by Evelyn Glass
“Guess you’ll have to do,” she tells her reflection. She grabs a little jacket from the top of the pile without pausing to second guess her choice and heads towards the door, preparing herself to spend an afternoon with Grayson Fletcher, the only man who she had ever loved.
CHAPTER FIFTEEN
GRAYSON
Nervous wasn’t really part of his vocabulary, especially not around women. He’d become used to them fulfilling a primal need for him, nothing more. He doesn’t remember the last time he’d had an actual date. But is that what this is? Standing outside Adriana’s front door, he starts to wonder if he should be here at all, if she even wants to see him. As the door opens, he realizes it’s too late to turn back and, besides, he doesn’t think he’d be able to move even if he’d wanted to.
“Hey!” Adriana smiles at him and locks him in with those eyes that she should need a permit for.
“Hey.” Grayson can’t seem to say anything else. His throat is suddenly dry, and the sound of his own heart beating is deafening in his ears. She’s so beautiful that she literally takes his breath away. They stand awkwardly until Grayson regains the power of speech. “Nice place.” He nods over Adriana’s shoulder towards the apartment behind.
Adriana makes a face as if to contradict him. “It’s seen better days, but it’s home.” She shrugs noncommittally. “Shall we head out?” She doesn’t wait for an answer before pulling the door closed behind her and locking it.
Grayson finds himself relieved that at least one of them isn’t having any trouble making a decision. He nods, not trusting himself to say anything else, not when she’s so close that he can smell her. The rose perfume he’d noticed the night before is intoxicating, and he wonders how the hell he’s supposed to drive with her in his car.
He opens the door of his Jeep for her, something he hasn’t done for any woman before. He wonders where this sudden sense of chivalry has come from; it sure as hell isn’t anything he’d inherited from dear old dad. As he settles himself into the driver’s seat, he becomes acutely aware of her presence next to him.
“So, where are we headed?” Adriana looks at him expectantly.
Grayson curses himself. He hadn’t actually gotten that far in his plans. Just working up the courage to see her had taken up most of his thoughts. He says the first thing that comes into his head, a theme that seems to be recurring around Adriana. He’d forgotten how she had made him feel completely tongue-tied. He had never been able to bullshit her, and it seems like that’s one thing that hasn’t changed between them, even if so much other stuff had.
“I thought we could head down to South Beach. You still like to walk?” He grips the steering wheel hard so that he doesn’t reach out to touch the smooth skin on her endless legs. Get a grip, Grayson; it’s not like you’ve never seen a girl in shorts before. But Adriana wasn’t just any girl, she never had been.
She smiles at him with that smile that makes her eyes shine. “Yeah, I still like to walk.” She doesn’t offer anything more, but he gets the feeling that she’s pleased, and the knowledge that he’s the reason for that gives him a warm sensation in his chest.
They drive in silence, and Grayson is glad to be able to concentrate on the road rather than on the girl in the seat next to him. It’s as if his body is completely attuned to her; he’s aware of every slight movement that she makes, and he has to resist the urge to stop the car and ravish her right there. It was the same feeling he’d had the night before when he’d come face to face with her in the club; she did something to him that he couldn’t describe. She awakened feelings in him that he thought he was incapable of having anymore.
He’s grateful when he can finally pull into a parking spot and get out of the damn car; being in such close proximity to her was dangerous and confusing and wonderful all at the same time.
He takes her hand to help her out of the Jeep, and the contact is like an electric shock passing between them. Adriana’s eyes go wide and her perfect rosebud mouth opens in surprise. Whatever the hell that was, she feels it, too.
“So, no work today?” Grayson steps away from her and leads her towards the paved promenade.
“No.” Her voice sounds breathless. He knows the feeling. “Early shift tomorrow though, prepping for surgery on a little girl to remove a tumor.”
The way she says the words makes it clear there’s more to it than a routine operation. “Shit, that’s tough. You care about her, don’t you?”
“I care about all my patients. But it’s always harder when you’ve known them a long time. Casey has been at the hospital longer than I have.” She laughs without humor to cover her emotions. “Poor kid, she’s had more surgeries than anyone I’ve seen. She’s only eleven, you know? How is that fair?” Adriana looks at Grayson as if she’s hoping he can give her some kind of answer, and he finds himself wanting to come up with something that will comfort her. He wants to put his arm around her and tell her that everything will be alright. But he can’t do that.
“It’s not fair.” Grayson shakes his head. “But I’ve learned that not a lot of things in this world are.” There’s a bitterness in his voice that he barely even notices anymore. “Casey is lucky to have someone like you looking out for her, caring about her. When did you decide to become a nurse? I don’t remember you talking about that.”
Adriana gives him a surprised look, as if she’s shocked that he would remember anything that they spoke about all those years ago. But how can she think that he wouldn’t have every second they spent together burned into his memory? Because you left her without a word, genius, he reminds himself.
“No, it wasn’t something I’d thought about until my dad got sick.” Her voice wavers, and she looks out towards the ocean, away from him so that he can’t see the pain in her eyes. “He had a heart condition. I guess on some stupid teenage level I thought that if I became a nurse that I could save him.” She shakes her head at the naiveté of her younger self. “He died a little while after I started at Mercy. I wasn’t even there when it happened.”
Grayson doesn’t stop to think about whether he should or shouldn’t do what he’s about to; he only thinks about what feels right. And, right now, what feels right is comforting Adriana. He snakes his arm around her shoulders and turns her round to face him. She looks down at her feet, avoiding his eyes.
“Hey, you don’t have to hide from me.” He holds her face between his hands, lifting her head up to meet his eyes. His heart feels like it might break for her, as he sees a tear trickle down her cheek. He chases it away with the pad of his thumb, wishing that he could take away her pain so easily. “I’m sorry about your dad. I know you two were close. I’m sure he’d be really proud of you.” He leans his head down to get closer to her. His face is only inches from hers, close enough to kiss. He feels like her lips are attracting him like a magnet. But no, he can’t go down this road, not with Adriana, not when he knows how hard it was to let her go the first time, he’s not sure he could do it again and he would have to, for her safety. He takes a deep breath and drops his hands.
There’s a flash of something like disappointment in her eyes, but it’s gone as soon as he thinks he’s seen it. She takes a step back from him and starts walking again. “What about your dad? Do you ever hear from him?” Her voice trembles, like she’s trying to recover from whatever just passed between them.
At the mention of his father, Grayson stands up a little straighter. It’s an instinctive reaction; he was always on high alert around his dad…he had to be if he didn’t plan on adding to his collection of scars. “I haven’t seen him in a long time.” He doesn’t add that he’d told his father that if they crossed paths again that he would kill him. Adriana was one of the few people who knew about the abuse, but even she couldn’t imagine the extent of it.
She nods in understanding and doesn’t push him. It’s something that no other girl would do, give him space to tell his story at his own pace. Most women wanted to pump him for information, as if
the more secrets of his they knew, the stronger the hold they’d have on him would be. It is just one of the many ways that Adriana is different from everyone he has ever known.
“How’s your mom? And Kay? She must be, what, like twenty, now?” Adriana had never met Grayson’s family; it was one of the many ways that he had kept his distance from her. It touches him to know that she remembers details like the age of his sister.
“Twenty-one next month, I can’t believe it. It’s like it was only yesterday that she was an obnoxious twelve year old, trying to get me to teach her how to drive!” He smiles at the memory of that day, when Kay hadn’t taken no for an answer and made him teach her how to reverse the car into the driveway.
“It’s nice to see you smile, Gray. You should do it more often.” Adriana nudges him playfully, and he has to stop himself from pulling her into him.
“I smile!” He protests, laughing and feeling more carefree than he has in years.
“No, I’m not talking about that BS grin that you give to all the girls. I’m talking about a real smile, like the one you’re wearing right now.” Adriana nods, beaming back at him. “You know you can be pretty handsome when you’re not so preoccupied with glowering like you’re thinking about punching someone.”
He looks at her open-mouthed. Women tended to just take him at face value; he’d forgotten that Adriana wasn’t like anyone else. “So you think I’m handsome?” He winks at her devilishly, making her laugh again. It’s such a great sound; he knows he wants to be the one to make her laugh all the time.
CHAPTER SIXTEEN
ADRIANA
Adriana blushes prettily and shrugs to cover her embarrassment. “I think you know the effect you have on women.” She gestures towards the girls along the beach that make no effort to pretend that they’re not staring openly at Grayson as he walks with her. She wonders what they must think of her, probably that she’s nowhere near pretty or interesting enough to hold his attention. They’re not wrong and a surge of jealousy catches her off guard. She has no reason to feel jealous. She has no claim on Grayson; she never has.
“I’m not interested in the effect I have on other women. What effect do I have on you, Adriana?” He’s stopped walking and has stilled her with a hand on her arm. There he goes, saying her name like it was a song, and she feels the butterflies in her stomach flap their wings like crazy.
She doesn’t want to answer. She’s incapable of lying to him, and she doesn’t want to give him that power over her, not again, not when she’s worked so hard to put herself back together like a broken china doll. There’s something that she’s desperate to ask him, something that feels like it’s about to burst out of her at any second, something that she’s wondered for a decade. But now that he’s in front of her, it’s harder than she could imagine to ask it.
“Tell me.” His voice is tender, as he ducks his head, forcing her to meet his eyes.
That’s what undoes her; it’s the warmth in his gaze that gives her the confidence she needs to address the elephant in the room, the one that’s been in the corner of her eye since she’d seen him again. She takes a deep breath. Here goes nothing. “Why did you leave? You disappeared without a word, without telling me where you were going. I waited for you, believing that you would come back, that you wouldn’t have just left like that. But you never did.” She feels her voice breaking, as she remembers the hopelessness, the disappointment that had crushed her day after day until she realized that he wasn’t ever going to walk her home again.
Grayson rakes his fingers through his curly brown hair, looking like he doesn’t know what to do with himself. He’s agitated, pacing in front of her, turning away from her and then facing her again, like he can’t decide what to do. He looks like he’s fighting with himself, something that she recognizes from the rebellious kid that he’d been all those years ago.
Eventually, he seems to come to some kind of a decision, and he faces her, just far enough so that she’s out of reach. “I’ve thought about that last day, hundreds of times, thousands.” He takes a deep breath, preparing himself for what he’s going to say. “Trust me when I say that I had to leave. I knew that I didn’t have any kind of future, that I didn’t have anything to offer you.”
Adriana shakes her head, his explanation is nowhere near good enough. “That’s it? You had a crisis of self-confidence!” She barks a laugh, but there’s no humor in it, only bitterness. “I cried for months, Grayson, for months. I wondered what the hell I’d done wrong to make you leave.”
He takes hold of her arms, her skin singing at the contact. “You didn’t do anything. I didn’t leave because of you. It was because of me. I was a screw up, and there were things that I had to do, things that I needed to do, that I couldn’t involve you in.”
“That doesn’t make any sense.” Adriana sighs in frustration, wishing that having him so close didn’t make her brain turn into the same consistency as her hospital’s mashed potatoes. “Why didn’t you at least tell me that you didn’t want to see me again?”
“Because I was a coward.” Her head snaps up at his words, not expecting him to accept responsibility for what he had done. “And it wasn’t that I didn’t want to see you. I knew that if I did, then I wouldn’t have the strength to walk away from you again, and I couldn’t allow that.” His eyes are burning with intensity, and Adriana feels herself taking a step towards him, needing to be closer.
“And now? Do you want to walk away now?” She looks up at him with her heart in her eyes. She knows that she should be trying to protect herself, that this man has the ability to crush her in one fell swoop, but she’s spent so long trying to push her feelings back into their box that she’s so tired of it all.
Grayson lays his hand against her cheek, and she leans into his touch automatically. He doesn’t answer with his words, but with his body. He guides her closer to him, settling her head against his chest, as he encircles her in his arms. Adriana can’t help but let a little contented sigh escape her as she lets him hold her, and she snakes her arms around his muscular torso, pressing herself into his body. She doesn’t know how long they stay like that, but she does know that she doesn’t want to let him go, not ever.
They spend the rest of the day walking along the beach, talking about their lives. Grayson seems genuinely interested in her work at the hospital—and impressed. It’s nice for her to be able to talk so openly and freely about a job that she loves. She asks him about fighting, about why he enjoys it, but when she asks him how he got into it he clams up, diverting the conversation in another direction. There’s something that he’s hiding from her, but she can’t expect him to open up to her about everything instantly; it had been a long time.
“Walking me to my door, it’s a little like déjà vu.” Adriana smiles up at him, as they finally get back to her apartment. They’ve spent the entire afternoon together, and she doesn’t want it to end. “Do you want to come in?” She looks up at him shyly from under her lashes, holding her breath for his answer. “For coffee,” she qualifies hurriedly.
CHAPTER SEVENTEEN
GRAYSON
“Coffee sounds great.” Grayson follows her inside, he doesn’t add that he’s so geared up that if he drinks any caffeine he’ll probably be climbing the walls.
“I’ll give you the grand tour.” Adriana throws her jacket over the couch. “Kitchen,” she points to the tiny area wedged between the couch and the front door. “Living room. Bedroom.” She nods towards the door at the back of the room. “I guess that’s the whole tour!” She shrugs, smiling. “Like I said, it’s small, but it’s mine.”
Grayson looks around at the apartment. Small would be an understatement, but the place is full of personality. The bright splashes of color on the walls make it hard not to feel your mood lift as soon as you walk in. It’s the same effect that Adriana has on him, her brightness and life makes him feel lighter, instantly.
“It’s great,” he assures her, seeing her blush and feeling ino
rdinately pleased that his opinion means so much to her.
“So, how do you take your coffee?” She heads over to the kitchenette, fiddling with the coffee filter, her back to him.
Grayson catches sight of a flyer he recognizes on the countertop. He goes to pick it up and looks between it and Adriana, raising an eyebrow. “This looks familiar.”
Adriana blushes, avoiding his eyes. “That kid I told you about, the one I stitched up, he gave it to me. I meant to throw it away.”
Grayson lays his picture back down and walks around to stand in front of Adriana. “But you didn’t throw it away.” He hooks his finger underneath her chin and lifts her head up so that he can see into the green eyes with flecks of gold that shine like the sun. “Why?”