As the song played, he turned his head slightly to look at Raine, and it was as if he were seeing her for the first time. Those delicate, tattooed hands, feminine and yet capable of so much strength, with short, practical nails that allowed her to play the guitar. Her mouth, those lips that had spoken her truths…and the intensity he could feel rippling off her in waves.
When he risked a glance at his face, he saw something in his eyes.
In that moment, she felt it too—an unspoken need, an unexpected bond.
Or maybe she felt something else. He couldn’t trust himself to guess.
But desire was filling the pit of his belly…for her. Seeing who she really was had opened his eyes and his heart. And he knew it had to be a simple emotional response to the intensity of the day.
Regardless, he could hardly ignore it, the way it gnawed at the pit of his belly, this emotion he hadn’t experienced in years.
But he knew it was the last fucking thing he needed to be thinking or feeling.
This young woman had a lot of skeletons buried in the back of her closet, and she’d just started exhuming them. She’d trusted him to treat her with respect and he would. But the emotions swirling in his chest, causing an ache deep in his gut, warred with his head, and he couldn’t quite understand why.
So he focused on the song as much as possible instead of her warm body sitting next to his. In the song, her voice grew slightly in intensity as she sang the bridge right before the soft, short guitar solo:
* * *
And I thought I liked it, thought I loved it,
Thought I wanted it, thought I deserved it,
Thought I needed it, thought I owned it,
Thought it was what I’d bought and paid for…
But that was just what you wanted me to believe,
Because it made me your willing vessel.
* * *
The guitar solo was nothing more than the notes played throughout the song but, this time, they could be heard on their own with just a few notes added in, just two lines of music to break it up. The reason why it worked was because, when it slowly led back to the chorus one more time, the listener could feel the approaching crescendo with the last time she sang the line “You used me: my body, my soul, my everything.”
Then, soft and quiet, almost weak—and oh, so poignant—came the last two lines with no accompaniment:
* * *
And I don’t know who I am anymore…
But did I ever know that little girl anyway?
* * *
When the song ended, Quentin took several seconds before drawing in a cleansing breath and forcing his eyes open. And he reminded himself: this was business, nothing more. So he nodded, clearing his throat and focusing on keeping his voice steady. “I think we leave it the way it is. It’s perfectly imperfect.”
Raine’s smile was one he hadn’t seen before—at least not since she’d arrived. And the way it reached her eyes made her seem almost like an angel. She seemed to agree, so he turned his eyes back to the computer, determined to back up this copy so they could exit this charged space as soon as possible.
But that was when she rested her head on his shoulder and placed that thin hand on his forearm. “Thank you so much. I can’t tell you what this means to me.”
Oh, no. Touching him that way was the worst possible thing she could do, especially considering the turmoil roiling inside him. “No,” he said, moving his chair back so her head was no longer on his shoulder, all while trying not to recoil as if she were on fire. Gently, he took her hand and placed it on the counter. “We need to keep this strictly professional.” He couldn’t help that his voice sounded far colder than he’d meant it to.
That message had been meant for him, not her.
But the look in Raine’s eyes almost killed him. And he could read her like a book. She couldn’t understand what maybe felt like a sudden shift or possibly even rejection—but he wasn’t about to correct her. For both their sakes, he had to keep his own shit reined in. This—and this woman—was a line he could not cross.
For her. For both of them.
