The Dangerous Jacob Wilde

“Why would I hate him?” she said, as she thumbed through the menus.

He was right.

Fun was what they’d had. It was the only thing they’d had. And yes, she’d known he was moving on but she was, too—

Suddenly, unaccountably, her eyes filled with tears.

“Stupid idiot,” she said.

Her, not him.

She had never loved Jacob—and what was with all this talking-to-herself-out-loud foolishness?

She should be celebrating, not babbling. Heck, this was the first day of her new life.

The money from the sale of the ranch had made it possible for her to walk away from the corporate world, just as Charlie had predicted she would someday do.

She’d find a job at a small law firm in Queens. Or maybe in Brooklyn. Find a garden apartment nearby, with a tiny terrace and a patch of green out back.

Why she’d ever wanted to live in crowded Manhattan was beyond her.

It wouldn’t be a place where you felt you could reach up and touch the sky like the ranch or Wilde’s Crossing, but—

She gave herself a little shake.

Never mind all that. Who cared about ranches and Wilde’s Crossing and—and—

Addison said a truly bad word, plucked the top menu from the stack and called for a pizza.

Delivery would take forty-five minutes, the kid who took the order said.

An hour and a half later, Addison was still waiting.

And not calmly.

She should have stayed with yogurt. Or a poached egg.

Or a fried cheese sandwich, and did people really eat such things? Had Jake been serious? Fried cheese. Fried hot dogs. And, dammit, why was she wasting all this time, thinking about a man who, yes, had problems but, double dammit, couldn’t she admit the truth?

She had loved him. Problems and all.

And he had pretended to care for her. To be a good guy. To be the most wonderful guy she’d ever known, someone so rare, so sexy, so tender, so strong, so perfectly wonderful that—

That he had broken her silly, useless heart.

The doorbell rang.

Addison narrowed her eyes.

“About time,” she muttered.

She went to the door. Undid the bolt. The chain. The lock. And, in her rage at the pizza place—hell, at Jacob, at herself—in that rage, she did something incredibly dumb.

She flung the door open without looking through the peephole.

“You’re two hours late,” she snarled….

Except she wasn’t snarling at a pimply-faced kid holding a box of veggie supreme with feta cheese in his outstretched hands….