Insecure (Love Triumphs 1)

11: Turn Back

Mace made her head spin, as though he stole her wits with her oxygen when he kissed her. If she didn’t stop kissing him back she’d be late and it was destined to be a horror morning, a nightmare week, particularly as she’d ignored both her phone messages and her inbox all of Sunday. She’d never done that. People were going to assume she was on her deathbed, and she’d pay for it in long hours and anxious deliberations.

She needed to shove him out the door. She needed to step back into her life. But he was a kind of fever she suffered. Prolonged exposure had her catching the disease of him. Now his smell, his taste, the energy of him swam in her limbs and burned in her veins. Bad for her: drugging, hooking deep, and inescapable. The lockdown was over, but the siege of her heart was in full force. The remedy was amputation: clean, fast, surgically brutal, but lifesaving.

And she held the scalpel. But she couldn’t bring herself to make the cut.

“You’re going to be late.” He had to get home before getting to work. She didn’t know where he lived or how long he needed to get there and still get to the office on time. She didn’t know anything about him except he had a difficult childhood, was raised by his grandmother, and turned himself into a tech wizard. They’d not taken much time to talk, letting their bodies carry the conversation, and he wasn’t much of a talker anyway.

Which made it hard to understand how he’d managed to learn so much about her. And harder still to understand why that didn’t make her feel apprehensive.

She trusted him. With her body and with the elements of her life that weren’t part of her public identity. It was probably a huge mistake, a risk she didn’t need. Not because she thought he’d betray her secrets, but because she didn’t trust herself not to want him in her bed again. And that was a complication she didn’t need.

It was intolerably unfair to have to suit up for battle after a weekend of such rare indulgence. But the morning’s newscast reminded her their time together had come at an enormous cost. Lives taken, damaged forever; the security of the city jeopardised and its confidence shaken.

Mace took her earlobe between his teeth and pulled gently. “Can feel you thinking.” His hands were inside her silk robe. He’d been touching her all morning and she’d done nothing to reject his advances, she craved them, but now she needed to exorcise them. She had no place in her day, in her week, in her life for this, for him. They were more than she’d expected, so much more it was disquieting, but they’d hit the natural boundary of her tolerance for the disruption of her life. She had responsibilities. People depended on her. She was going to turn around Friday’s disaster and she was itching to get into it.

“I have so much to do.” She’d given him a razor and a toothbrush and his cheek was smooth against her neck, his breath coffee and peppermint.

“And I’m stopping you.”

“Yes. It’s time.”

“It’ll make me sound pathetic, but it was the best time for me.”

She smiled, attempted to dislodge his hands, but with no success and no regret. “You’re not pathetic.”

“I fall for my hook up. Definition of pathetic. And man enough to admit it.”

She was CEO-in-waiting of one of the country’s largest banks. She had wealth and position. She had personal influence and power. People clamoured for her attention and fawned on her favour. She felt like crying because this gorgeous complex man was playing at loving her.

She knew it was play; a hybrid variety of Stockholm syndrome where the circumstance had kidnapped them both and held them hostage to each other’s nearness. Outside of her apartment there was no reason for them to be. And even if she was game enough to try to fit a relationship in her life and deal with the scrutiny that would bring, he was hopelessly unsuitable. He was a junior employee. He didn’t come from her world of education and privilege, not that it made him a lesser person, but it made him an outsider. It made him a challenge. And she had enough of those to fill thirty-hour workdays.

She wrapped her arms around his neck and gave herself over to him, to the contented growl he made, to the arms that bore her weight and the lips that calmed her at the same time as they hitched her pulse.

She’d lain in the comfort of him long after they’d settled to sleep, restlessly awake. She’d eased out of his arms without waking him, went to the kitchen and drank her fill of chilled water, then took the pad and pencil Jay had borrowed back to bed.

The only thing she sketched these days were business plans. And for those she needed words and numbers, not fine and shaded lines. She barely held a pen, let alone a pencil anymore; everything was keyboard and touchscreen. There was a moon, enough light through the glass ceiling to see him clearly. She sat on the floor and filled the pad with sketches until her wrist ached and her fingers cramped.

She filled the pages with aborted efforts to capture the way his hand lay curled on the sheet, the way his shoulder fitted solid and functional to his neck and chest. She drew the leg he’d thrown outside the sheet: the rounded knob of his knee, the elegant length of his shin, his surprisingly bony ankle, shapely foot with the bandage tape around it and squared off toes. The pencil had a mind of its own and wasn’t keen to follow her lead. She couldn’t get his proportions right, capture the latent strength, the resting spark of him.

She attempted his face and almost woke him, groaning in disgust at what she produced. She got pins and needles in her foot. She made error after error of line and placement and instead of wanting to garbage mulch the pad, she wanted a better pencil, a bigger pad, a piece of charcoal, more time. Not that any of those things would help her get the look of him, the unconscious masculine strength and grace of him on paper, but because it made her happy to try.

Last night she’d have drawn him forever. This morning, he was the one who made the cut. He pulled away gently. He retied the bow of her robe. He tucked her hair behind her ears, pinching their edge with a smile when it didn’t sting.

“You’re going to be busy. Jay will make you crawl over glass.”

He nodded. “I won’t louse it up.”

“I’d like to hear how you go from time to time.”

He shook his head. “No.” He kissed her forehead. “I knew what this was.”

“We—”

“No, we won’t. You work in your tower. I work in mine. That was the design of this.”

He had it right. She’d chosen him because they had no need to be in each other’s space again, because she had no personal future need of his particular professional skills.