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“Hey, Patrick. What’re you still doing here?” she said, voice pleasant, nice.
He detested it.
Snap at me. Argue with me. Show me you feel something...for me.
“I could ask you the same thing. You’ve been pulling longer nights lately,” he said instead.
She leaned back in her chair, setting the pen clutched in her hand on the desktop.
“With City Hall hiring us to promote Yulefest, there’s more to do than usual. But nothing I can’t handle.” She tilted her head. “Everything okay?”
He considered leaving her to it and walking away, saying nothing. But he couldn’t. He wouldn’t.
“Cole just called,” he informed her. “He has the annulment papers ready for us to sign. Once we do, he can file them with the court. And we’ll be done. The marriage will be over.”
His gut tightened to the point of pain just uttering the words.
She slowly nodded and exhaled a low, long breath.
“Okay. For some reason I thought it would take longer,” she murmured, as if talking to herself. Shaking her head, she met his gaze. “That’s good. When are you going over to sign them?”
He shrugged, a flare of anger igniting inside him at her seeming eagerness to end them.
There’s no us. There never has been, he thought, and mentally scrabbled away from the resentment in his own head.
It wasn’t her fault she couldn’t reallyseehim.
It wasn’t her fault she didn’t love him.
“Probably tomorrow during lunch,” he said with a shrug of a shoulder. “Did you want to head over together?”
“No, that’s okay.” She picked up her pen again, fiddling with it, and he focused on the tell before lifting his gaze to hers again. She avoided his eyes by shifting her attention to her computer monitor. “I plan on working through lunch, so I’ll call Cole and arrange a time for me to go.”
“Why are you avoiding me?” he bluntly asked. “And don’t lie to me and say you’re not.”
“How can I avoid you when we work together?” she tossed back.
He chuckled. “This is how you want to play it? Okay, I’m in.” Approaching her desk, he quietly laughed again, and to his own ears, it sounded hard, sharp-edged. “For the last week, you haven’t talked to me unless it’s work related, and you make damn sure you’re not alone with me. When I call, you don’t answer and reply by texts. You’ve been working late nearly every night and, though Yulefest is one of your favorite festivals, you haven’t been to one activity since the lighting.” A frown marred her forehead and her lips parted, but he shook his head. Hard. “Don’t bother with an excuse. It would only be bullshit, and we both know it.”
“I don’t know what you want me to say,” she said, rising from her office chair.
Pride and a bolt of lust lit him up like a lightning strike. This was the woman he’d come to know and secretly love with a need and passion that, at times, scared him. She didn’t back down from anything or anyone, and that stubbornness, that strength, that fierceness, was hot as hell. It stirred a lust in him that had only grown over time, and damn if he didn’t think it would drive him out of his mind.
“The truth. Be honest,” he snapped, purposefully goading her. Wanting her to unleash her fury on him. Mark him with it. “Tell me why you suddenly find it too hard to talk to me, to be with me.”
Be with me.
The words seemed to echo in the taut silence that fell between them. He should’ve tried to mitigate them, explain that he meantbe with himas her friend.
But there was enough lying, enough hiding, between them. And in this moment in her office as they stared at one another across her desk like gunslingers intent on taking one another down, he stood on the edge of a precipice. Yes, it sounded dramatic, but he couldn’t shake it. This moment would determine how they moved forward with one another.
It would change their lives.
“I don’t,” she said, that dark brown gaze shifting away, and both frustration and anticipation surged inside him, shoving against his chest. “You’re either imagining this or making too much out of it. I’m fine. We’re fine.”
“No, sweetheart. We’re not. And if you don’t want to be honest with me, I’ll do it.” He paused, studying her until she looked at him again. Did she even know how those formerly shuttered eyes now revealed her uncertainty? She’d deny it if she did. Would hate it even more. “Ever since the tree lighting you’ve been distant. Ever since you left me alone with Kayla—”
“I didn’t leave you alone with her,” she hotly contested, her eyes narrowing. “You voluntarily left with her, and I don’t recall you putting up a fight to stay with me.”
