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Nobody had ever made me feel as wanted and cherished as he did.
“You have nothing to be sorry for. You’re here now, and that’s all that matters to me.”
I hadn’t wanted to question all that I was feeling or everything he’d just shared, but there was a part of me that needed additional reassurance. “I know you’re doing what you can to help me out and keep me safe now, but I guess I have one question. If things had gone according to my plan yesterday and I wound up at Harper Security Ops without being attacked, what do you think would have happened? Would we be standing here now?”
Forrest drove his fingers gently into my hair. He scratched my scalp before allowing his fingers to thread through my strands. I tried not to let the extended silence send me into a tailspin, but it wasn’t easy.
“We might not be standing here if you hadn’t been attacked yesterday, but I think that’s because we’d likely still be in bed with one another,” he revealed.
I tilted my head back to look up at him.
When I smiled at him, he added, “I can’t tell you how good it feels to have you here with me, Daisy. As we approached the end of our trip, I had wrestled with what to do. I desperately wanted to ask you to come back here with me, but I never knew it was an option for you. I didn’t want to make things more difficult for either one of us.”
The irony of it all was too much to take. “I’d been praying for the last few days of the trip that you’d ask me to visit you here. If you had, I think it would have been just what I needed to tell you the truth about me looking for a new place to live. I guess I was waiting for the confirmation from you that you really did want me to be around.”
He closed his eyes and sighed. “I would have given anything to have you here with me these last six weeks. I was miserable.”
Shooting him a looking of understanding, I insisted, “You weren’t the only one.”
Forrest’s fingers left my hair, so he could wrap his arms around me again. We stayed like that on his deck for a while longer, simply enjoying being wrapped up in one another.
We might have lost some time, but as I stood there with my good cheek pressed against Forrest’s chest, I felt relieved we were going to be able to make up for it now, that Forrest wanted it as much as I did.
I felt like I finally belonged somewhere, and not even the horror of what had happened to me yesterday could put a damper on that.
“Is everything okay?”
Expectations.
Over the weeks that I’d been packing up my house in preparation to put it on the market and officially leave Birch Creek, I had a lot of thoughts about how things would go once I arrived here in Steel Ridge.
The fantasy in my head had been wonderful—show up where Forrest works, wait in the parking lot for his workday to end, and have him run toward me to lift me in his arms and kiss me senseless.
Things wouldn’t stop there, though.
He’d take me back to his place, where he’d ravish my body after having been deprived of me for so long. Afterward, we’d eat and talk and work ourselves up to several more rounds.
We wouldn’t be able to get enough of each other.
With the exception of me showing up to Harper Security Ops, nothing about how I imagined things would go was correct.
Forrest had kissed me, but only because I’d asked him to. And he’d been incredibly sweet, attentive, and wonderful.
And while I understood that I’d arrived with my face looking awful and blood covering my shirt, it had been days.
Several long days after six long weeks.
Forrest hadn’t made any attempt to do anything beyond kissing and holding me.
The first two or three nights, I appreciated him being more concerned about my physical well-being. I didn’t think I could have handled anything more than being held by him. But he’d been spending these days with me, and he was a smart man. He knew my body was mostly healed and capable of intimacy with him.
I didn’t think it’d ever be possible to be anywhere that Forrest was and feel upset, but that was precisely how I felt now.
He liked me.
I knew he still liked me, because he’d made that clear through his actions and his words. But I didn’t know how to handle the rejection night after night. Granted, I hadn’t exactly offered myself up naked on a silver platter and been refused by him, but Forrest had regularly initiated while we were at the ski resort. He wasn’t doing that now.
Was he simply trying to be a gentleman, worried I wasn’t ready for intimacy?
