Page 67 of Resist

“I what? Treated her like she’s a human?” he says with a shake of his head like it’s a no-brainer as he pushes himself up to a seated position. “There’s no need to thank me for that.”

“Still, thank you.”

“She’s a sweetheart.”

“She is.” I nod as she turns a corner and throws her head back in laughter. It’s so much easier to watch her than to look at him and acknowledge the flutter that being this close to him gives me. “Why are you jogging here?”

“Here?”

“The park.”

“Because it’s a nice place that has some great lead-in trails,” he says as if it’s a weird question for me to be asking.

“Do you live around here?”

“No.”

“Then why are you here?”

“I just answered that question,” he says with a chuckle, but it fades when he sees the perplexity on my face. “Sometimes I want to get out of the concrete jungle. Run where the sidewalks are clear and the horns are quiet.”

“But there’s always Central Park.”

“Yes, and that’s a great jog five days out of the week, but . . .” He shrugs.

“So you’re a man who gets bored quickly, then?”

He furrows his brow. “Jogging and women are two different things, Vaughn,” he responds, negating my innuendo before glancing to Lucy, who waves again at us, and we both put on big smiles and wave back. When he turns back my way, he says, “I come here all the time. Is that a problem? Are you the keeper of the park?”

I eye him skeptically as my mind begins to whirl. Lucy and I come here often, almost every weekend at this time, and we’ve never seen him. Then, out of the blue, all of a sudden, he’s here and sees us?

My spine stiffens immediately.

“I’ve never seen you here.”

“Maybe we’ve crossed paths before. You ever notice how once you know someone, you see them all the time when you never saw them before?”

I don’t respond to him, my fingers picking at the grass and my thoughts veering back to the images he said he had of me from his private investigator.

“Vaughn?” he asks, but I keep my eyes focused on Lucy instead. “Are you implying I’m following you?”

I glance his way but only for a beat as I try to decipher whether I should believe him or not. “I don’t know, you tell me. You’re the one with an investigator.” My voice is reserved, uncertain.

“Seems to me you have one too.”

Our wills wage a silent battle. “Mine is for protection. Yours is . . .”

“Mine is for many things,” he muses. “And I haven’t used him to find out anything about your private life, if that’s what you’re implying.”

I stare at him, wanting to believe him . . . and at the same time doubt myself. It would be one thing if he were calling me and I were avoiding him. Then he’d have reason to find out more about me and seek me out. But nothing like that has happened. In fact, quite the opposite. He’s the one who has been ignoring me.

“The last time I talked to you was over a week ago.” The words are out of my mouth and sound so needy when I’m not needy in the least.

“Yeah, and . . . ?”

And you haven’t called. You haven’t emailed. You said that I had to accompany you to events, and there haven’t been any scheduled. The words flicker and fade in my mind as I try to come to grips with how this girl who needs no one suddenly wants to be needed by him.

I’m confused by my thoughts. By this sudden whirlwind of feelings that makes no sense and feels so very foreign to me.