10. Casey
Chapter Ten
CASEY
Why did you have Leo pick you up? This is a really bad idea.
My hormones were behaving like a rowdy teenager. They ignored all of my caution. My hormones wanted Leo, wanted another kiss, wanted more than a kiss.
Somehow, during dinner, I talked myself into this little corner in my mind where it was totally okay for us to casually date even though he had a daughter and my life was a mess. But I trusted Leo, and wasn’t that something?
In the years since my sister Callie had died, trust had felt nearly impossible to find. I trusted my parents. And yet, I’d broken their trust by keeping a secret that would tear them to pieces if they knew it. I didn’t know what to do, or how to sort it out. I didn’t know who else knew what had been going on with Nathaniel and Callie.
I’d always wanted to travel. After Callie died, I wanted to run away, so I did. Two birds, one stone. I would scratch my travel itch and escape the mess that I felt powerless to clean up. Now, it felt like one lie was rolling into the next, and here I was on a date with my fake fiancé. The fake fiancé who nobody even knew was my fiancé here. Complications were adding up by the day.
My attention narrowed to a singular focus when Leo walked me into my apartment building. I should’ve run out of the truck. But when he offered to walk me up, my rowdy hormones were all, “Hell, yeah!”
The downstairs of the building had a larger apartment that Janet rented to tourists. The upstairs had two apartments with mine on one side and an empty one on the other.
Our footsteps sounded loud to my ears as we walked up the stairs and turned down the hallway. I had a doormat with a sunflower on it in front of my door.
Leo glanced down at it, his lips twitching with a smile. “That suits you.”
“A sunflower?”
“Yeah. Cheerful and pretty, like you.”
The simple compliment startled me, and I smiled before I could get embarrassed. “Oh! Well, that’s sweet of you.”
His baby blues held mine as his lips kicked up at one corner before his smile stretched to the other. Heat pooled low in my belly, and I suddenly felt breathless as I looked up at him.
He rested a hand on the wall beside my shoulder before he startled me with his blunt words. “I want to kiss you again, Casey.” He closed his eyes briefly as he shook his head. When he opened them again, the blue had darkened to almost navy. “I want to do a lot more than kiss you.” He released a sharp breath. “But I don’t know what you want.”
“You already know my life is a little complicated,” I said while my hormones did cartwheels inside and I tried to ignore the joy buzzing in my veins.
“I definitely understand complicated. Maybe we just see what happens. We don’t have to tell everybody we’re engaged,” Leo replied.
“And going to fake couples counseling,” I offered, my tone dry as burnt toast.