“You’re telling me you felt like this with those other guys? The boy who didn’t take you to prom? The dudes who fed you pills and alcohol and pushed you on stage when you were just a fucking kid? The guy who put you on the Miller brothers’ radar?”
“Please.” She shook her head, wishing he would stop. His questions pushed at her brain, making everything scramble—her thoughts, her emotions, her fears. Of course that’s not how this felt. How she felt about Wyatt was different than . . . everything. It was too much. It was all too much. “I can’t deal with this right now.”
He jaw flexed, his teeth obviously pressed hard against each other, but he didn’t look away. “You want a drink, Kelsey?”
She inhaled a sharp breath. “What?”
“You want a drink? Simple question. There’s a whole bottle of tequila in the cabinet.” She stared at him in horror as he got up and strode over to the bar, uncapping the bottle and pouring a healthy shot. He stalked back toward the bed, the golden liquid sloshing in the high ball glass, and plunked it down on the bedside table. “Do you need salt. I’m sure we have that, too.”
“Have you lost your fucking mind?”
“Maybe.” He crossed his arms, staring down at her with ice chip eyes. “So, salt?”
“No!” She scrambled off the other side of the bed, pulling the sheet around herself and squaring off with him. “I don’t want a goddamned drink. Why the hell would I—”
He smiled. Fucking smiled.
Then she realized what he’d done.
She put her hand to her forehead, her brain feeling like it was going to explode behind her eyes. “Jesus, Wyatt.”
“Get in front of the bed,” he said simply. “On your knees.”
She blinked, her mind spinning so fast she could barely understand English, but her body complied before her executive functioning caught up. She found herself lowering to the ground without an ounce of hesitation, the sheet still tangled around her.
He stepped around the corner of the bed and sat down on the edge of it, taking her face in his hands. “It’s okay if you don’t love me back yet. It’s okay that you’re scared. But you are no longer allowed to use the excuse that you aren’t strong enough or good enough to try something with me. Because that is utter bullshit.”
Her throat went dry, her heart tattooing her ribcage. Maybe she was finally strong enough to handle emotional upheavals, but anxiety wrapped around her ribcage and squeezed. She didn’t know how to be in a real relationship without sabotaging things. Without getting needy and clingy with the guy. Without getting wild and jealous. Without losing her own way while trying to be what the guy wanted. “I don’t know how to be normal. The closer we get, the more I want to run.”
He leaned over and pressed a kiss to her forehead. “Then I guess I’ll have to be faster than you.”
“You deserve better than that,” she whispered.
“You’re right. I do.” His palms spanned the side of her head and he tilted her face upward. “And so do you. You want to spend your whole life running? Pushing away the good things because you’re afraid they’ll disappear?”
“They always do,” she said, the knot in her throat like a steel fist.
The sympathy that crossed his features busted something open inside her. He shouldn’t care this much. She hadn’t earned that emotion on his face, that . . . love. She didn’t even know if she was stable enough to exist on her own yet, much less as half of something else. Wyatt had already suffered through a relationship with a girl who’d used him as her emotional crutch. Kelsey refused to be that kind of albatross to anyone.
“I need to go home, Wyatt.”
“Kelsey.” His voice was a plea.
She met his eyes, letting all the emotion drain from her body until only the echo of loss pounded through her, and she said the one request she knew would do it. “I need space.”
At that, those three simple words, his gaze clouded over, his expression closing. His hands lowered to his side in defeat. “I’ll call for the boat.”
CHAPTER TWENTY-SIX
The smells and sounds were the same. The clicking keyboards, the ringing phones, the scent of the carpet cleaner the weekend crew used. Even Wyatt’s desk was exactly as he’d left it, everything in its place. His assistant had placed a stack of messages on top of his desk calendar, arranged first by urgency then by date they were received. Everything the way he liked it. Routine. Predictable. Safe. These four walls had been sanctuary for more years than not. Yet, as Wyatt sat in his desk chair, staring out the row of windows, he simply felt lost.
The day outside was bright despite the chill, but the tint on the building’s windows gave everything on the other side a gray hue, reflecting Wyatt’s mood back at him. He’d spent yesterday digging through files and combing through reports, not exactly sure he wanted to see what was there, but finding what had been hiding in them anyway. A goddamned nightmare tucked in a seemingly innocuous row of numbers.
And now nothing would ever be the same.
Cary, his assistant, breezed into his office, the smell of coffee alerting Wyatt of his presence. Cary cleared his throat in that practiced way he had to let Wyatt know he was no longer alone. “Mr. Austin, so good to have you back. I brought you coffee from a new place today. Hope you don’t mind. The other was out of the kind you like.”
“Thanks. I’m sure it’ll be fine.” Wyatt spun in his chair to face Cary.