Grace turned her head to face me but didn’t say anything.
Reaching over, I pulled my keys from the ignition, and pushed open the passenger side door, climbing out while also forcing myself to ignore the pain the movement caused in my hand and the rest of my body. My fourth and fifth fingers were in a cast that extended all the way down past my wrist, holding the broken fragments of my bone in place to heal.
I don’t believe you’ll need surgery …
The words of the orthopedic surgeon that’d been called down to the emergency department, to give me his analysis on my injury, rang out in my head, as I headed in the direction of the elevator. My long strides got me to the elevator in less than a minute, but I could hear Grace’s frantic footsteps behind me. She was jogging to keep up with me.
I wanted to tell her to go away. All I kept seeing was the image of her flinching away from me in my car.
But just as I slipped inside of the elevator, to carry me up to my condo where I could shut out the rest of the world, she jumped in right behind me.
“What are you doing?” I questioned at the same time I pounded the button for the tenth floor with my new cast.
“Jacob, you’re going to make your injury worse doing that.”
“Stop babying me.” My voice was low, but it bubbled over with rage. I wasn’t angry at Grace but she was there, and she always had a way of bringing up emotions that I either never knew existed in me or I tried to suppress.
“I’m not babying you. I’m just concerned.”
“I don’t need your concern.”
The elevator dinged and I didn’t wait for her to catch up as I exited and headed down the hall to my condo. But again, Grace was right on my heels and her insistence on following me kept the war inside of me going. Part of me wanted to pull her to me and never let her go, while the other kept replaying her flinching away from me, and wanted to push her away.
“What’re you doing here, Grace?” I questioned, spinning on her as she shut and locked my door behind her.
“What do you mean, what am I doing here?” Folding her arms across her chest, she huffed, a wrinkle forming between her eyebrows. She was growing pissed, impatient with my attitude.
Good. Maybe that meant she’d leave on her own so I wouldn’t have to push her away.
“I know what you’re doing,” she said, moving closer.
“And what would that be?” I cocked my head to the side. I would’ve folded my own arms across my chest but the throbbing in my hand and wrist stopped me from doing that.
“You’re trying to push me away. Goading me so you think I’ll leave. You might be nothing more than an ass to people who don’t know you and who you can intimidate, but I’m not them.” The final four words of her declarations were punctuated with a poke to my chest from her forefinger.
Truthfully, it would’ve been funny and sexy as hell, her anger, if I wasn’t pissed off in my own right.
My nostrils flared and I remembered back to that fear in her eyes at the hospital. I shook my head. No. She needed to go. She didn’t need to be around me. She didn’t deserve to be around all of the fucked up shit going on in my head that was only bound to spill out one way or another.
“You need to leave.”
“I’m not going anywhere?”
“Why?” I yelled and growled, slamming my left fist into my countertop.
Grace jumped, and that was the moment I thought would do it, but I should’ve known better. Grace was a hell of a lot braver than I was. She didn’t run.
“I’m not leaving, Jacob.”
“I want to be alone.”
“Too damn bad.”
Stubborn woman.It’d piss me off even more if it didn’t actually turn me the hell on. It was incredibly ridiculous that as fucked up in the head as I felt in that moment, that the set look on Grace’s face and the fact that she hadn’t run screaming from my craziness, made my cock come alive.
But I continued to push. “You already admitted to being afraid of me.” I took a step closer, and then another, forcing her to retreat backwards.
“I never said I was afraid of you.”
