heaved a sigh so deep, it seemed to come from the very bottom of my soul.
“It’s late, Chris. And I’m not your honey.”
“Please, Brooke. It’s important.”
Rolling my eyes, I cracked the door. Only an inch, though. Maybe less.
“What?”
He took a step forward. “Let me in.”
“No.”
“Brooke, I’m not having a conversation standing in the hallway,” Chris moaned. “We can talk inside. I lived here for Chrissakes.”
“Lived, yes,” I said coldly. “For once we agree on something.”
He looked at me, and I saw his eyes change. He was always innocuous. Annoying as hell, but generally harmless. But now…
Now I saw something els
e. Something wild and untamed. A desperation, behind his eyes.
“Brooke, I—”
Mid-sentence, the sneaky fuck shouldered the door with everything he had. It slammed backwards, straight into my head.
Hard enough that I saw stars.
Thirty-One
BROOKE
“ASSHOLE!”
I shouted the word in pain and anger, throwing my entire weight back against Chris’s abrupt assault. At the same time, I scrambled for the door chain with my free hand. I should’ve engaged it before I’d opened up for him, but I wasn’t thinking.
“I… just… want… to… TALK!”
I pushed even harder, but the door wasn’t budging. Not an inch, not even a fraction of an inch. Then I looked down and realized why:
My ex had his foot jammed in the doorway.
“CHRIS!” I yelled, in my scariest, most heated voice. It was the voice that had always frightened him. That one that had always gotten him to back off… until now. “Get the FUCK out of my apartme—”
“Something wrong?”
Our eyes had been locked, but suddenly we both turned to look back over his shoulder. There was man standing there now. A man I recognized as someone who’d only recently moved into the apartment across the hall.
“No,” Chris said quickly. “Nothing’s wrong. We were just in the middle of—”
“Get your foot out of her fucking doorway,” the man said calmly.
I took stock of the burly stranger. He wasn’t tall, but he was wide. Older, but not ancient — maybe in his early fifties. He was still well-built, top to bottom, wearing a loose-fitting pair of shorts and a tight, sleeveless T-shirt.
He also had tattoos up and down both arms. One of them, fuzzy with age, I recognized as the Marine Corps logo.
