“Why are you here?” Though my anxiety skyrocketed thinking about what words he’d selected for me, I needed to know what he was after. He had to be here to yell and scream, berate and insult. Twice I’d loved him and twice I’d left him. Certainly forgiveness wasn’t on his itinerary.
“You know, when I left home, I didn’t really havea plan,” he admitted. Some of the tension that walked into the room with him had dissipated and with each word he spoke, he seemed to turn more into the Quinn I knew.
But then again, what the hell did that even mean? The Quinn I knew was nothing more than a kid, a fearless teenager who was ready to conquer the world. I had no idea how life had treated him, who he was, what his desires and hopeswere.
I wasn’t worthy of those things.
But damn it to all hell, I wanted to be worthy of them.
“Do you have one now?” I took a chance and hoped for the best.
He shrugged. “It depends.” I felt like I was transported back to high school all over again. The coy and playful smile accompanying his not-really-an-answer made him look years younger.
“On?”
Without skipping a beat, he said, “You.It’s always depended on you.” His words cut through me, stabbed me in my heart, held it in front of my face, still beating, before squeezing all the life out of it. “Do you know how much I hate you?”
“Couldn’t possibly be as much as I hate myself.”
He laughed. “Not so sure about that.” Shifting in his chair, he switched the way he crossed his legs as he tucked his hair back behind his ear. “ButI’m tired of hating you. I’m tired of being angry. I’m tired of missing you.” His admission was salt mixed with lemon seeping into the wound of my soul.
Unable to watch him hurt like this, I did what I knew how to do best. I pushed him away with the harshest words I could come up with. “You don’t even know me, Quinn. And I don’t even know you. All we know is who we were. A couple of horny kidsfooling around a time or two. Then life got in the way. We’re nothing more than a one-night stand. You shouldn’t have wasted your time coming here just to find that out.”
Tears burned in my eyes because everything I’d just said had been a stream of lies. I buried my head in the file I’d just found, and said, “You should go.” I expected to see him walk away, leave me behind so he could go on withhis life, but he didn’t move a muscle.
“That’s not what we were. You and I both know that.” He stood from his chair, leaned over the desk, his broad shoulders and powerful arms imprisoning me. In order to gain back some leverage, I stood from my seat.
That was a huge fucking mistake. Because looking deep into his eyes, I saw his pain so clearly because it was a reflection of my own. “Quinn,”I began. “I don’t know what you want. And if I did, I know I can’t give it to you.”
In three or four steps, he was around my desk and in my face. “That’s where you’re wrong. Everything I need, you have it. You always have. You’ve just never given yourself a chance to let it happen.”
“You don’t know what the hell you’re talking about. You have no clue who I really am.” There was no more thanan inch between us and it took all my strength not to reach out and tangle my fingers in his long, silky hair.
“You’re right,” he agreed. “I have no clue who you are now, but I want to. I need to know. That’s why I’m here. I have a proposition for you.” The heat billowing between us made me wonder if hispropositionhad anything to do with him dropping to his knees and taking my cock into hismouth.
On a chance that it might have been part of his plan, I clenched my fists, bit my tongue and asked, “What exactly did you have in mind?”
“One week.”
“What?” Confused, I couldn’t keep the irritation out of my voice. Who did he think he was, showing up here, breaking into this life I’d so carefully created so that I could leave the old one behind and just demand things from me?
His eyessearched the ceiling, probably for the strength to deal with me and my ridiculous emotions. But when his lips parted, working as a release valve as he let out a slow and controlled breath, I wanted nothing more than to feel their soft warmth on every inch of my skin.
“You give us one week and at the end of that time, if you want, you can walk away. But that’s it. You walk away from me one moretime and that’s it. I’ll leave, and you’ll never hear from me again.”
It was all too much to process. The thought of having him here with me for an entire week was one of pure elation. But then knowing I’d have to walk away from him at the end of it, knowing that I could never tell him the truth of who I was, that was too painful to bear.
Call me a glutton for punishment, because instead ofpushing him away, telling him that he’d lost his mind and that I wanted nothing to do with him, I simply couldn’t miss the opportunity to have him once again, even if it was once and for all.
So I’d have to twist it around on him, show him why it was all so impossible. “I can’t just walk away for a week. I have a business to run. Unlike some—”
He stepped closer to me, reaching his hand for myjawline. When his fingers brushed against my skin, my heart skipped a beat. “Don’t pull that shit with me. I have a business, too. I dropped everything and got my ass here because that’s how important this is to me.” With his other hand, he touched the other side of my face. His eyes searched mine as he asked, “Am I not important to you?” The mock seriousness in his tone lightened the mood slightly,and I didn’t have it in me to shoot him through the heart with the arrow of my lies.
Swallowing past the pit of emotion suddenly lodged in my throat, I admitted, “You are.” As if it made them matter more, I spoke the same words again, this time covering his hand with mine. There was something about this man that would always cut me to the core, whittle away the bullshit exterior I used to hidefrom the world so that no matter how hard I tried to push him away, or how far I attempted to run, he was always right there to see who I truly was.
“Good.” He smiled, tracing his thumb just below my lower lip. “That’s what I was hoping for.” The air sizzled between us, threatening to explode like thunder on a humid summer night. “Tomorrow is Friday,” he announced, leaving his thumb dancing justout of reach of my lip. “I’ll be at your front door Sunday morning. That gives you…” He quickly calculated that it would be, “…just over forty-eight hours to get everything around here covered.” His eyes flickered down to my lips as his tongue darted out to lick his own.
Kiss me. Damn fool. Kiss me and then let me bend you over this desk and fuck you into tomorrow morning.
Incapable of speaking,I nodded, hoping to all hell he wouldn’t notice the beginnings of the erection pressing against my suit pants. “Good. I’ll see you then.”
His words, equal parts promise and threat, floated in my office long after he left. They stayed with me through the night and into the next day as I scrambled to take a very impromptu vacation in the middle of a rather crazy building season. They kept me awakeat night and made me long for sleep during the day.
As Sunday rolled around, I wondered how the hell I was going to survive a week with Quinn when two days with only the echo of his words made me nothing more than a lost cause.
