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  Jaxon knew he couldn’t get out of the situation gracefully, but he could try. “I was only thinking of you. Most women aren’t thrilled about fighting off deadbeats like Riley, especially when they have a boyfriend at home.”

  “I don’t have a boyfriend anymore, thanks to you.”

  Jaxon held back his whoop of excitement. “Y’all broke up? When?”

  “That’s none of your business.” She slammed a menu into his chest. “Haven’t you caused enough trouble for me already?”

  Wait ‘til she found out he was the reason she’d lost her job… “I never wanted to cause you trouble, baby.” He reached for her hand.

  “Well, you have.” She pulled back, giving him no choice but to release her hand or cause a scene. “My parents aren’t speaking to me, my boyfriend’s dumped me, and I lost my job, forcing me to work for you…” A tear slipped down her cheek. “I don’t know how much more I can take.”

  “Jesus, don’t cry.” He jumped up and brushed his thumbs under her eyes, trying to wipe away the tears, but they were falling faster than he could catch them. “Come on, let’s go to my office.”

  “I don’t want to.”

  “Too bad.” He grabbed her hand before motioning to the waitress. “Tell Beatrice to call another hostess in. Sela’s not up to working tonight.”

  “That’s for me to decide!” she protested, trying to break free. “I can’t afford to take the night off.”

  “We’ll worry about that later,” he mumbled, trying to keep their conversation private. “I’m not going to have you looking after my customers in this state.” He was a jerk for playing the boss card, but it was the only way he could get her alone. They needed to talk so he could figure out how to repair the damage he’d done.

  “Fine, let me go home then.”

  He didn’t respond. He didn’t have to. They both knew there was no chance of that happening. He ushered her through the crowd to the manager’s office in the rear of the building. He didn’t want to take her, given their bad memories in that room, but if he tried to take her to his car, she’d undoubtedly put up a fight.

  “Tell me everything.” He went to the mini bar in the corner of the room and poured her a scotch as she sunk into the couch with a heavy sigh.

  “I don’t want that,” she said, trying to refuse the drink until he thrust it into her hand, giving her no choice but to take it. “Why do you do that? Why do you always assume you know what’s best for me?”

  He sat beside her, being careful to keep a respectable distance between them. It wouldn’t be easy to break down the wall between them, but he was determined, even if he had to do it brick by brick. “I haven’t had the desire to take care of very many people in my life, Sela. But you, you’re different.”

  “I don’t need you to take care of me.” In spite of her protests, she wrapped her hands around the glass and took a tentative sip, followed by another. “I can take care of myself.”

  “I know you can.” He smiled. “I remember thinking that the first night we met. It was one of the things that attracted me to you.”

  She smiled. “I was trying to get the bartender’s attention so I could order drinks for me and my girlfriends.”

  “Yeah.” Jaxon chuckled. “I was sitting at the bar with Dylan, and you managed to get yourself wedged between me and some guy who started hassling you. I was about to intervene when you told him you carried mace in your purse and weren’t afraid to use it. Dylan and I laughed our asses off. I knew right then I had to get to know you better.”

  “I’m glad you did.” Her eyes lingered on his before she turned her attention to her drink. “In spite of what went down between us, I was never sorry for letting you into my life.”

  “I’m glad to hear that,” he said, inching closer. “There have been times I was pretty sure you wished you’d never met me.”

  “Never.” She took another sip of the scotch before licking her lips. “I’d never known a love like that. You made me feel reckless, and I liked it.”

  He smiled, but he felt as though he was dying. He could have had it all with her. Even though it was over with Sheldon, she could tell him she wasn’t willing to take him back, and Jaxon would be left with a gaping hole in his heart that no other woman could heal.

  “I know how much I hurt you.” He acknowledged he was the reason they’d grown so far apart. Even before he’d ended things, he’d been pushing her away because he was so afraid of how close she was getting. “Sorry doesn’t seem adequate, but it’s all I’ve got.”

  “Sometimes relationships don’t work out,” she said, lifting a shoulder. “People are at different places in their lives, and no matter how hard they try, they can’t close the gap. That’s the way it was for us. Even though I hated the way you ended it, I never hated you.”

  “You didn’t? Are you sure about that?”

  “I was mad for a long time, but with every day that passed, my heart ached a little less. I could start remembering the good times without feeling like someone was taking a sledgehammer to my chest.” She drained her glass before setting it on the coffee table.

  “Would you like another?” he asked, hoping the alcohol would help her to open up about what had happened with Sheldon. He wanted to be the person she turned to for support.

  “Maybe one more,” she said. “I walked here, so it’s not like I have to worry about driving home.”

  He walked to the mini-bar as he shot her a look over his shoulder. “You walked here? What the hell were you thinking? You don’t get off work ‘til two a.m. Don’t do that again.”

  “Don’t tell me what to do.”

  Jaxon closed his eyes as he took a deep breath. The goal wasn’t to antagonize her, so he let it go for the moment. No way would he let her walk home alone after dark. “Do you want to talk about what happened with Sheldon?”

  She leaned her head against the soft leather cushion and closed her eyes. “It started at the wedding. When my dad cut into our dance, he had a lot to say, things I didn’t want to hear.”

  He knew he shouldn’t have left her to take the heat from her old man, but he had been trying to respect her wishes. “What did Gordon have to say?”

  She opened her eyes when he sat beside her. “He thinks I’m stupid for letting my guard down with you.”

  “He doesn’t understand what we have,” Jaxon said gently. “No one does.”

  She looked pained. “I don’t even understand this thing between us. How can I expect him to?”

  Jaxon wanted to make her understand beyond a shadow of a doubt what he felt and where he hoped they were headed, but it wasn’t the right time for a heavy conversation about the future. He needed to help her work through her problems first. “There’s more. What else did he say?”

  “He implied I was sleeping with you because of the power you wield.” She bit her lip as she looked away. “Because of your money and connections. He basically accused me of being a whore who’d do just about anything to get ahead.”

  “That son of a bitch,” Jaxon whispered, reaching for her hand. He regretted his words when he saw her wince. “I’m sorry. I know he’s your father, but he doesn’t know you at all if he could accuse you of that. Of all of the girls I’ve dated, you’re the least materialistic. You don’t care about things. You care about people.”

  She looked at his hand before linking it with hers. “Thank you for saying that. These days, it doesn’t feel like I have very many people in my corner.”

  He hated that he was the reason she felt estranged. He had to do something to make things right. “If you want me to talk to your parents—”

  “No,” she said quickly. “Please don’t. That would only make things worse. Once my parents have made up their minds about something or someone, they’re not likely to change.”

  Jaxon knew how hard it would be for them to build a future together if he couldn’t convince her parents he was the right man for her. She would always feel torn between the man she love
d and her parents, and he didn’t know if he could put her through that. “What else happened?”

  “I went to Sheldon’s apartment after the wedding. I needed someone to talk to.”

  “You could have called me. I’ll always be here for you.”

  “In hindsight, that may have been a better idea,” she said, clearing her throat. “My talk with Sheldon didn’t go so well.”

  “That’s when y’all broke up?”

  She nodded as she brought the scotch to her lips. “It was weird. He started talking about other women, like he wanted me to believe he’d cheated on me.”

  “Had he?” Jaxon’s heart pounded. He didn’t want her to have to deal with the pain of an unfaithful lover. She didn’t deserve that.

  “I don’t think so. I think he was testing me. He wanted to see how I’d react.”

  “How did you react?”

  “Apparently not the way he wanted me to.” She pressed the glass to her lips before moving it away. “He wanted me to scream and cry, throw things, hit him… I don’t know. I guess he thought my reaction proved that I was indifferent, that I didn’t care enough about him or our relationship.”

  “Is that true?” Jaxon held his breath as he waited for her to continue.

  “I don’t know how I feel anymore. If someone had asked me a month ago, I would have said I loved Sheldon and could imagine a future with him, but maybe I was just kidding myself. Maybe I was just trying to build that relationship into something it could never be. I wanted to convince myself Sheldon was the love of my life…”

  Could I be the love of your life? “I’m sorry things didn’t work out the way you hoped they would.”

  She looked at him out of the corner of her eye before smiling a little. “You don’t expect me to believe that, do you? I know you’re not sorry I broke up with my boyfriend.”

  He squeezed her hand, grinning. “No, I’m not. But I am sorry you’re hurting. Let’s see if we can do something about that, take your mind off your problems for a while.”

  “Where are we going?” she asked when he tugged her to her feet.

  “For a drive.”

  Chapter Eight

  Sela knew the last place she should be was with Jaxon, speeding down a country road while the wind whipped through their hair and the tunes filtering through the speakers made them think of making love.

  “The alcohol made me sleepy,” she said, stifling a yawn. “But this feels nice. It’s been a long time since I’ve taken time to relax. Between school, work, friends, family, and Sheldon, I’ve barely had a minute to myself in… forever.”

  A certain Bruno Mars song came on, and he turned it up. “Every time I hear this song, I think of you.” He reached for her hand. “I was too stupid to realize you were the best thing that had ever happened to me. By the time I’d admitted it to myself, you’d moved on, found a man who was smart enough to give you all the things you needed.”

  “My relationship with Sheldon wasn’t perfect,” she said, closing her eyes. The music touched a place in her soul that had been dormant for a long time. Just knowing Jaxon had regrets made her feel alive again. Alive and scared. “He had his own issues.”

  “He told me about his ex-wife. It sounded like she really did a number on him.”

  “Don’t we all have someone like that in our past?” she asked, peeking at him out of the corner of her eye. He was impossibly handsome with his bright smile, dark skin, and piercing green eyes, but it wasn’t the man the rest of the world saw that she had fallen in love with. It was the man he only let her see that made him impossible to forget. “Someone we can’t forget, no matter how much they hurt us?”

  He pulled up to a clearing overlooking a lake. The gravel parking lot was deserted and dark. Turning toward her, he killed the engine and removed his seat belt. “Am I that someone for you, the one you couldn’t forget?”

  “Sheldon certainly seemed to think so,” she said, trying to hide her bitterness. “That’s why he broke up with me. He didn’t really ask me how I felt. He just assumed he had all the answers.”

  “Was he wrong?”

  She wanted to say Sheldon had been way off base, but she would be lying to him and herself. “So much has happened, so much history between us.”

  “Not all bad,” he reminded her. “There were good times too.”

  She smiled as she caught his hopeful expression. “Yeah, there were a lot of good times. That’s why I fell in love with you, because the good outweighed the bad.”

  He glanced at her feet. She’d kicked off her high heels and left them on the floor. “I guess you don’t feel like going for a walk?”

  “Actually I’d love to.” After reminding him of how she’d felt, the feelings he hadn’t reciprocated, she couldn’t get out of that car fast enough.

  “But you can’t walk in those shoes.”

  She reached for her bag in the nearly non-existent backseat of his Mercedes. “I walked to work remember? I brought a pair of flats.”

  “Perfect.” He watched her slip into her shoes before he walked around to the passenger’s door to open it for her. “Will you be warm enough? I might have a sweater in the trunk.”

  “I’ll be fine.” It was a crisp night, perfect for clearing her head and gaining some much-needed perspective. She was letting Jaxon get under her skin again, and no matter how many times she told herself it was a mistake, she couldn’t seem to prevent it.

  “Are you sure?” he asked, looking uncertain. “Maybe I should—”

  “I said I’ll be fine.” She reached for his arm. “Come on, let’s go.”

  He let her lead him down the gentle slope toward the small lake. The trail was popular with dog walkers and cyclists during the day, but that night, they had it all to themselves.

  They were silent for a few minutes before he said, “I come out here a lot at night to walk, sometimes jog, and clear my head. I do some of my best thinking here.”

  “Funny, I don’t remember you being all that big on quiet introspection.” Whenever she’d tried to get him to talk about what he was thinking or feeling, he shut her down.

  “My therapist said I should—”

  “Hold up,” she said, shaking her head in disbelief. “Did I hear you right? Did you just say you’re seeing a therapist?”

  He smirked at her shock. “Why is that so hard to believe? You were the one who told me how messed up I was. Turns out you were right. I needed a professional to help me work through what happened when I was a kid.”

  “Has it helped?”

  He shrugged. “I haven’t had very many sessions yet, but it seems to be. We’ve talked a lot about my dad… and my mom. Their marriage. Why I felt my mother was partially responsible for his death and why I still blame myself.”

  Sela was so touched he was sharing something so personal and intimate with her. She was afraid to break the spell by asking any questions, so she just listened, hoping he would continue to open up to her.

  “Not only that, but…” He looked out at the water. There were little cabins on the other side of the lake, and a few lights were on inside them, like beacons in the darkness. “I shared with my therapist some of the thoughts I’ve had that have scared me.”

  She was almost afraid to ask. “Do you care to talk to me about those thoughts, or are they too personal?”

  He inhaled deeply before his grip on her hand tightened. “I should have talked to you about this when we were together, but I wasn’t man enough then.”

  “Maybe you just weren’t ready,” she said. He’d always been his own worst critic. “Are you ready now?”

  “There were times when I wondered if I was like my dad, you know, if it was hereditary.”

  “What are you talking about?” She watched her feet instead of looking at him. She was afraid she knew what he was getting at, and just thinking about it scared her.

  “I’ve had some pretty dark thoughts over the years. I didn’t know if everyone did, or if it was just me. I
thought maybe I got that from my old man.”

  “You mean you’ve thought about killing yourself?” Her chest constricted to the point she could barely breathe. In spite of the fact they hadn’t been a part of each other’s lives for a long time, she couldn’t imagine a world without Jaxon.

  “I have.” He released her hand and walked to the wood logs that created a barrier so no one would fall down the embankment and into the water.

  She stood beside him. She wanted to say something but wasn’t sure what she should say.

  “Not often,” he said. “Just now and then, when things got really bad. Like when I couldn’t decide what to do with my life, or when my mother got on my nerves to the point I couldn’t stand it anymore.” He tipped his head to look at her. “Or when you left me.”

  “I didn’t want to leave you,” she whispered. “You made me.”

  “That’s the part I couldn’t cope with, knowing I’d driven you away.”

  She slipped under his arm, stood directly in front of him, and grabbed his face. “How dare you think about taking your own life? Don’t you know that would have destroyed me?” She cupped his gorgeous face, wondering how someone so perfect on the outside could be so flawed on the inside.

  “I thought I’d be doing you a favor,” he said, his voice breaking. “I just assumed after what I’d done to you that you’d want to see me dead.”

  “You’re so wrong.” A tear glided down her cheek, and she made no move to brush it away. For the first time, she didn’t care if he saw how much loving him had cost her. “When you love someone the way I loved you, you want them to be happy, even if it’s with someone else.”

  “I don’t believe that.” He lowered his eyes. “I loved you, and I never wanted you to be happy with anyone else. Maybe I’m not as selfless as you are.”

  His words pierced her. “Did you say you loved me?”

  “Of course I did.” He pinned her with his intense gaze. “Don’t tell me you didn’t know that.”

  “A girl can hope…” It wasn’t easy to find words, especially when they would leave her raw and exposed. “But after a while, she has to face reality.”