I wasn’t lying this morning. If I was offered another place to hide out until whatever’s going on back home is over, I would have gone.
But it would have torn my heart out.
Gideon going out to the gym for a while is a good thing. I need to remember that I’m here because of a favor to my mother, not because of anything personal going on between us.
He may be attracted to me,I think, but nothing’s going to happen.
Because this is Gideon. He does everything by the book.
And just because he might have liked the sight of my ass in red panties doesn’t mean that he wants to take said panties off and do unspeakable, sexy things to me.
Damn it.
Maybe while he’s out of the house I’ll go take an arctic shower to calm down my hormones.
Chapter Eleven
Gideon
I had to get the fuck out of that house.
In the span of forty-eight hours, Lena has managed to get under my skin and make me question everything I thought I knew about her. I worked next to her foryears, and I would have said, with absolute certainty, that there wasn’t much I didn’t know.
If I’d bet my life on it, I’d be fucking dead right now.
Granted, people change. They grow, especially over the course of years, and it’s been a while since I last saw her.
But fundamentally, at the base of who they are, most people don’t changethatmuch.
So what I’m learning is that my little rebel may be sassy and headstrong, but she was also manipulated more than I realized at the time. She’s good at putting on a brave face, but horrible at standing up for herself and telling goddamn Chelsea to fuck off.
Her artwork just about opened up my chest and squeezed the bloody organ pumping there from my body. It’s breathtaking. She captured my mountains perfectly.
The dark charcoal on her cheek was sexy as fuck.
And don’t even get me started on her tight little body. When she fell, and her ass was in the air, it was all I could do to keep my dick in my pants and not fuck her right there on the floor.
She’s not mine.
Lena is the job, and I need to remember that. I need to keep my fucking hands to myself.Stoptouching her.
I’ve never been afraid of touch. That’s not something that my shit childhood took away from me. I hug my family all the time, and affection comes easy to me. I think I have Debbie to thank for that. She loved to be hugged and did it so often, it was just second nature.
Lena isn’t so lucky.
But it’s not my job to hug the woman. Or to strip her bare and fuck her into the mattress. Or to sit next to her and listen to her talk about how she was manipulated into having hermotherfucking nipples pierced.
And it’s absolutely not my job to want to comfort her, hold her, laugh with her,absorb herthe way I want to.
I could want everything with her, and that’s foolish.
So I’m going to work myself into oblivion and get her out of my system, starting with free weights. I haven’t had a good, hard workout in days, and I’m feeling it.
I have music playing, but I can still hear the thunder raging outside. Rain and hail pelt down on the metal roof, echoing inside the gym, and I love the noise.
I finish a set of squats and then pace, listening to the building take a pounding, letting it empty my mind.
After two hours, when it sounds like the storm has calmed, and my muscles are weak and pushed to the limit, I take a shower in the gym bathroom and change my clothes, and then set off for the house.
