When I grew up, I put aside those childish dreams, though not wholly. I still dabbled with the modern magics of manifestation, crystals, and anything else that could help me believe I had some agency over my life.
But I’d long abandoned such practices since it hadn’t helped me any. Until now. Standing there at the coffee machine, it felt like I’d used some kind of power. That I had magicked this into my life. Beau Shaw wanting me.
Beau cleared his throat loudly. He hadn’t stepped back like I was contagious, like he had in the past. His body hadn’t even stiffened.
He remained where he was, hand outstretched, grazing mine, my arm seemingly suspended in space and time.
I reveled in the contact, at the shift in our relationship that was so jarring, so wondrous, that I couldn’t trust it. But I didn’t want to back away from it either, whatever promises I made to myself mere seconds ago.
“Banana, what are we doing today?” Clara’s loud voice fractured the moment.
“Let me,” Beau murmured quietly, nodding to the machine.
I nodded back, stepping away from him in a gesture that felt foreign, painful. Swallowing bile, I turned to the smiling face of the most precious girl in the world.
The little girl whom we were protecting by denying our baser urges. And looking at her clear, innocent, happy face, I couldn’t bring myself to regret that decision, not even a little bit.
So I did what I needed to do. I told her about our day. I accepted coffee from Beau then prepared myself for another miserable chapter in my life.
Not Beau hating me or me hating him.
But both of us wanting each other and pretending we didn’t.
I hadn’t thought I could recover from the life-changing night with Beau. The life-changing night wherenothing actually happened.
He had told me all the things I’d wanted to hear, and he brought me as close to an orgasm as was humanly possible without physical touch. He made me feel like a woman. Worthy.
And then he decided not to act on his needs. His incredibly detailed and visceral needs.
So that was … it? I was supposed to go back to how things were twenty-four hours earlier, behaving like nothing had changed? Like he hadn’t permanently cracked the foundation beneath my feet? It didn’t seem tenable to live under the same roof as the man who wanted to fuck me until I screamed, let alone maintain professional distance, without some sort of implosion.
Yet we did. As usual, Clara worked as a buffer. Her presence made it impossible to act on my urges to run over to Beau and kiss him. Rip his clothes off with my bare hands, wrap my legs around his hips. I hadmanyfantasies.
On the rare occasions when we were alone, Beau kept his distance. Sometimes.
Other times, he tortured me.
Like when I was getting a snack for Clara, who was in the living room building a magnet tile tower, and Beau had been in his home office doing … whatever Beau did.
I had opened the fridge and leaned forward when I felt it. Heat. Completely juxtaposing the chill from the fridge. I was grasping a yogurt when I turned, Beau’s body so close to mine that our clothes brushed. I tipped my head upward to glimpse his tight jaw underneath his sexy beard, my breath catching at the intensity in his gaze. His hands were twitching at his sides, as if he were having actual trouble keeping them there.
My heart rate spiked, and my breathing became shallow as I met his eyes, lips parted.
I’d thought he was the king of compartmentalizing. That or he just had the power to tell his brain that I was off-limits, and then he’d no longer want me. It had left me feeling bereft, weak, and consumed by thoughts of him, desperate for him. It hadbeen torture, wanting him when I thought he hated me. It was quite another thing knowing he wanted me.
And he still wanted me.
A lot.
If the expression on his face or the electricity crackling between us was anything to go by.
I was stuck in his gaze, half in the fridge, half in the forge of his desire.
“Beau,” I whispered.
He leaned in, eyes on my lips as if he were going to claim them. Claimme.
Except he’d already claimed me and for longer than I’d like to admit.
