Total pages in book: 139
Estimated words: 133321 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 667(@200wpm)___ 533(@250wpm)___ 444(@300wpm)
Estimated words: 133321 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 667(@200wpm)___ 533(@250wpm)___ 444(@300wpm)
“I can’t.”
“You want to.”
“Yes,” I agree.
“Then you can,” he counters.
“I can’t get by the fact that you’re Grayson Bennett.”
“To most people, that’s not a problem.”
“I’m not most people,” I say. “I told you that.”
He stares at me several beats and then his hand falls away. “I’ll see you soon, Mia.” He backs out of the office and disappears.
I sink against my wall just inside the doorway and try to catch my breath, but my God, my entire body is on fire. He’s just so damn—perfect. The way he looks. The way he smells. The way he feels. Those green eyes. I breathe out and force myself to move.
I exit my office and scan for Grayson but he’s nowhere around, and a punch of disappointment grinds through me. He’s my boss, no matter how he tries to frame it otherwise. I can’t go out with him. I can’t even sleep with him. It sucks. I hurry forward and enter the elevator, my body humming a tune that Grayson wrote. I need a workout. A long, hard workout. And chocolate. It’s not Grayson Bennett, but it will do. My weekend plans set, I exit the building and start walking. I’ve made it one block, with one to go to reach the subway, when a black Porsche pulls up next to me.
The window rolls down. “Get in,” a male voice calls out and I suck in air when I realize it’s Grayson. It’s a moment of decision. I know this. I should say no. I try.
I walk to the window and lean in. “I’m not getting in.”
“No one else knows what happens between us unless we make that decision together. It’s just you and me tonight, Mia.”
Just me and him. I don’t know why those words, all of them spoken together, hit all the right notes, but they do. “I don’t want to regret this,” I say, in a last bid for resistance.
“And if you walk away, will you regret that? Because I can tell you, I will.”
I tell myself he’s a man that already controls my job. I can’t allow him to become the man who controls my heart and yet, I don’t know what happens. I just—I get in the car.
Grayson sits back down next to me and hands me my glass of wine. “What are you thinking, Mia?”
“About you showing up in your fancy sports car and telling me to get in.” I reach up and stroke his cheek, the rasp of his whiskers on my fingers. “And then you brought me here, to your mansion in the Hamptons, in a chopper. But we had pizza as your way to prove to me that you were just a man. That we weren’t worlds apart.”
“We were never worlds apart,” he says. “From the day we met, we were a team.”
“And yet you fired me off that case without talking to me first,” I say, the words spilling out of my mouth of their own accord. “I don’t understand how that made us a team. It made you the man in control of my heart and my career.”
“And so instead of fighting with me, instead of giving me a chance to explain, repent, regret, make it up to you, you used Becky as an excuse to run.”
“I didn’t run.” I try to stand up.
He catches my arm. “What are you doing right now?”
Chapter nineteen
Mia
“What am I doing right now?” I demand, still on the barstool with Grayson holding onto my arm. “Giving myself room to fight. I don’t want to be trapped in my seat right now.”
He studies me for several unreadable seconds and then lets me go, but there’s something in the way he does it, in the way he withdraws beyond the physical that keeps me in my seat. “I’m not even thinking about leaving. I wish I never had. I wish I could turn back the clock and get back our lost time.”
He doesn’t immediately respond. He doesn’t agree. He doesn’t offer me the forgiveness I don’t deserve for leaving, and some part of me really needs to be forgiven, perhaps because I feel he never really will. Which makes the fact that he’s the one who stands up now and walks away, appropriate. He offers me his back and presses his hands onto the counter opposite the island by the sink. I’ve hurt him again, and in turn, I’ve pushed him away when I want him close. I stand up and quickly slide between him and the sink, but he doesn’t move. He doesn’t touch me. “Is that how it is, Mia?” he asks. “I suffocate you? I make you feel trapped?”
My hand settles on his chest. “No. God no. You always made me feel safe in too many ways to name. In us. In the rest of the world. In my desire to go bigger and further. You made me feel so many things, good things that I have missed. I just—”