Page 39 of Dancing With Temptation

And that was the crux of his current problem. He wanted to be the one that grew old with her. That couldn’t happen though, he cared about her too much. He wanted too much from her and if his mother had taught him anything, it was that you couldn’t count on forever.

He had to go through this overwhelming amount of pain now, he had to do this to them both, to protect himself. He smirked at his own thoughts, at his own sappiness. He’d never loved a woman. He thought now that what he’d felt for the girl she used to be was a kind of love, and he used that memory to remind himself countless times that no woman could hold a candle to her.

Now that he’d come to know Roxie, who that girl had become, he knew that no other woman would stand a chance of replacing her. But he’d have to find one he could keep at arm’s length. Like the women at the restaurant tables in New York. If he ever decided to have a family, a wife, he’d pick one that he could keep at arm’s length so that when she divorced him and tried to take his children away it wouldn’t hurt so much.

He loved his mother, but she’d broken something inside of him a long time ago. She’d taken away his belief in fairy tales and dreams of being a knight in shining armor for some future princess. Even if that princess was named Chloe. Or Roxie, as the case may be.

He spent one more night alone, in a bed that now seemed far too big for him. He growled his way through work and drove himself home that evening with one thing on his mind. He’d waited long enough.

He needed her, needed to be inside of her, and he didn’t care what he had to do to get it. He’d beg if he had to, he’d go to her if she demanded it. He’d let her tie him down in his playroom and whip him until she got rid of all the hurt and anger, he knew she had to be feeling.

It was a moment of weakness, he knew he should wait, that he wasn’t where he needed to be yet to be able to hide his heart from her, but he couldn’t wait anymore. He needed her more than he’d ever needed anything in his life. He physically hurt all over his body without her. He knew it wasn’t a real sickness, a disease, that made him hurt like this, it was an emotional sickness that only she could cure.

He’d keep her at arm’s length as long as he could, he told himself, but he needed to taste her, desperately. His fingers punched in the words on his text messenger, his brain turned off when he hit send. He’d wait now and hope that she’d answer him.

He sat on his couch for an hour and waited, with no response from her.

Maybe she’d given up, maybe she was so hurt and angry that she wouldn’t reply. Maybe it was best that she didn’t. He got up, went to the bar cart where a bottle of bourbon waited for him, and filled a glass with two measures of the golden-brown liquid. His finger tapped against the glass and he walked into the kitchen to get some ice.

That’s when he heard his doorbell and his heart thudded far too hard in his chest. She was here. Finally.

20

Roxie

She’d never known this kind of pain.

Or this kind of rejection.

It had taken her a while to catch on but when she did, pain crushed her, unlike anything she’d known before.

When they first got back from Cambodia, it took Roxie a few days to get over the sheer exhaustion of crossing the globe again. Her brain turned off that first night and it hadn’t turned back on until she’d slept through two days. By the third day, she was ready to speak to other human beings again. She exchanged texts with everybody in the few moments she’d been awake over the last few days.

Wendy, Emily, and everybody else knew she was back home but they all gave her the space to recover from the ordeal of getting back home. Even Lincoln had insisted she stay at her own place to recover. She’d wanted to stay with him, to maintain that closeness that she needed now.

She’d woken up and texted him, thinking about having a normal life with him, with a normal guy. A guy who loved her, like her parents had loved each other. She’d hoped for that with Nathan, but he proved her wrong. Lincoln wouldn’t do that to her, though, not him.

When Lincoln barely responded to her text, she’d shrugged it off. When he barely spoke on the first call she made to him, she’d decided he was just still too tired to have a long conversation. The next day, she excused it all because maybe he was just having a hard time adjusting to this new thing between them.

The contract was over, but he didn’t say anything about renewing it. Maybe that was a good thing?

There’d been a hundred thousand maybes swimming through her brain, so she sat alone in her hotel room. She’d gone out with Emily the day before, had her nails done, and bought some new lingerie to wear for Lincoln. Today she had a waxing appointment and the trickle of pain she felt as a tightness in her chest was completely murdered by the real pain of having her legs and nether regions waxed.

When he didn’t come to her that night, when he didn’t answer her calls, she sat alone in the dark. She knew this moment; she’d experienced it with Nathan.

He was tired of her.

The maybe-train started all over again.

Maybe she’d been too needy that last night in Cambodia.

Maybe Lincoln couldn’t handle a real relationship.

What was it he’d said to her once? He couldn’t maintain a platonic friendship with straight women, but he’d never had a real relationship with a woman.

He’d had a lot more than that from her and maybe that was just too much for him to handle.

When another day passed with no contact at all, she checked her bank account and decided that it was time to move on. He was done with her. She had enough to rent a new place for a while and maybe she should find her own vacation spot.