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Bella laughs, and while I can’t hear the sweet sound of her voice, her head tilts back, the creamy expanse of her neck on display, and my damn cock twitches. It twitches every damn time she walks into my office, the ice queen who has frozen me out since I showed her the bastard in me is alive and well.
I think about how close I came to taking her to my bed, how close I came to fucking her until she saw stars. But she is not for me, I remind myself—yet again.It would break me, but that is a joke,Iwould breakher. She would hate me. She came to my apartment to keep me company and I needed that company. Translation: she’s too damn good of a friend and a person for my hand to burn her the way it abso-fucking-lutely would if I got the chance again to make it happen.
Because I wouldn’t let things end as they did last time if there was a next time between us.
I turn away from the glorious sight of her and rest my hands on the railing overlooking the bright lights of Nashville’s bustling downtown. The February night is unseasonably warm enough to open the balcony doors but there is a chill in the air, the knowledge that my father left this world a man without honor. I vow right here and now that I will never allow myself to become a monster like Jack Hawk.
“Hey.”
At the sound of Bella’s voice, a punch of unruly awareness burns through my veins. There is something about this woman. There hasalwaysbeensomethingabout Bella.She is off limits, I tell myself before I even consider acknowledging her. I did the wrong things, even if I felt like they were right at the time. I rotate to face her, each of us resting an arm on the railing.
“Bella,” I greet.
She searches my face, far too comfortable in her intimate inspection when no one else finds me this approachable. But then, she is Bella. That is the answer I have to all things with this woman. No one else would have come to me after my father died, fed me ice cream, and then forced Patrick Swayze doingDirty Dancingon me. Despite her track record of boldly going where no one else will go with me, she has also kept her distance these past two months. This is why I am shocked when she lifts her hand to touch my hand and briefly touches my arm before she awkwardly pulls back.
She has never touched me outside of that night at my apartment, and even then, the collision of our hands reaching for the remote had been accidental. I’d wanted to fuck her. She would have let me, too. I’d seen it in her eyes, felt it in the air between us, a warm blanket of lust and desire cloaking us in the moment. But she would have regretted it the next day.
But that memory lingers with me, and in her touch just now, it’s ignited. She is standing close enough that I can smell the jasmine sweet perfume she wears tonight as she had that night, and I’m hot and hard, the zipper to my expensive blue suit stretched and ready to break. No doubt a product of the fantasy in my head right now, involving her naked and in my arms while my cock is buried inside her. She’d beg me for more. I’d give it to her, too.
She must read my reaction, the primal need to drag her away and fuck her kind of feeling, because she whispers, “Tyler?”
“Yes, Bella?”
“You okay?” she asks.
I have no idea why she believes I would be anything but fine and then some. It’s in this moment that I think that maybe, just maybe, I should just fuck this woman out of my system and me out of hers. I don’t want a friendship that involves sympathy andan assumption that I am weak when I am not. “I’m just fine. Are you?”
She wets her lips nervously, her delicate little pink tongue stroking over skin when it really should be my tongue all over her body. She gives a short laugh. “I’m fine. Why wouldn’t I be?”
“You tell me,” I urge softly, baiting her when I should be reassuring her.
It’s a game I’m playing with her, one I cannot resist despite good reason. Because it’s a dangerous game. For her, not me.
Chapter Seven
Tyler
The exchange between myself and Bella lingers in the air...
Her:You okay?
Me:I’m just fine. Are you?
There’s a flicker of something in Bella’s eyes that I cannot name with that rebuttal question I’ve handed her one moment and dashed away the next with what appears to be sheer determination. My gut feeling is that whatever she wants to say to me has been set aside. As if proving my assumption, she dismisses the question and in a typical Bella move, does exactly what I did to her. She turns the topic back to me. “This isn’t about me tonight. It’s about you,” she declares. “It’s a big deal to take over the family empire. But I want you to know that everyone here tonight, and everyone I’ve communicated with since your father’s death, seems relieved to have you officially steering the ship’s wheel.”
“Even Dash?” I ask because I believe that is who she is talking about, reassuring me that I’m right with her brother, who was more than a little put off by me only months before. I’d not only pulled him from an underground fight, but I’d also used Bella and the woman he’s now marrying to help me with the process. He’d been embarrassed, but he’d kept his film deal, and his woman.
“Dash knows you were there for him.”
“He didn’t at the time.”
“No,” she confirms, “but that was then, and this is now. He’s reached out to you for a reason. He’s officially over his anger. Just as you’re officially the captain of this ship.”
The reference to my position being “official” punches me in the gut, but I manage not to flinch despite the voice of concern nagging at my mind, telling me my father hated me. He will never make my takeover easy, no matter how inevitable it is. I skip this reality check with Bella. It’s Thursday night. My concerns will no longer be concerns at all come Monday morning. “And I’m not polarizing?” I challenge, interested in how she dodges this bullet, not how I dodge my own.
“I’d label you as demanding and arrogant,” she replies with no hesitation in her answer. “You can also be sharp and intolerant.”
I narrow my eyes on her. “You know no one else talks to me like that, right?”
