by Katee Robert
Roxanne knew it better than anyone, but he’d been making progress. She was supposed to be his calming effect, be someone he really valued. “He threw me away like yesterday’s trash.”
“Uh, no, he didn’t.”
“You weren’t there. He said—”
Elle held up a hand. “I’m not going to pretend I understand what happened between you two in the parking lot, but I was there when he stood up to Mom and told our parents that he wouldn’t take the job they offered him. Heck, he told her if she couldn’t accept you then he’d have no part of the family at all.”
Her entire world slowed down to a near-standstill. “I thought he wanted that job.”
“Apparently he wants you more.” Except he still abandoned her.
“But—”
“Let me ask you a question.”
“Not like I have a choice.” If Ian had been willing to turn down the job for her, then he couldn’t have really meant things were over between them. Could he? None of this made any sense.
“You don’t.” Elle nodded, as regal as a queen. She looked a whole lot like her mother right then, but without the mean edge. “Do you love my brother?”
“It doesn’t matter if I do. He left me.”
“Oh please. You knew my brother had issues when you decided to date him. So you had a fight—so what? Everyone fights, Roxanne. It doesn’t have to be the end of a relationship unless you want it to be, so stop playing the martyr.”
Anger bloomed, and Roxanne welcomed it with arms held wide. “I can’t believe you just said that to me.”
“Someone has to.” Elle pushed to her feet and smoothed down her ivory skirt. “I’m meeting Gabe for lunch, so I’ve got to go. But maybe you need to sit down and figure out if you really love my brother. Sometimes love means not walking away when things get rough. But sometimes love means chasing the idiot down and knocking some sense into him.”
Roxanne waited a full five minutes after Elle left her office to slowly stand. Her body didn’t move quite right, as if she’d taken yet another hit but didn’t register it yet. Why couldn’t Elle have sat there and offered her unconditional support? All she had to do was nod and agree that, yes, Ian had betrayed her, and he totally wasn’t good for her because of it. He chose this. Not her. Elle wasn’t supposed to throw the ball into her court and just walk away.
“Goddamn it.” Roxanne grabbed her purse and headed for the door. She paused by Mallory’s desk. “What’s my afternoon look like?”
“Clear. Though you said something about hunting down a florist for the Clarkston sweet-sixteen party.”
Right. The exotic freaking flowers the diva just had to have. “I can’t move on that until I know which way she’s falling on the entertainment issue.” With her current streak of luck, the girl would rile up her parents, and they’d call the whole thing off. Then Roxanne would be stuck with an order of ridiculously expensive flowers. She readjusted her grip on her purse. “I’m going to run a few errands and cut out early. You can head out whenever.”
Mallory frowned, but she nodded. “I have a few things to finish up, and then I’ll get going.”
“Great. See you tomorrow.” Tomorrow she’d have her game face on. There’d be no pity parties or being distracted or any of the shit she’d dealt with today. Yes, the mess with Ian had thrown her, but she’d bounce back. She had to.
Roxanne drove home, seeming to make the trip between one blink and the next. Okay, she shouldn’t be zoning out while driving. What if she’d run down some poor granny or something? It’d be the cherry to top off the piece of shit of a month she had going right now.
Shaking her head, she walked through the lobby and stopped in front of the elevator. Even with the doors closed, she couldn’t stomach the thought of standing still long enough to make the ride. She shouldered through the stairwell door and started climbing. Seven stories in six-inch heels? It was no more than she deserved for being a special kind of idiot. By the time she hit the seventh floor, her legs were shaking in a distinctly unattractive way, and she’d lost feeling in her left foot. Her right foot, on the other hand, felt like one big blister.
Roxanne barely made it three steps into her apartment when a flash of pink on her fridge caught her attention for the millionth time. She turned, horror- movie slow, to see the note hanging there, secured by a Girls Gone Wild magnet she’d gotten from the last bachelorette party she’d gone to.
She should have thrown the damn note away the first time she noticed it, instead of trying to ignore it. Obviously, he’d written it after the last night they spent wrapped up in each other. It could say anything. Hell, it was probably a grocery list.
Despite knowing it was a mistake, she crossed to the fridge and pulled the note out from beneath the magnet. It was short and simple, written as an afterthought before he walked out the door.
I’m going to spend the next two days counting down until I see you again.
* * *
Have a great day.
Then he’d signed it with a little heart and his name. Had he known, even then, that this infatuation was heading over the short drop to… Holy shit, she couldn’t even think the word anymore.
“Oh my God, I am so broken.” She collapsed onto her bed and curled up, Ian’s note clutched against her chest. “It doesn’t matter if he loves me. He left me.”
Except, each time she repeated the words, the protest seemed a little bit weaker. If Ian had really been willing to sacrifice the job he wanted—the future he wanted—for her, then how come he’d turned around and said all those hurtful things?
She forced herself to play over the night again, trying to get past her hurt and see the events from a distanced point of view. Ian had been sweating and shaking and obviously on the verge of another panic attack. If she’d reached out to him then—instead of reacting with fear and accusations—would he have calmed down enough to take back what he’d said?
Had she taken a horrible night and made it a thousand times worse by projecting her issues onto him?
Oh God, what had she done?
Elle’s words circled through her mind again. Sometimes loves means chasing the idiot down and knocking some sense into him. Roxanne sat up and looked around her loft, her gaze landing on the incomplete dresser she loved so much.
Maybe it was time to do just that.
22
The loft wasn’t empty when Ian unlocked the front door. He stopped in the doorway and stared at Nathan, who lay sprawled over the entirety of the couch, his forearm covering his eyes as if the bare light of the single lamp was too much to bear. It was all very dramatic, which was completely unlike Nathan. Ian figured he hadn’t done it on purpose, but he wasn’t in the mood to be charitable. “What are you doing here? Waiting for your True Love’s kiss? ’Cause that shit isn’t going to happen.”
“I couldn’t sleep.”
“So obviously the logical solution is to drive into town and not sleep here.” Ian shook his head. “You want a beer?” Because he could sure as hell use one after his run. He’d come home from working on his house and been so damn restless he’d tossed on a pair of shorts and run so far his legs were shaking.
It still didn’t help.
“Actually, yeah.” Nathan sat up and rubbed his eyes. “I figured you weren’t sleeping much these days, between adjusting to being back in town and a certain pretty brunette.”
“She’s not an issue anymore.” Ian tossed a beer over and opened one of his own. Since his fight with Roxanne, he’d been craving something harder than beer, but he knew enough to know drinking whiskey was a terrible idea right now. He’d all but given up hard alcohol after he got back from the desert. The exception being the night he got back into town, and look how well that had turned out.
Nathan shook his head, concern lighting his face. “I thought things were going well with her.”
“They were.” All week, when he was ripping up carpet, steaming down wallpaper, or breaking tile into tiny little
pieces, he wasn’t thinking about Roxanne. Except it didn’t really work. She was always there, in the back of his mind, right next to all the unforgivable shit he’d said to her that night. Now, with the space of time and distance between them, he could acknowledge how fucked up he’d been when he’d left the restaurant that night. He’d known what a big deal saying “I love you” was to her, and he’d turned around and told her he couldn’t be with her.
Considering the conversation they’d had not twenty-four hours previous to that, he shouldn’t have been surprised that she’d reacted the way she did. “What happened?”
“I lost it at dinner with my family last Friday.” Even now, the pressure in his chest thumped at the memory. “It was a mess. So I ended things.”
“Wait. You dumped Roxanne because you fought with your family?”
“Yes.” It was the best for her. He couldn’t subject her to all of his shit.
“I hate to say it, but your logic might be flawed. Then again, relationships have been ended over less.” Nathan dropped back onto the couch and propped his feet on the coffee table.
Ian took the chair opposite—the same chair Roxanne had sat in barely two weeks ago. God, he needed to stop thinking about her. She deserved better than he could give her. If only his heart would acknowledge that logic and stop aching in his chest.
Then what Nathan said registered. That hadn’t sounded like a meaningless platitude—that sounded like the voice of experience talking. “What do you mean?”
Nathan smiled, but not like anything was funny. “There was a woman, a long time ago. It’s ancient history now.”
As much as he cared about his best friend, he didn’t like to think that this was his future—to be sitting there years from now, telling this story with the ghost of Roxanne in his eyes. Because, whoever this chick was, Nathan hadn’t walked away whole. Ian wanted to ask for more details since this was the first time Nathan had brought her up, but he wasn’t sure the other man would welcome the questions. “I’m sorry.”
“Don’t be. It’s not your fault. And as I said, it’s ancient history.”
It sure didn’t sound like ancient history.
Still, Ian let it go. There didn’t seem to be many safe subjects to talk about these days. “So why can’t you sleep? Nightmares?”
“More like general insomnia—can’t seem to turn my brain off.” Nathan shrugged.“I usually come to this loft to think or plot out my next project.”
“What are you working on now?” Ian had seen the works Nathan had set up on the gallery floor, and the sheer level of detail in those scrap-metal sculptures amazed him.With a talent like that, he wasn’t sure why Nathan had bothered to enlist in the first place—he knew for a fact the man made a killing selling his art.
Nathan tipped back his beer, draining half of it. “I’m in between projects. I’ve finished the one I was working on the night you got into town, and now I’m in the planning stages of another. It’s inspired by Icarus.”
“Wasn’t that the kid with wings?”
“He had a pair, but they were made by his father. He was warned not to fly too high, or too low, but he managed to do both.” Nathan picked at his beer label. “The story speaks to me.”
Yeah, Ian could see how it would. He identified with walking a fine line between one extreme and the other. On one side, he had the gaping hole of his past, all too willing to suck him under if he were weak enough to give in to the anxiety that pressed him. On the other, he had run the risk of losing himself in Roxanne. That hadn’t seemed like a bad thing at the time, but with the sick feeling in his stomach only growing as the minutes ticked by, he was forced to face reality—falling in love with Roxanne might have been even worse than turning into a paranoid basket case.
“So what are you going to do?”
That was the question. “What am I supposed to do? Things are the way they are.”
“I’m going to give you a piece of unsolicited advice.”
“Can we do this another time?” With everything such a toxic mess in his head, Ian wasn’t ready to add another voice to the confusion.
“Nope.” Nathan rolled off the couch and to his feet in a ridiculously graceful motion. “If you love her, make things right. If you don’t, you’re always going to wonder if you could have done something to make it work. Don’t do that to yourself.”
“She deserves a man with a less complicated situation than I have.”
“Life is complicated. There isn’t going to come a time when everything magically falls into place between two perfect people. You have to take your happiness where you can get it, and it sounded like she made you happy.” Nathan laughed. “Jesus, I’m like Dr. Phil over here or something. You know I had a pretty damn similar conversation with my brother not too long ago about Elle. He chose to keep trying, and they managed to work their issues out. Maybe you and Roxanne can, too.”
Ian spoke without thinking. “What happened to that girl? The one who got away? Is there any chance for you to make things right?”
The silence stretched on so long, he opened his mouth to apologize for overstepping. If Nathan didn’t want to talk about his past, it was none of Ian’s goddamn business. But then Nathan sighed, his shoulders dropping. “I don’t know.”
Since he hadn’t completely shut him down, Ian asked, “Have you ever thought of trying again?”
“Every damn day.” Nathan cleared his throat and looked away. “But enough about me. What are you going to do about Roxanne?”
“I don’t know.” Up until two minutes ago, he hadn’t been planning on doing anything other than trying to move on with his life. But Nathan’s words resonated with him. She did make him happy, and he was pretty sure he did the same for her.Was that enough to create a lasting relationship?
He looked at his best friend, at the weary way his shoulders sloped and the shadows in his eyes, and suddenly knew that if he didn’t at least try to make things work with her, this would be his future. No one had ever touched him on the level Roxanne did before now.
Could he go through his life running the risk he’d never find it again?
No. He loved this woman. He wasn’t perfect— would never be perfect—but like Nathan had said, life wasn’t perfect. What he had with her was something special, though. “I don’t know how to fix this.”
Now that he’d decided to do something about this mess, it was everything Ian could do not to go running out the door right now. The only thing stopping him was the fact that he didn’t have a plan, and showing up at Roxanne’s place without one would be a mistake. He’d only get one chance at this, so he had to make it count.
“Have you tried groveling with flowers and chocolates? Maybe buy her a piece of artwork? I hear both those things work.”
Groveling wouldn’t do a damn thing, and she wasn’t much of an art fan. He needed something to make Roxanne stop and take notice. “I need something… bigger.”
“What does this bigger look like?”
Christ if he knew. Ian sighed. “I’m going to have to think about it.”
“You’ll come up with something.”
The vote of confidence might have felt stronger if he had any idea of how to move forward. “Yeah. I’m sure I will.”
“Just keep tearing into whatever part of your house you’re focusing on now, and I’m sure it’ll come to you.”
“I’ll do that.” He paused. “Thanks.”
“No problem. Like I said, I’m here if you need me. And on that note, I’m going home.” Nathan grabbed his keys and walked out the door, leaving Ian alone with his thoughts once more. He’d figure this shit out. He just needed to pull the right trigger to get Roxanne’s attention.
23
“Ouch!” Roxanne jammed her shoulder against the house as she reached for the doorknob. It was so early in the morning the dew hadn’t evaporated off the grass. Hell, the sun was barely up. The things she did for love. “Hang on while I get this.”
“I am han
ging on.” Elle’s voice was muffled. “Pretty sure I left a portion of my foot back on the porch step, though.”
The door opened beneath her hand. “Got it.” “Tell me why we’re doing this again?”
Roxanne wobbled as she used her heel to push the door open farther.“Because I screwed up and you told me I needed to fix it.”
“Yeah, I get that. What I don’t get is why we’re hauling your favorite dresser into Ian’s unfinished house at six in the morning.”
She could barely see the top of Elle’s blond head on the other side of the dresser. “Here, let’s put it against this wall.” They limped over and awkwardly dropped it to the ground. Roxanne wiped her hands on her jeans and surveyed what would eventually become the…living room? It was hard to tell with the floor all torn to shit and the walls exposed. She shook her head. “I thought the house would be further along than this.” A lot further.
“He’s been working on it pretty much every day since you guys had that falling-out, but there’s still a lot left to do. Obviously.”
She’d been operating under the assumption that she’d sneak into his nearly finished house, get her dresser situated in his room, and then sit at the dining room table and do a crossword until he showed up. Or something. She turned another circle, her feet making patterns in the sawdust.
Elle glanced at the dresser. “I still don’t get why we couldn’t have asked Gabe for help. I broke a nail, and I’m pretty sure my big toe will never be the same.” “I told you. If Gabe knows, then there’s a decent chance he’ll tell Nathan, and Nathan and Ian are best friends, so what’s to keep him from spilling the beans?” “I really don’t think they talk as much as you think.” Elle frowned. “You’re kind of acting like a basket case. Are you sure this is what you want?”
“Yes?” Truth was, she could barely keep her head on straight right now. She ran her hand over the top of the dresser. It looked ridiculous sitting here in this unfinished house. “Maybe this wasn’t a good idea.” It wouldn’t be the first time she made an idiot mistake when it came to Ian.