His Best Mistake (Shillings Agency 6)
He flexed his fingers on the wheel. “Right.”
“I—” Her radio went off. The man on the speaker called for backup, and asked for the units holding off traffic to approach. More were being sent to guide
traffic away. She lifted the radio to her mouth, depressed the button, and said, “10-4. We’re on our way.”
“Daisy—”
“I have to go. I’m working, Mark. It’s fine. I get it. You don’t want to deal with this. We knew that from the beginning. And you know what? I don’t want to, either.” She shrugged nonchalantly again, and it felt like a knife stabbed through his chest. “We were just messing around anyway. It’s not like this was serious or anything. It was just sex.”
Just sex.
That’s all he’d been to her.
A good lay.
Jesus.
She tapped his hood and cocked her head to Tim, who nodded back. “Take care, Mark.”
He watched her walk away, speechless for the first time in his life.
Every nerve in his body screamed at him to go after her, to chase after her one more time and take back everything he’d said, but she didn’t even care that he’d broken it off with her.
Didn’t even care about him.
So he did nothing.
“Nothing” had never felt so fucking horrible.
Chapter Eighteen
This is a mistake. A huge mistake.
But she was going to go ahead and do it anyway.
Daisy marched up to Mark’s door with sweaty palms and shaky legs. After he’d stopped by that scene and broken up with her on the frigging street, she’d been a hot mess. He’d begged her to let him in. Begged her for a chance to prove why they belonged together. And then at the first hint of danger…
He bailed.
He frigging bailed.
Lifting her hand, she knocked hard three times. She stood on his stupid perfect porch, with its stupid little perfect wicker chairs, and its stupid little perfect porch light, and wanted to punch him right in his stupid perfect nose, just like her dad had done, because she hated him for making it hurt to breathe. Only she didn’t. Not really. The knife in her chest, radiating pain throughout her body because she lost him, wasn’t hate.
It was fear.
The door swung open and he was there, wearing an open shirt and a pair of jeans that hugged him in all the right places, making him look way too damn sexy for her own good. His five-o’clock shadow was more of a full on stubble, and it made her wonder if he didn’t have time to shave this morning. It was even sexier than his usual shadow, and her fingers itched to touch the long lines of his hard jaw, to touch that dimple she loved so much. Her gaze lingered on his abs and those too-tight jeans, but she forced herself to stop drooling.
She wasn’t here to admire his beauty.
She was here to yell at him, damn it.
He watched her from under hooded eyes, and swayed slightly. He squinted at her, like he was having a hard time focusing. She wasn’t. “This isn’t a good—”
“Time? Well, I don’t care. Screw you and your time.” She poked his chest. He stumbled back clumsily, blinking at her. She barged inside and shut the door behind her. “You asked me to give you a chance.” Another poke. “You promised me no one would get hurt.” A harder one. “You lied.”
When she went to poke his chest again, he caught her hand in an iron steady grip. “Yeah, I guess I did.”
She blinked, caught off guard at the way he looked at her. Like she was…nothing. A thing of his past, that dared to come back into his present. “What?”