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“You hadlunchwith Erica?”
“Not intentionally.”
“What did you even talk about?”
“Just the usual. How she and Frank still hate my guts, and I should stay away from you.”
“Oh God...” Alexis sighs. “I’m so sorry.”
“It’s fine,” I tell her.
“No, it’s not. My sister’s insufferable and my dad is the most stubborn ass on the planet.” She nudges my arm with her elbow, and my whole body tenses with the need to pull her closer. “Walk with me. I have something I want to say to you in private.”
Against my better judgment, I turn and meet her gaze.
“There’s nothing private about this place,” I say. The longing in her sad smile mirrors the twinge in my chest. “I should stick around in case someone needs me.”
“I need you,” she whispers.
Those three little words reach inside me, pulling on strings tied to my heart and tangled around my aching dick.
Alexis strides northward, away from the ruins and into the trees. I slump against the fence. I know I’m doing the right thing by staying put. But what fucking good is doing the right thing when people are determined to assume the worst about you no matter what?
Perhaps it’s high time I stopped torturing myself—and her.
I abandon my post and begin tracing her path through the trees. As I walk, a sense of inevitability washes over me like the calm before a storm. I spot her silhouette after only a handful of strides. Rather than come up beside her, I remain a few steps behind, watching her ass sway in her athletic pants as she marches on.
Alexis meets my stare over her shoulder and slows, forcing me to catch up. We walk in companionable silence for almost a quarter mile, heading northeast toward the old barracks.
“What did you want to say to me?” I ask.
After a quick glance behind us, she says, “I thought about what you said last week, about your divorce. I just wanted you to know that I get it.”
“Get what?”
“I understand why you don’t want to sneak around with me. Because that’s what your ex did to you.”
Sometimes I think Alexis might be too clever for her own good. “That’s a fair assessment, if not entirely accurate. My reasons for pushing you away have had more to do with your family than my marriage.”
We come upon the old barracks, the red-bricked shell of what was once a large brick building with multiple archways lining the first floor. I kneel beside the fence and motion for Alexis to step onto my leg and pull herself over.
She waits on the other side for me to join her.
“It’s not my family’s place to tell me who I’m allowed to have feelings for,” she says.
I brush the rust from my palms. “That may be true. But if they found out we were dating, they’d never let you hear the end of it.”
“We wouldn’t have to tell them. Not right away.”
“I’m not asking you to lie to your parents.”
“You can call it lying, or you can call it what it really is.”
“And what’s that?”
“Discretion,” she says.
We make our way inside the barracks’ interior. Having lost its roof ages ago, the inner sanctum is more like an atrium, filled with trees and foliage. Sunlight dapples through the canopy into a space littered with ferns that resembles a small courtyard, but was probably a hallway back in the day.
