by Sarah Morgan
And she felt the first shoots of doubt spring to life inside her.
The longer the silence stretched, the bigger the doubt grew.
She’d freaked him out.
She shouldn’t have said anything. It was too soon. She should have let things ride a little longer and waited for him to come to the conclusion himself instead of bashing him over the head with it. But how long was long enough? When you were as sure as she was, what was the point in waiting? Life could be unpredictable, she knew that. You needed to seize the moment.
But by seizing the moment had she ruined everything? “Jake? Say something.”
He stirred. “Something? We both know what you want me to say, Paige. That’s how this game works, isn’t it? You tell me you love me, and either I don’t say it back and therefore we break up, or I say it back and we stumble along together until one of us decides that in fact we don’t love the other anymore, and then we break up. Either way, we break up. Generally I prefer that to happen sooner rather than later. It’s cleaner for everyone concerned.”
“Cleaner?”
“Yeah. The deeper the roots, the harder it is to dig them up.”
“Roots are a good thing. They keep you secure.”
“There’s nothing secure about love.” He pushed the covers back and sprang from the bed like a tiger who had just discovered that someone hadn’t locked the cage. “Love is the most unpredictable thing out there. It’s just a word, Paige, and words are easily spoken.”
“It’s not just a word. It’s a word that comes with a whole lot of feelings. Important feelings.” She paused and breathed deeply. “You haven’t had a great day—I get that. It must have been difficult with Matt, so we’ll tell him Sunday and we’ll just talk about this another time.”
“There’s nothing more to talk about. And there’s nothing to tell Matt.” He snatched at his jeans, pulling them on. “I don’t know what you were expecting from me, but whatever it is I can’t deliver.”
Frustration gave way to the first seeds of panic.
“I wasn’t expecting anything.” A small part of her knew that wasn’t quite true. She had been expecting something. She’d hoped. And she’d been so sure that he felt the same way. They’d spent time together. He’d given her a key. She made a last attempt to force him to take another look at his feelings. “What we have is special. We’ve had fun the last few weeks.”
“We have, which is why I don’t understand why you did what you just did. Why ruin everything?”
She took a deep breath. “Maybe because I don’t think love ruins a relationship. Nor do I consider love to be the worst thing that can happen to a person.” Her heart broke for him. And it broke for herself. “Love is a gift, Jake. The most important, valuable gift of all. You can’t buy it, you can’t produce it on demand, and you can’t switch it on and off. It has to be given freely, and that’s what makes it so precious. That’s what I’m offering you.”
“You’re wrong. It can be switched on and off. And ‘I love you’ is the easiest thing in the world to say.” He stared at her, his face an expressionless mask. “I don’t want what you’re offering, Paige. And you should leave now.”
He might as well have slapped her.
“I— What?” She gaped at him. “I tell you I love you and you tell me you want me to leave?”
“I don’t want you to love me. I’m sorry you think that you do.”
“I don’t ‘think’ it. I know I love you.”
He swore under his breath. “This is exactly why I didn’t get involved with you before now.”
“What? Wait!”
“I should have ended it sooner. We shouldn’t have carried on seeing each other for so long.” He said it with the emotion of someone informing her that her library ticket had expired.
This was about his mother.
She knew this was about his mother.
“Jake, my feelings for you aren’t new. I’ve been in love with you for most of my life.” She kept her voice calm. “Or that’s how it feels.”
“Then you lied to me, because you told me this wouldn’t happen.”
“I didn’t lie. I just—” She breathed, trying not to let her emotions escalate. “I just underestimated how deeply I was already involved.”
“I know. You’re like Eva. You believe in love and happily ever after. You want that.”
“Yes, I do. I won’t pretend otherwise, and I won’t apologize for wanting it.”
And so did he; she knew he did.
But he was afraid to trust it.
“I don’t want it, and I won’t pretend, either.” His tone was blunt. Resolute. “I thought you knew. I thought I’d made that clear. When we started this, we agreed it was just sex.”
“I know. But things changed. I thought you felt it, too.” She tried to reason with him. “This time we’ve spent together—it hasn’t been just about sex. We’ve had fun. We’ve laughed. We’ve talked.”
“We spent some time together. We weren’t looking for the end of the rainbow. You said you were cool with this.” His voice was low. Tight. “You said you could handle a relationship that was just physical. Now you’re telling me you can’t.”
“I’m not telling you that. I’m telling you I love you, that’s all.” She took a deep breath and took the plunge. At this point, what did she have to lose? “And I think you love me, too.” Except that right now she didn’t see love. She saw blind panic.
There was a protracted silence, so tense she could have sliced through it with a blade.
“You’re wrong. I don’t.” His features were set. Immovable. Serious.
It was hard to recognize him as the laughing, sexy guy she’d spent the past few weeks with.
He’d gone from warm and relaxed to cold and unapproachable. And she knew it was a defense mechanism.
“Are you sure? Because I’m sensing this isn’t about us, Jake. It’s about your mother.”
“Maria is my mother.”
She closed her eyes. “Jake—”
“You need to leave, Paige.”
“I can’t imagine what it must have done to you when she didn’t come home that night. You told me how it felt and I’ve never forgotten that conversation. My heart breaks, thinking about how lost and confused you must have been and how you must have wondered and worried.”
“It was a long time ago.”
“Time heals some things but it doesn’t erase. It was a long time ago, but it’s still with you. It has to be. You carry something like that forever. Oh, you adjust and learn to live alongside it, but it scars and occasionally that scar aches and reminds you that you need to be careful. Is that what’s happening, Jake? Are you being careful?” She slid off the bed and walked across the room to him, relieved that at least he didn’t back away from her.
She closed her fingers gently over his arm.
His biceps were hard and tense. His entire body rigid as he held himself still.
“There’s nothing more to talk about, Paige. I didn’t want you to fall in love with me. That wasn’t part of the deal. I did everything I could to stop this happening.”
It was as if she hadn’t spoken.
As if he’d ignored every word.
“I fell in love with you years ago, so whatever you think you could have done to stop it, you were too late.” Her voice was choked. “I loved you from the moment you walked into the hospital with Matt on that first night. I’ve loved you ever since.”
“I’m sorry to hear that.”
“And I think you love me, too.”
“I don’t.” His gaze lifted to hers, his eyes cold. Blank. “I’m sorry to hurt you, but I don’t.”
It was like trying to chisel a hole in a wall with a hairpin.
Her eyes filled, and she grabbed his arm in a final attempt to penetrate that cold layer that insulated him from emotion. “Jake—”
“You need to leave now. You’re only hurting yourself by staying.”
“Sending me awa
y is hurting me. Rejecting my love is hurting me.”
“And I’m sorry for it.” He stared down at her fingers on his arm as if steeling himself to do something he found impossibly difficult. Then he clenched his jaw and gently unpeeled her fingers from his arm. “It’s probably best if we don’t see each other for a while. You can carry on using the office. I’ll fly to LA for a few weeks.”
“I don’t want you to fly to LA. I don’t want to not see you. What are you afraid of, Jake? What are you so afraid of? I love you.”
There was a long, pulsing silence, and then he lifted his gaze to hers. “She said that. She said that to me every day. She used those exact words the morning she left and never came home again. I love you, Jake. It’s you and me against the world. I believed her, so I sat on the steps, waiting for her, as I waited for her every night, except that this time she didn’t come. She left a note with our neighbor, Maria, asking her to take me until the authorities could find me a home. She left nothing for me. No note. No explanation. Nothing.”
Paige felt the hot sting of tears. “Oh God. Oh, Jake—”
“She had no way of knowing that Maria would take me in. I could have ended up anywhere and she would never have known because she didn’t check. Not once. That’s how much ‘I love you’ meant to her. And far from being the two of us against the world, it turned out that we were tackling the world separately, which seems like a pretty daunting prospect when you’re only six years old. I learned a lot of things from my birth mother, but the most important lesson was not to trust those words. ‘I love you’ means nothing, Paige. They’re empty words spoken by millions of people every day. Millions of people who still break up, get divorced and never see each other again.” He looked tired, his handsome face pale and drawn, and she felt as if someone had placed a heavy brick in her chest.
What should she say?
What could she say?
“Maybe those words are easily said,” she said quietly. “But I’ve only ever said them to one man, and that’s you. And if you really believe my love means nothing, then you’re not the man, and the friend, I know you are.”
His gaze lifted to hers and he looked at her for a long moment.
Then he turned away. “Put the key on the table when you leave. We never should have started this. I’m sorry we did.”
The pain was indescribable.
“I’m not sorry. I’ll never be sorry. Yes, it was a risk, but you were the one who taught me to take risks. You were the one that taught me to go after the things I wanted in life. It’s because of you I moved to New York. It’s because of you I set up Urban Genie. You taught me to take risks, but you’re too afraid to do the same yourself.”
“I take risks all the time.”
“But not in relationships. Not with your heart. You never risk your heart.” She stared at him for a long moment, holding back the tide of misery. “I love you. And those aren’t just words, Jake. They’re a description of how I feel with all of me, from my eyelashes to my toes. I love you. I’ll always love you, and I want us to be together, but most of all I want you to let yourself be loved. I want you to trust that feeling, and not keep running from it or pushing it away. Love can last, Jake. There are examples of that all around you. And even if this really is the end, I’ll never regret a single moment of these last few weeks.”
She felt as if her chest was splitting in two.
Forcing herself to stay calm, she walked toward the bathroom.
How had they gone from incredible sex to this?
How had it happened?
Why?
But she knew why. She’d put a label on the feelings they shared. She’d made it impossible for Jake to ignore them. She’d told him how she felt, and while part of her didn’t regret that, another part did. If she hadn’t spoken they’d still be in bed together. If she hadn’t spoken, if she’d taken a few more weeks—
Choking on tears, Paige stepped into the shower and turned the flow to maximum. Her tears blended with the water, the shower muffling the sound.
If she was hurt, then it was her own stupid fault. Or maybe it was his stupid fault. Or his mother’s stupid fault. She didn’t know whose fault it was. She only knew that it hurt. It hurt so badly that by the time she stepped out of the shower she had no tears left.
She felt drained. Numb.
Numb was good. Numb would get her through the next hour. She’d pick up her clothes, gather up the few things she’d left in his apartment, take the subway home, and then unload on her friends.
Friends were what she needed right now. They’d surround her with a loving blanket of support in the way that only people who knew you inside and out could.
Eva would remind her that there were plenty more fish in the sea, and Frankie would say very little, taking it as yet more evidence that men couldn’t be trusted.
They’d cry and laugh together. Probably open a bottle of wine and eat chocolate.
Either way, she’d get through it with the help of her friends.
All she had to do was get herself home.
And that was when she realized her clothes were in the kitchen.
Taking a deep breath, she opened the door to the bathroom and was relieved to see no sign of Jake.
His absence was still more evidence that she’d frightened him to death.
It would take two minutes to dress, and then she’d be out of here. He could have his apartment back. He could have his life back.
She was gathering her clothes from the floor of the kitchen when she heard Jake’s voice.
“I wasn’t expecting you. It’s not a great time—”
Paige stood still. He was still in the apartment. And he had visitors? Who would call on him this late?
Given his comment that this wasn’t a great time, presumably his visitor was a woman. And just like that the misery was back.
She’d do him a favor and make it clear that she wouldn’t be hanging around.
As for the fact he had a woman wrapped in a towel in his apartment—well, she’d let him explain that part.
Gathering her clothes in front of her, she stepped through to the living area and froze.
She’d expected a woman, but it wasn’t a woman who stood there.
It was Matt.
And she was standing in Jake’s apartment dressed in nothing but damp skin and a wet towel with her thong dangling from her fingers.
CHAPTER TWENTY
Don’t hide a skeleton in your closet unless you’re sure no one is going to borrow your clothes.
—Eva
MATT’S GAZE RAKED over her from head to foot, taking in her flushed cheeks and the fact that she was naked under the towel.
“What’s going on?” His voice was low and deadly, his handsome face unsmiling. “Jake?”
Wishing she could slide through a gap in the floor, Paige stepped forward. She’d thought life couldn’t get any worse.
She hadn’t worked out the right way to tell Matt, but she certainly hadn’t wanted him to find out this way.
The last thing she wanted was to hurt her brother. And right now she barely recognized him. He was always calm and measured. Strong. The type of man who solved problems with thought and carefully chosen words, not anger.
“Matt—”
“I’m talking to Jake.” His voice was ice-cold and she flinched. He never brushed her away. He was never anything other than kind and protective.
“Matt, I can—”
“You’re having sex with my sister?” All his attention was fixed on Jake. “You have the whole of Manhattan at your feet, but you choose to amuse yourself with my sister? How long has this been going on?”
“Awhile.”
Matt’s face turned white. “You drank beer with me, shot a few games of pool, and you forgot to mention you were screwing my sister?”
“I didn’t forget.” Jake’s tone was flat. He didn’t flinch or stammer. He made no excuses. Nor did he mention the times he’d tried to persuade h
er to let him tell Matt.
“Who else knows? Frankie? Eva?” He took one look at Paige’s face and pain crossed his own. “You told them. They know. Everybody knows except me.”
Knowing that she’d hurt her brother was the worst thing about this whole situation. “They guessed, but—”
Matt wasn’t listening. All his attention was on Jake. “You took advantage—”
“He did not take advantage. I’m not some vulnerable teenager.” Paige stepped in front of Matt, forcing him to look at her. “I didn’t think you’d want details, but since you’re jumping to conclusions that have no basis in fact, I’ll supply the facts. Jake stayed away from me. All these years, he stayed away from me. I was the one who came to him. I showed up at his door. Gave him no choice.”
Matt made a disgusted sound. “I’ll bet he fought you off.”
“He didn’t fight, but he was worried about all the things you’re worried about. That I’m vulnerable, that he’d hurt me—” she swallowed “—and I told him all the things I’m always telling you. That I’m an adult. I don’t need to be protected.”
“I know you.” Matt gave her a long look. “You want love and happy endings. Jake doesn’t do that. He dates a different woman every week. He can’t offer you the type of relationship you want and deserve.”
She didn’t point out that what they’d had together had already lasted more than a week. “This is my business, Matt.”
“He will hurt you.” Matt’s voice was raw. “He will screw you, and then leave you just like he does with all women because he doesn’t want attachment. He’s done it before. The difference is that I didn’t care about it before, because it wasn’t my sister he was banging. He will break your heart, Paige.”