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Technically, she wasn’t supposed to let him off leash in the complex, and she hated when people had their dogs off leash around others, but her little nook of the complex was private. Usually, she went out with him, though. Tonight, she stayed on the warm side of the door.
He didn’t go far, either, just straight to his favorite tree, a lift of his leg, a few sniffs to make sure nothing was amiss, and straight back inside. He accepted his ‘good-boy’ head scratch and trotted to his bed by the fireplace.
For Mr. Darcy, everything was as it should be.
For Kelsey, everything had been upended and given a hard shake. She walked like a zombie to her sofa and dropped onto it.
It had only been one week. A week or two of dancing around the idea before that, but even so. Their entire relationship had occurred within the month of December. Why did this hurt so much? How had she fallen in love so quickly?
There’d been moments in the past week where she’d felt like she was hurtling toward that destination. Moments of perfect connection with him, when they’d seemed made for each other. Soulmate moments.
But there had been other moments, too. Moments of him pushing her away, moments when she hadn’t understood him, or he hadn’t understood her. Moments when they hadn’t seemed to fit together. Moments when he’d frightened her.
Maybe it was her. Maybe she was drawn to controlling men. She didn’t like to be controlled, but was there something in a man like Dex, or Greg, that should be a red flag, but she wasn’t perceptive enough to see it until she was hurt by it?
Dex and Greg were nothing at all alike, and she felt guilty even to make the comparison. Greg had been sweet and gentlemanly, seemingly the perfect boyfriend, right up to the moment she’d first disagreed with him. Then his entire personality had changed.
It wasn’t like Greg had completely stopped acting like a nice guy when things began to go wrong. Instead, he’d flown between two extremes—an increasingly desperate ‘nice guy,’ lavishing love and gifts and praise and favors on her, apologizing with frenetic sincerity, and then, when she hadn’t thrown herself immediately into his arms, rage would take him over and he shout at her and throw things. And hit her. And worse. A dizzying, damaging cycle.
Pushing her away and dragging her close.Thatwas where the comparison lay.
But Dex had never tried to be someone he wasn’t. He’d waved a red flag from the start. She’d simply ignored it. She’d even thought he wasmorehonorable,moreworth the work, because he was so forthright about being dangerous.
But here she was, sitting alone in her apartment on New Year’s Eve, crying.
She really needed Maisie. But her best friend was still hunkered down with her parents, trying to survive the holidays after losing her grandparents so suddenly and horribly in the midst of them. She hadn’t seen Maisie since the funeral, two weeks earlier. It was the longest stretch they’d been apart since their college days.
God. She really was alone. On New Year’s Eve.
Okay. Well, in the fridge she had the bottle of champagne a client had given her, and she had nowhere to be tomorrow.
She pushed herself up off the sofa and went over to turn on the gas fire, for which she got a contented sigh from her canine roomie. Then she went to the bathroom to wash her face and get her hair out of her way (she needed to touch up her roots, she noticed), went to her bedroom to put on her comfiest pajamas (a blue fleece onesie with snowflakes and snowmen that had been last year’s Christmas Day pajamas), and headed to the kitchen.
There, she pulled out the chilled champagne, and—why not?—grabbed the half-full tub of milk chocolate frosting left over from the cupcakes she’d made for the work Christmas party. She popped the cork on the champagne with an anticlimactic ease that seemed fitting, got a spoon from the silverware drawer, and carried her New Year’s dinner back to the sofa, where she buried herself under her Christmas throw, turned on the television hanging on the wall above the fireplace, foundLove Actuallystreaming, and settled in to drink cheap champagne straight from the bottle, shove week-old chocolate frosting in her maw, and cry with Emma Thompson.
~oOo~
She was almost halfway through the champagne and had just scraped the last of the frosting from the bottom of the tub when a heavy fist pounded three times on her door. Mr. Darcy lifted a sleepy head and looked at her, but he didn’t bother to get up. A guard dog, he was not.
She paused the movie while Juliet was watching the wedding video, untangled herself from the throw, and stood. Until that moment, she hadn’t thought she was drunk.
Okay, she wasn’tdrunkdrunk, certainly not by Brazen Bulls’ standards. But the room definitely did a jig for a second. She was pretty drunk by her own personal standards. Her mind was still clear, though. She was pretty sure.
Yet it wasn’t until she was nearly at the door that it occurred to her to wonder who could be pounding on it at this hour, on this night. The complex was gated, and she didn’t know any of her neighbors well enough for them to pop by for a visit at any time of the day or night. She hadn’t been loud, so there wasn’t anything to complain about.
Peering into the peephole, she saw Dex.
Maybe if she hadn’t had half a bottle of champagne while watching a weepy Christmas movie alone on New Year’s Eve, Kelsey would have made a different choice upon finding on her doorstep the jealous jerk who’d beaten her friend bloody for the sin of showing her some platonic kindness. But she had drunk the champagne and watched the movie, so she ripped open the door and said, “What?”
He blinked, his eyes widened, and his head rocked back a bit. Kelsey tried to rewind the tape and listen to herself—oh. She’d kind of barked that word.
As was only right and proper.
“I’m sorry,” he said at once. “I’m a jackass.”
“I agree.” Actually, it felt a lot better to be angry than to be sad. “How did you get through the gate?”
“You gave me the code, remember? When I brought you home on Christmas?”
