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She didn’t want half ways. She wanted everything and that was her ultimatum.
I wanted to say a determined no.
The old Brax would definitely have done it the second she had finished her sentence. I couldn’t give her what she was asking without giving up everything I believed in when it came to my private life.
But I couldn’t let go either.
I needed a compromise, and since I knew she wasn’t going to give me one, I asked for time. ‘I need two days.’
Two days to decide the course of our destinies.
I didn’t wait for her to answer, just crashed my lips on her cheek in exactly the way that she wanted. A gesture showing that it wasn’t all about sex. ‘Let’s get you dressed. I’ll take you home.’
Helping her put the dress back, I offered to drive her to Ferris’s mansion.
I couldn’t help myself from feeling completely numb. It wasn’t a matter of making the right decision. It was about making the less wrong one.
Was I to trust her and open up?
I never thought I would be needing to choose that path, and still the thought of being without her seemed impossible to bear.
My car pulled to a stop in front of Ferris’s mansion. I couldn’t force myself to say even a word, mostly because I couldn’t say goodbye not knowing what it really meant.
I just watched her lose herself climbing the steps to disappear between the massive wooden doors.
The image hurt... her fading away from my life. But never from my memories.
Still, it was within my power to stop it and set our lives on a brand-new course.
Chapter 39
Idrove straight back home trying to clinically assess the situation. Like I could detach my brain from the heart. I was beginning to think I lost count of the nights in which I was lining up the pros and cons of what any kind of relationship would mean to a man like me, and the negative effects always outweighed any positive feeling.
It wasn’t just because of some deeply enrooted phobia I was having about being abandoned. It had more to do with failure. I would eventually screw things up, maybe even to the level that I would get her to leave the city, as had happened with my parents. That was bringing the responsibility of breaking also Ferris and Cole, not just me.
That only put more weight on my shoulders along with the other burdens that were piling up on their own... as the one that she would never be safe with a man like me. I had a habit of making more enemies than I could count. And it’s always the close ones that they go after first.
The fucking list of cons could go on for ever and I always shook my head as a determined no in front of the negative impact it could have on my life. But then I would close my eyes and the memory of her sensually moving on top of me would flood my senses, and everything would change. All cons would become blurred compared to the memory of her trembling lips as she was afraid that she could hurt me. Bea could never physically bring me any harm, no matter how brutal she would have been to me, but when it came to the emotional damage, she could fucking ruin me.
That was the exact reason I was fighting so strongly to keep her away from reaching my heart. Yet she had sneaked in anyway, like a snake poisoning its every cell to beat only in her favor.
I walked towards my bedroom mirror. I seemed to have been doing it often lately, not to fix some loose strands of hair, but trying to convince myself that I was still in there.
Some parts of me were, while the others seemed to have melted into a softer version. A version I didn’t like yet at the same time, one I couldn’t ignore. I could so easily continue to be unapologetically fucked-up, but every time I looked at the empty bed a molten pain pressed down into the pit of my stomach.
Sure, I could have it filled with just a snap of the fingers with any female presence of my liking. But none of them would be her...
I was weighing my options... like I really had something to weigh when it came to my heart. I was just pretending I still have a choice while I was, without even knowing, only one phone call away from making up my mind.
Ferris’s name lit on my screen just as I was in a meeting with my accountant. And if the little bald man sitting in front of me was usually the carrier of bad news, this time around Ferris was certainly beating him to it.
He was calling me about two menacing texts Bea received, setting a dangerous type of hurricane within me as the thought of her being in any kind of danger was ravaging my senses.
In less than half an hour I was pushing the doors to Ferris’s living room wide open, roaring as loud as my lungs could sustain, demanding the phone.
I could strangle the three of them with my bare hands for not telling me about this earlier, but I had much more important matters to attend to. I needed to know who had the balls to send the texts, especially since he must’ve known that Bea was under my protection. It was a fucking declaration of war from what I could tell, and if they wanted war, then I was going to give them pure hell.
Ferris tried calming me down, although it had no use as the list of possible subjects was racing through my mind. It could have been anyone. Someone who found out about our plan, someone close to the governor, her own father, a client from the Pleasure Room, or just a prank from the Academy.
