“I threatened the man’s life in front of them, our odds weren’t good.”
“Our GPS was better,” she said, feeling stubborn now. “And I’m not pregnant. I thought I’d throw that in there real quick since we’re getting to end our association now. Really and completely.”
“You aren’t pregnant?” he asked, his expression strange, veiled.
“Nope. Not gestating the heir to your techie empire. Sorry.”
“Julia…”
“And I still can’t believe they picked Hamlin! We won that. We won it. Ours was so much better.”
“It doesn’t matter, they picked him.” He started pacing the length of the office. “This is your fault, you know?”
“My fault? How is this my fault? You’re the one who lost your cookies in the meeting, in front of everyone!”
“Because he insulted you,” Ferro said. “And I could not stop myself. I lost all of my control, and that has never happened to me, not since I learned the importance of it. It’s you. You’re the only thing that’s different. You have changed me. And I cannot, for the life of me figure out how to change back. Six days, Julia, six days and I can’t eat. I can think of nothing but you. I feel like my heart has left my chest and is walking around outside of it. Do you know how terrifying that feeling is?”
“Yes,” she said, “I do because that’s how I feel. Like my heart is walking around outside my body and you, you’re my heart. When you walked away you took that away from me and I…and everything just sucks! I don’t care about the GPS. I don’t care about the deal at all, and it’s the whole reason we got together in the first place. But I don’t even want it anymore, Ferro, I just want you.”
He strode to her desk and rounded it, reaching for her hands and tugging her up into his arms, kissing her, bold, deep, fierce. And when she pulled back and looked into his eyes, she saw him unveiled. Truly. Finally.
Emotion blazed from him, passion. And there was no control. He kissed with everything he’d held back from her for the past few weeks. She had a feeling it was everything he’d held back for the past thirty-four years of his life.
When they parted, neither of them could catch their breath. He brushed his thumb over her cheek, wiped her tears away. Tears she hadn’t realized were falling.
“You were right about me,” he said. “I was a coward. I learned early on in life that the more you need, the more you can have taken. The more you care, the more power you give to other people. I had to force myself to stop feeling when I made the choices I did. I had to stop so I could get through it, and when it was over I was afraid if I started feeling again I would have to face the full horror of who I had become in order to get ahead in life.”
“You make it sound like you did it on a whim. Ferro, you were saving your life. You were doing it for food. For shelter. For things I had given to me, things I’ve taken for granted all my life.”
“I know,” he said. “But it didn’t change the fact that it…broke something in me. The way I saw sex. The way I saw relationships. Not just that I had a hard time connecting sex and emotion, but that it seemed an impossibility. I had worked so hard to separate my body from my own desires, from my emotions, that I didn’t think I could ever unite them again. And I didn’t want to. Because it would hurt too much. Cost too much. But I faced it, Julia. I did. I looked down into the darkest parts of myself and I saw the pain. The destruction.”
He kissed the corner of her mouth. “And then there was you. I thought I could give in to my body’s desire for you and keep my emotions separate. After all, I had done it with women I didn’t want. How hard could it be to take what I wanted for a while and walk away? But I didn’t count on you. You and your joy. Your innocence. Your enthusiasm. You are everything that I had beaten out of me. You bring it back to me. Show me a part of life that I have never gotten to have and I want to hold on to it, to you, forever.”
“You… Ferro you make me proud of who I am. You make me feel like I’m special. Except…except when you left. That hurt me. It broke my heart.”