Protect Me Not ((Un)Professionally Yours 2)

She accepted his offering with a grateful smile and that was when she had crept under his arm.

“That was wonderful, wasn’t it?” she asked, tilting her head back to look at him. Her pretty gray eyes still drenched with tears.

“It was something,” he hedged.

She sighed in contentment—not appearing to notice his caginess—her pouty lips curling into a sweet smile.

“Thank you for staying tonight, Ty. I enjoyed it.”

He pinched her chin between his middle and index fingers and dropped a soft, lingering kiss on her mouth.

“I did too,” he said. He brushed a curl away from her forehead, and his thumb traced the arch of an eyebrow. “I should probably head home.”

“I know.”

“Get a good night’s sleep. If such a thing is possible in that pink atrocity you call a room.” That made him pause. “What the hell is up with that room anyway? No offense, honey, but it’s a nightmare.”

She laughed and told him a crazy convoluted story about her brother and her mother and a spa retreat. But he got the gist of it. Her brother had pranked her, and she stubbornly refused to change it back, wanting Hugh to undo the pinkpocalypse he’d wrought upon her room.

Crazy sibling bullshit. It all made sense now.

He chuckled. “Just get a decent night’s sleep, okay?”

He reluctantly lifted his arm from around her shoulders, and she shifted away from him. He instantly mourned the loss of her warmth, scent, and weight against him. It took every ounce of willpower he possessed not to snatch her back to his side.

And even more of it to get up, and walk to the front door.

“I’ll see you in the morning.”

“Goodnight, Ty.”

It should not be this hard to leave her. If it was this difficult now…he shook his head, refusing to complete the thought.

Tomorrow would be a return to normalcy, and this evening would be dumped in the “never to be repeated” category.

Where it belonged.

The following three days were uneventful. As Vicki had expected, Ty kept his distance after that night in her apartment. Returning to form with his long silences and impersonal touches. The easy intimacy of Wednesday night had him running scared. Vicki wasn’t certain what she would do tonight. Her period was done, but she wasn’t sure if it would be a good idea to resume this one-sided, probably self-destructive, arrangement with Ty. She wanted to, oh God, she really, really wanted to.

But after the other night, when they’d felt almost like a normal couple, she knew that she was skating on thin ice. She was starting to want more. And that wasn’t his fault, it was hers. She shouldn’t have gone into this in the first place, not when she had already found him interesting and likable. She needed more time to think without sex clouding the issue.

Chance was on duty that Saturday, and Vicki was almost relieved to have a break from Ty’s broody presence. The Australian was a breath of fresh air, with his silly comments, and slightly off-color jokes.

Because of JJ’s cancelled wedding, Vicki’s Saturday had opened up, and her day was easy and almost relaxing because of it. Thankfully, the bride and her mother had also agreed to accept a 25% refund and had asked Vicki to deliver the flowers they had paid for on the ex-groom’s doorstep.

Which she had done with great pleasure. She’d relished the chagrin on the man’s face when she and Josh offloaded hundreds of white and pink blooms in the cramped front room of his small Surrey terrace house.

He’d protested of course, but Vicki had cheerfully informed him that she was only doing her job. When he looked set to argue, Chance had stepped forward—folding his beefy tattooed arms across his chest—to stared at the skinny man, who immediately backed off.

Sometimes Vicki appreciated having all that muscle around.

She closed on time on a Saturday for the first time in weeks and immediately called Bella to ask if she and Pete would join her for a drink. Her friend happily agreed and said she was bringing some friends along, which prompted Vicki to invite Jasper and Linda as well. Josh had declined the invitation.

In the end, Linda, Danny, Jasper, Hugh, and Stephen all joined them at a local pub in Hammersmith.

Bella, who’d been disappointed to learn about Vicki’s disastrous “date” with Teddy, had been urging her to give the man another chance in a different setting, and sure enough—never missing the opportunity to matchmake—she had dragged him along.

“Hi, again,” Teddy said, when he had the opportunity to speak with Vicki. He looked awkward.

“Let me guess, Bells didn’t tell you I would be here,” Vicki said with a laugh. And he grinned, relaxing.

“I’m glad you are,” he said. “I’ve wanted to apologize for that day at the gardens.”

“Why? You did nothing wrong.”

“I felt awful for leaving you sitting there. It wasn’t well done of me, at all.”