ome with me?”
He tilted his head to the side. “You’d want me to?”
“Y-Yes.”
“Then why didn’t you tell me before?”
I winced. “Because I don’t want to go, so why should you?”
He blew out a breath. “Okay, you’re making this sound terrible. Where are we even going?”
I loved that he was going to come with me even though he didn’t have a clue where it even was.
“My parents’ place.”
The words dropped into the silence that had suddenly taken over the office. I realized I’d been staring at his throat, not really wanting to see his expression of horror at my words. Then, he moved and my gaze moved with it and I saw he was, once again, beaming at me.
Stunned by that reaction, I blinked.
“You want to introduce me to your parents?”
“Not really,” I said on a sigh, then, when his shoulders dropped again, I quickly blurted out, “Only because I don’t get on with them. I only see them on special occasions.”
That had some of the tension flooding from him, but again, the notion that I could hurt him, both floored me and filled me with a kind of warmth only he’d ever been able to engender in me.
I knew I was starting to mean something to him. The very fact he always wanted to take me out with no expectation had told me that! But seeing it, in the flesh? Yeah, that made it hit home in a way I couldn’t even begin to describe.
“We don’t get on.” Not anymore. But I don’t say that.
He frowned. “Then why do you go spend your birthday with them?”
“Tradition, I guess.”
“And you weren’t going to tell me?”
Again, more hurt. I sighed. “I don’t know.”
“Time was pretty much running out.”
“There’s still lunch yet.” And we always ate lunch together. Always. Unless he had a business meeting, which to be fair, happened three days out of five. Any other time, though, his lunch was mine.
Yeah, mine.
I blew out a breath when I realized how possessive that sounded, but that was another emotion this man inspired in me. Possessiveness. It was mutual though. I knew that. From the way he clamped his hand on my hip wherever we went, or nestled it on the small of my back or on my shoulder.
We might not have been intimate but that didn’t mean he wasn’t declaring to the world at large that I was his.
A thought process that never failed to heat me up from the inside out.
Releasing another breath, this one shuddery, I tried to quench the way that fire in my core had started to flicker out of control.
“This is true,” he told me, pursing his lips in recognition of the truth in my words. “What if I’d had a meeting?”
My lips twitched. “Then I could have asked on the way home.”
He insisted Mackenzie took me back to my place, and considering I lived where I did? Yeah, I wasn’t going to turn that offer down even if it was excessive.
Over these past few months, I’d come to learn what it was to feel safe again. He made me feel that way, and I would always be grateful to him for that.