by A. J. Chase
"Fielding," he shouted. "I know that you're in there. Now open the bloody door."
Harry was still on the other end of the line. "Miss French, I really wish that you'd let me call security."
"It's okay, Harry." Lie. "I can handle him." Lie. "He doesn't scare me." Lie. His ability to tear her barely mending heart open again scared her badly, but that didn't constitute the use of security.
"If I don't hear from you again in the next ten minutes, I'm going to call security," he ground into the line.
Chandler was knocking harder and demanding to see Anne. That little schemer. She had set them up. She had to get the doorman off the phone before Chandler knocked her door down.
"Yes, okay. That's fine. Thank you, Harry." She hung up the phone and skirted up to the door as if she couldn't approach it head on.
Finally, she pressed her cheek against the door, which felt cool and calmed her a little. She could hear him breathing on the other side of the wood. She closed her eyes.
"Chandler, what are you doing here?" The words were hardly loud enough for him to hear.
"I want to see Anne," he demanded. "I have no idea why she came here, but she needs to come home with me."
"She's not here," Fielding told the wood.
"Don't lie to me about my daughter. Let me in."
She shook her head, even though he couldn't see her. "I can't do that. You'll just have to believe me that she's not here."
"Why would I believe anything you tell me?" He demanded harshly. Then she heard him curse and then sigh. "I know how capable Anne is of drawing people in to her schemes. She told me she was here. Don't feel like you have to protect her. Just let me in."
Wounded by his words, she pulled back slightly from the door. "She's not here. I mean, she was. But she's not anymore. You can believe me or not, but I'm not letting you in."
He swore again, and she heard a thud as his shoulder fell against the door. "Fielding, I just flew sixteen hours without a minute of sleep, and I'm tired, and my back hurts, and I want you to open the door and talk to me. Just tell me what she did while she was here and where you think she might have gone."
It wasn't an unreasonable request, but she couldn't oblige him. She knew she would crumble if she saw him, and she was not going to make a fool of herself in front of him again. "I can't."
She pressed her hand against the door, wishing she was strong enough to allow herself the incredible pleasure of seeing him, smelling his scent, one more time, but she wasn't. She would just end up showing her weakness, and she never wanted to be in that position again.
"Please, Fielding." His coaxing voice shot straight through her body like molten lava. She bit her lip. "I'm already here. Let me see you."
She groaned, but suppressed it hopefully before he could hear it. "Why? Why would you want to see me? What makes you think I want to see you?"
There was no answer for several seconds. She had to strain to hear his response. "I don't know. I don't understand anything I do when the matter is you. I can understand why you wouldn't want to see me, but Anne obviously wanted me to see you, and here I am, so the least I would think you could do is open the door and talk to me."
She sighed. He was right. She was being unreasonable, and she would just have to pull herself together and suck it up. She unlocked the door and stood aside to let him in.
She had been right. His physical presence was unaccountably painful. She sucked her breath in as he crossed into her living room. He was dressed unseasonably warmly, just as Harry had said, and he did, indeed, need a haircut. His hair was shaggy and hung almost to the collar of his shirt. It had turned gray at the temples. It wasn't fair that he should be so gorgeous.
He looked at her, and then flinched slightly turning to look out the window instead. She sighed and slammed the door shut. His shoulders jerked slightly at the noise, but he still didn't turn around.
"So now you're in." She crossed her arms across her chest like they were a talisman that would ward him away. "What do you want?"
He laughed. The same short, bitter sound that she remembered. Had it really been only four months? It seemed like years. "I want to go back to the beginning and start over," he said.
The beginning of what? Life? Pirates? His recent trip to New York? She had no idea, so she didn't say anything at all, just stood with her arms crossed hating how she had missed the wide arc of his shoulders and the line of his back as it faced away from her. Abruptly, he turned around and instead of staring at the back of his head, she was looking into his fathomless eyes.
She hissed, backing against the door and wishing she hadn't closed it. Why did she let him reach her like this? Why couldn't she just put it behind her?
"What did Anne want from you?" He took two steps in her direction, cringing slightly as she backed into the wood, trying to get farther away.
"I don't really know." That wasn't true. She just felt like an idiot telling him the truth. But after what lay between them, the viable option for them to communicate was the truth. "She wanted me to forgive you."
He froze into that complete stillness that she had never seen anyone but him perfect. "Do you?" His voice was low and tentative.
Her jaw clenched. She hated this conversation like she wished she hated him. "Would it matter if I do? Would it make you hate me any less?" Her anger and bitterness of the last four months twisted her words.
He sighed, and his shoulders suddenly slumped. "I trusted you. I…" A muscle in his jaw worked. "You used me."
She recoiled slightly. How she wished he wasn't here. That she wasn't so weak when it came to him. That she could order him out and pretend like she had never met him at all.
"I didn't mean to." The words were so hard to release that they burned her throat on the way out. "I didn't even know you. But I knew Mac, and I knew I owed him, and he said he owed you. I was just trying to do the right thing."
"How could stealing my soul and giving it away ever be the right thing?"
His demand was phrased the same way that he had talked about newspapers before, and after the way she had felt when she had seen Anne's clip, she could almost understand where he was coming from. And he had suffered a thousand more such invasions, many at the hands of her uncle.
"All I wanted to do was prove your innocence as he asked me to do and find the real killer. I wasn't ever supposed to know you, not really. Mac told me to stay away from you." She frowned. "I should have listened."
He flinched. "Why didn't you?" He sounded truly interested, so she told him, even though she knew that they would both regret it.
She smiled slightly, tinged with bitterness. "Because I thought you were beautiful and tortured, and I wanted to help you, and then I wanted to kiss you, and then I wanted you inside me, and then I was stupid enough to fall in love with you. How was I supposed to walk away from the kind of feelings that I never ever really believed existed before I saw you?"
"I don't know."
Chandler didn't. He wasn't just saying that. He didn't know how he had ever walked away from her. He had been living in a daze for months, unable to face the reality of what he had thrown away because he was bitter and scared and couldn't believe that anyone, let alone Fielding, could ever truly love him. Seeing her was almost more than he could handle and still keep such a tight grip on himself.
"You didn't write any stories," he stated as if he had checked, which he probably had.
"I don't even want to be a reporter," she whispered. "That was Mac's dream. I just wanted to see you go free from those unfair accusations. I just wanted to help you."
He didn't know how to believe her. Just like he didn't know how to forgive her, or how to love her. Sadly, he also didn't know how to stay angry at her or how to push the emotions he felt for her away, so either way he was pretty much screwed.
"I don't know how to believe you," he finally muttered. "I don't know how to believe that you ever really loved me. How could you?" He held his arms out. "Look at me."
Her face softened, and she took a step toward him before she stopped. His heart beat hard in his chest. "Whatever other lies I told you, Chandler, my feelings were never one of them. I did love you. I loved you so much that it crippled me from telling the truth when I should have, and I am sorry for that. But I'm not sorry that I loved you, even though I keep telling myself that the only way to retain my sanity is to hate you for leaving me and to be sorry I was that weak, but I'm not."
He looked at her highly polished wood floors and swallowed. There was nowhere to go but forward. Nothing he could rely on but the truth. No matter how ugly it was. No matter how bare it stripped him.
"My whole life I've been building walls to keep people out. I learned how when I was just a boy, because if I didn't, it would have killed me that my parents were more interested in horses and strangers than they were in me. Then I just got better at it. Whatever was left to be erected came during my marriage to Helena. She was more than happy to help me hate the world all the more."
He rubbed a shaking hand over his face. "You destroyed all my hard work in two months. You took every wall I had and knocked it down with so little effort. I went so many years feeling nothing, and now I feel everything. The beauty of my daughter's heart, the rain on my face, every single breath you take. I can feel them all through every inch of me, and I know I should hate you for that. For taking my defenses away and then taking advantage of me while I was down, but I can't. I can't do anything sane when it comes to you."
He looked back up at her. She hadn't moved at all. She was still standing in that same position she always struck when she wanted to protect herself. Arms crossed across her chest like the fragile gesture would keep evil and hurt away.
"I'm sorry I left, Fielding. Truly I am. I'm sorry that I didn't protect you. I'm sorry that I wasn't man enough to stay when I didn't believe that you were sincere in your feelings. I thought it would just make me a fool. But I'm very afraid that walking away was the most foolish thing I've ever done."
She shook her head ever so slightly. "I forgive you, Chandler. I hope that you can forgive me. What I did to you was unconscionable. But I guess it doesn't really matter, does it? We made too many mistakes, you and me. The whole event is nothing but another regret now."
Was she rejecting him after he had bared himself to her? He refused to accept that. "What about forward?"
Her head jerked up, and she stared into his eyes, her pale green ones widening slightly. "What?"
"You're right. We've both been fools, and we can't ever go back and meet like normal human beings. But what about forward? What about making new and different mistakes. You and me."
She flushed slightly, and he took another step in her direction. They were close enough to touch. "What are you saying?" she asked, her voice sounding shaky.
What was he saying? He had no bloody idea. But he was saying it anyway.
"I'm saying that I'm an angry, aging, bastard who's probably never going to get any better. But I love you. I do. I don't know how to love you, but the feeling overwhelms me anyway, whether I give it permission to assail me or not. So if you think that you can deal with that, I'm saying…I don't know exactly what I'm saying, except that…I love you and…I'm sorry."
She was still staring at him like she couldn't quite believe the words that were coming out of his mouth. He smiled. Really smiled. It was so unused that it felt weird and rusty.
She observed him for another second. "You really mean it?"
"Yes. I really do mean it," he whispered."
"No more pride?"
He smiled again. It was a little easier this time. "I can't make that promise. But I promise that I will do everything in my power to see that you are not the one who pays for it. No more lies?"
"Agreed." She cocked her head to the side. "No more refusing my proclamations of love?"
He was grinning now. "Agreed. No more running away. For either of us."
She smiled too. When he was a boy, he had always been slightly mystified how the smallest ray of light could break through those heavy English clouds and warm him. Fielding's smile was the same. It peeked just a little more through the clouds he couldn't help but hold close to himself, and warmed him.
"Agreed," she whispered back.
Then she launched herself across the three feet that separated them and into his arms, knocking the breath out of him. Then her mouth was on his, doing the exact same thing.
His mouth tasted like every emotion that he had wrung out of Fielding in the months that he had been gone. She wanted to crawl into his skin, consume him before he changed his mind. She licked into his mouth, tore off his coat, his shirt, scored her nails against his skin while he laughed deep in his throat. She had heard it from him before. He laughed when he was pleased. He would be even more pleased in five minutes if she had her way.
She pushed him back on the couch and climbed into his lap. He stopped laughing and started caressing, tasting. He pulled her shirt over her head, moaning at the discovery of the nothing she wore underneath, and gave it an indiscriminate toss. He paused for a short moment, touching trembling fingers to the scar across her abdomen. Chandler pulled in a hard breath and she knew she was losing him, to regret, to shame, to demons of Sara and the past. Fielding pushed his head up so he could no longer look at the thick white scar, raised against her skin. When he met her eyes, she raised a single eyebrow and leaned in, softly pressing her mouth to his.
It was enough.
He plunged back into the kiss, pulling her farther into his lap. She fumbled with the button of his jeans moving her thumb over the part of his hardness that she wasn't rubbing herself against. He hissed in pleasure, his eyes closing. She got the button undone and was working on the zipper, impeded by their erotic movements and the trembling of her fingers. He tasted like the future, and he was never getting away from her again.
Suddenly, the door flung open and slammed against the wall. Every single one of her building's half a dozen security men poured in with a frantic Harry pulling up the rear. Fielding screamed and covered up her chest. Chandler pulled her tight against him and stared at the invaders. The security men stopped and stared at them. They looked at Harry and then back at the half naked couple entwined on the couch.
"I told you I was going to call security if you didn't call," Harry defended.
"I don't need any help," she muttered, burying her face in Chandler's shoulder.
"But…"
Chandler cut Harry off while the security team continued to gape. "What the bloody hell is the matter with the whole lot of you? Why are you all just standing there like a bunch of bloody idiots? Does she look like she's being raped to you? Good Lord, man, she's on top."
Chandler was yelling now. "Get out all of you."
She started to laugh against his shoulder, inhaling the incredible scent of his skin with every breath. "If I have to get off this couch, I swear that every one of you will be sorry!" Chandler shouted.
She laughed so hard that tears were coming to her eyes. The security team looked at each other and headed back out the door. Harry looked at her and Chandler for another moment, confusion evident on every line of his face. Finally he followed them out. "Close the bloody door," Chandler yelled after him.
The door slammed shut, and she smiled up at him, cupping his cheeks in her hands. It was just as Josh had described it all those months ago. They were two screwed up people who had found the one person who could make them feel human again. Chandler was the same old irascible, impatient perfectionist and would always be, and, God, she loved him for that. She hoped that he never did change, except to be a little more open to emotions. They would work on that. Every day. Otherwise, she would take him just the way he was. And as often as she could.
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ABOUT THE AUTHOR
AJ Chase lives in the desert southwest with her husband, who is good at everything but she loves him anyway, and three children who are amazingly smart and evil for things so little and cute. She divides her time between making mac and cheese, digging ground Pop-Tart out of the carpet, and writing romantic comedies and romantic suspense. Under another name she also writes series mysteries. She has a weakness for things that make her laugh and dead bodies. Not necessarily together.
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BOOKS BY AJ CHASE
Awaken the Devil
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SNEAK PEEK
If you enjoyed this novel, check out this sneak peek of another suspenseful romance from Gemma Halliday Publishing:
HARD TO KILL
by
WENDY BYRNE
PROLOGUE
"Get the hell out of there. Now." Jennings' voice crackled to life in Sabrina's earpiece.
She ignored his command even while her skin itched, foretelling her sixth sense kicking in. Yep, she was close.
"Now, Shaw. His friends are heading your way. You—"
She clicked off the receiver to stop the tirade that no doubt would follow. A few minutes. That was all she needed.
Tiptoeing up the metal staircase in her black combat-style boots, she inched her way to apartment 203. Eddie Ramer might be able to fool the cops but not her. The bottom feeder had been enticing Caitlyn for weeks with his promise of high-paying modeling gigs. And then she'd disappeared.
Coincidence? Yeah, right.
A heavy smell of weed permeated the air, despite the open balconies outside the apartment doors. The metal railing and no-tell-motel appearance of the building didn't shock her. In fact it worked in her favor. The thin walls made her privy to the conversations along the journey to her prize.