What the hell was I doing? I was supposed to be giving Khane a piece of my mind, not discussing the reasons why he hadn’t approached me and asked me out.
“You assumed how I would react to you. You were wrong to think that way. You’ve been spying on me all this time, but you only saw what you wanted to see, or you would have known me better.”
My clipped tone with him wasn’t for the right reasons. Was I getting upset because he had never approached me?
“I know you better than anyone because you were the only one I wanted to know. Your favorite color is white because it’s the color of a blank canvas. Whether you sketch, paint, or start a digital project, white is the foundation that inspires your creations. You smile through your eyes when your creating art. It’s when you’re the happiest. You sometimes sit tucked into your couch crying at movies, only its not the movies that makes you cry. I think it was loneliness.
“You always have dinner with your father every other Sunday and you two have only missed three Sunday’s in six years. The picture of the dream house you keep pinned to your vision board inspired me to pick this house. You will warm the same cup of coffee six times before you make a new cup. You have a sex toy that you’ve never used. You take it out, it makes you frown, and you toss it back in the drawer.”
I held up a hand. “Okay. Shit. You can stop. It’s getting creepy.” I was wrong to assume he didn’t know me because it sounded like he could have gone on forever. I aimed my head at the ceiling and inhaled a few deep breaths, realizing that I was more irritated that he hadn’t asked me out more than I was about the wall of pictures he had collected of me.
How crazy am I?I truly believed being an Evans had fucked me up worse than any other thing life could have thrown my way. After all that I had seen and after all that he had revealed, I still wanted Khane. I couldn’t turn the shit off.
I aimed my stiff thumb over my shoulder. “The pictures. They come down. You need to destroy them.”
“I’ll do it tonight. I’ll burn them,” he agreed.
I plopped down next to him on the couch, my knee bumping his muscular thigh as I adjusted.
“I’ve never had someone invest that kind of time and attention in me. Had I known you were interested, I would have saved you time and paper.”
He went still, not even moving his eyes as he stared straight ahead, realizing his ploy to drive me away hadn’t worked.
There was too much on the other side of his crazy for me to cast off. The man had literally purchased my dream house base on the picture of it that I kept on my vision board. He claimed I had sparked some type of epiphany in him so that he would grasp a hold of more meaningful things in his life. He had been using me as his anchor, his therapy, and his constant for six years. The man probably knew me better than I knew myself.
I leaned in, easing deliberately closer, his warmth wrapping around me instantly. “You should have approached me, Khane. If you had, you wouldn’t have had to get yourself off to a frozen replica of me. If you had asked me out, I would have said yes, and we wouldn’t be here fighting our attraction because of my arranged marriage to your brother.”
He swallowed, his gaze locking with mine. He had that expression, I’m in so much fucking trouble. Yes, he was in trouble, and so was I.
I sensed him shuffling through the pile of thoughts stacking up in his head to gather his words. I was upset with him for spying on me, for taking pictures of me without my knowledge, and for not approaching me. In a way, I think I was also blaming him for our current situation.
Would I have gone out with Khane if he had asked me out before now? Without a doubt.