I hadn’t let him know earlier, but I had my doubts about that.
I wanted to see him again.
It was so stupid of me. What would be the point? The two of us could never amount to anything. God, therewasno two of us. I’d spent barely a night in his company, and he hadn’t so much as kissed me. Nothing had happened between us. The sparks I’d felt when he’d put his hand on mine and the deep-down shiver I’d experienced when he’d told me I was a good girl meant nothing. They were just stupid little reactions—something I probably wouldn’t have even thought about if I hadn’t already been traumatised from the attack.
I’d been told Jayden Wynter was cruel and thoughtless and impulsive, but the man I’d met had been none of those things.
It made me wonder what else my family had been lying about.
Why did my heart do that strange jolt when I thought of him? The tattoos, the dark hair, the intense eyes. The way he was living alone in that vast, empty apartment. I felt like there were always people at my home, how it was almost never empty, even if they were people I’d never asked to be here. How could he not be lonely? Grieving his dead father, too.
Was his sister around? Or was she too busy with her own life—her new husband and imminent baby—to worry about her brother?
I had the crazy idea I could talk to her but immediately pushed it from my mind. That would be overstepping so many boundaries, I’d have practically frog-jumped them.
Besides, I could just imagine Hallie Wynter’s—or was it Cornell’s now?—face if I showed up at Tam Cornell’s house.
I would be asking for trouble.
And I was in enough of that already.
Chapter Five
Jayden
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ICAUGHT A FEW HOURS’sleep to make up for my lack of it the previous night.
Fuck.
I couldn’t get Ivy Gilligan out of my head.
The way she’d shivered when I’d told her she was a good girl.
I needed to shake those thoughts from my mind, but I found myself in Hallie’s bedroom, observing the spot where Ivy had stripped naked only a matter of hours ago.