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I stare at the most gorgeous woman I’ve ever seen. I’ve met Jules a couple of times. I didn’t give her a second thought because I was married then. But yes, in an intellectual way, I registered that she’s pretty, that she’s witty, and that her glittering brown eyes held a hint of…somethingin them.
Something I couldn’t name then, but I can now.Curiosity.
“Nonstop. You’ve been in my head for two weeks. Fifteen minutes in the library, and now you’re lodged here,” I bite out, tapping my temple.
Her lips twitch in a hint of a grin. “Well, you spent two songs with me on the piano too. Don’t forget that.”
I groan, annoyed and turned on all at once.
This is what I’m talking about. She’s a delicious flirt as well as the most responsive woman I’ve touched. It’s impossible not to want her. “That’s the problem. I want more,” I say, but inside, I’m torn apart by loyalty and lust. They’re both terribly powerful.
She lifts her chin. Strong. Defiant. “I wanted that too,” she says, fearless but seeming resigned to our new reality.
Still, her boldness is kerosene to my desire. I should not be so close to her. I should not stand this near to her.
I spin around and pace across the ornate carpet in the library, dragging my hands through my hair like I can rewind this awful twist of fate. “You’re the first woman I’ve touched since my divorce. And you’re—” I stop, choking on the words.
When I turn back, Jules is looking down at the floor like she’s done something wrong. That won’t do. I stalk back over to her, aching to hold her, fighting to resist her. “It’s not you. I just can’t believe this,” I say softly, metering my frustration. I can’t let her think she’s the reason I’m mad.
She raises her face again. Her eyes are tinged with regret and disappointment. Everything I couldn’t see earlier when she played, I see plainly now.
She was never avoiding me.
Carefully, I ask, “Tonight. When you wouldn’t look at me…were you protecting me?”
A sad nod. “I didn’t want you to know. I thought it would be safer if you never knew who I was.”
“Safer forme?”
“Yes. I didn’t want you to carry that with you.”
“Carry what?”
“Guilt. I didn’t want to ruin your friendship with my…”
Yeah, I can’t sayyour fathereither. I should. But with her this close, with her so alluring, I can’t let myself think of my best friend.
The man who raised her.
“You hardly know me and you wanted to protect me. And him,” I say, kind of amazed.
“I know what it’s like to lose a friendship,” she says, her voice strong but forged from pain—that’s clear.
This woman.What she must have been through. I met Tate after he endured the hell of his youngest daughter’s death, something this resilient woman faced too—she lost a sister.
And here she is, trying to save me from hurt, from guilt, from loss.
I should walk away. I should take the gift she’s giving me.
Really, I should.
But I don’t. I close the distance, drawn to her.
She’s next to the ladder against the shelves, that shiny dress showing off her bare calves and her lovely throat and teasing me with the skin I want to kiss.
I should not want my best friend’s twenty-five-year-old daughter. “I should go,” I mutter, without making a move to do so.
“You should,” she says, not pushing me to go either.
