Something shifted inside of him, which he ignored. He wasn’t going to assess why being part of a couple with her was resonating so deeply inside him. Not now.
She gave him that sweet, intimate smile that she only used with him, and as much as he wanted to pretend that it didn’t affect him, he sort of unraveled inside. He pulled her back into his arms, because not touching, not holding her, wasn’t working. Heneededher in his arms. She hugged him and tipped back her head as he brought his down toward hers, kissing her long and deep. And when he lifted his head, he knew they needed to go somewhere private.
She had always had this effect on him. She turned him on like no other woman. So quickly, like a marshmallow melting in a mug of hot chocolate. She made his walls crumble until all he wanted was to be in her and with her.
“Yes. Let’s go back to your place.”
She nodded, chewing her lower lip as she used her phone to order an Uber for them. They only had to wait a few minutes before they were picked up. She didn’t say anything and neither did he—they both just sat close to each other watching the buildings pass as the driver took them to her apartment building. He dropped them off and Sean remembered the last time he’d been in her apartment, and hesitated.
He’d hadn’t been back since the morning he’d left to get his hair dyed back to his natural color and shaved off his beard to lose the last vestiges of Jack.
He thought that Paisley might be thinking about it too. She hesitated at the outer door and he wondered if she’d changed her mind.
“You still want to do this?”
“Yes... I was just thinking about...the last time.”
“Me too. That morning when you were harried and had to get to work, and I was lazing around because we’d wrapped filming and I knew I had to tell you who I was.”
“Yeah...what was that like?” she asked.
“Scary.”
“Ha, you’re not scared of anything,” she said.
He shook his head. If only she knew how much she scared him on a soul-deep level. He couldn’t figure her out. And normally, he was good at figuring out what made people tick, what they wanted or needed from him, but Paisley was still a mystery.
“Maybe not like jump scare but there are other fears,” he told her.
She sort of wrapped one arm around her stomach and then reached out with her free hand to unlock the outer door and lead him into the building. “I know about those. You just sort of ooze confidence, even when I thought your job was sort of dead-end, I still felt it.”
He laughed at that statement. “I do have confidence—some would say arrogance, but that doesn’t negate fear. One of my mentors when I first started said the bigger he got, the more he felt he had to lose, and the fear grew along with his career.”
Her apartment was on the third floor and Paisley always took the stairs. He hadn’t realized that he’d led them to the stairwell until they were both walking up. There was something so familiar about this. None of those first-date jitters or anything like that. He realized that his fears weren’t strong when she was by his side. It was when he was alone...as it always had been.
“I can see that. You have more at stake and more to lose,” she said. “It’s different for us at IDG because it’s not just me. I have Olive and Delaney with me. If one of us gets scared then the other two talk her down.”
He could see that. Her friendship with the other two women was a big part of Paisley. They grounded her in her life and in her career, and he envied her that, he realized. It must have been nice to always have someone to lean on. He had been slowly letting Bert into his life but Sean was always careful to remember the other man worked for him.
He held open the door to the third floor and Paisley walked into the hallway toward her apartment. “Is it weird for you coming back here?”
“Yes and no,” he said. He almost told her that it felt like he was coming home but he stopped himself. He didn’t want to reveal that this small apartment of hers in Chicago had felt more like his home than his mansion in Malibu.
She unlocked her front door and turned to look up at him. The expression in her gaze was serious. “When you left, did you plan to never come back here?”
“No.”
Paisley just continued looking at him. She wanted more. And he wasn’t sure how to put it into words. “I think I had deluded myself into believing that once you knew who I really was, you’d sort of laugh it off and we’d keep having our affair.”
“But I didn’t.”
“No, you didn’t. But I’m glad you gave me this second chance to start over with no secrets between us.”
Nine
Paisley wasn’t sure what she’d expected when she brought Sean back to her apartment. Maybe somehow seeing him here would make her realize something she’d missed earlier? Like right now, she just wanted to shove him against the coat closet and kiss him like they used to do. Push his coat off his shoulders and free his cock, and have crazy, hot, hallway sex. Like the very first time...but this wasn’t the first time. She stood there watching him, very aware of what his naked body looked like and how good he felt inside of her, but at the same time, her emotions were roiling. Like a blizzard threatening to keep Santa from coming on Christmas Eve.
She wished—reallywished with her whole damn heart—that she was one of those people who could just shut off their mind, but she wasn’t.