Chapter 13 #2
When I met Felice, I was enamored with how smart and successful she was. She was a junior vice president at a marketing firm in Virginia not far from where I was stationed with the Marines, though she had aspirations for opening her own firm someday.
Just like my mom had opened Technique Group with my grandfather.
Grandpa was me—the muscle—but Mom was the brains.
She had a knack for seeing through bullshit, and she made a name for herself by finding and hiring disciplined protection agents with good instincts.
She worked hard, and she loved me fiercely, and there’s no way I could’ve had a single mom like her and not grow up into a man who had an appreciation for badass women.
Hence me bending over backward to make Felice happy.
Because I wasn’t going to be one of those twatwaffle men who took a partner for granted. I was going to be one of those men my mom taught me to be—before she fell for Xavier’s bullshit—who meant it when he said partner.
One of those men who celebrated my partner’s success.
One of those men who respected what she built and pulled my share of the weight at home and treated her like the intelligent, amazing woman that she was.
Because she was.
Felice was intelligent and independent and funny and driven, and I was so fucking in love with finding someone like her who said she loved me back that I missed all of the warning signs that lingered in the background for years.
And now here I am again, with what can only be described as a crush on an even more successful woman, who’s keeping secrets but kisses like some kind of angelic vixen and who does small things like the dishes and making popcorn that you’d think someone who could afford household staff wouldn’t do herself.
Wouldn’t even know how to do.
I grew up in the Technique Group offices.
Stories about the rich and famous and the outrageous things they did, along with the outrageously simple things they often couldn’t or didn’t do themselves, were part of my childhood too.
I cue up the sitcom I’ve been watching late at night—some goofball thing about a haunted manor where one of the owners can see ghosts—but I don’t start it yet.
I should.
I should start without her, distract myself with falling into the plot, and not put myself in a position to entertain any fantasies whatsoever about Margot Merriweather-Brown.
But I can’t help myself.
When she’s talking to her brothers, she lights up. She compliments her fellow housekeepers’ hair and asks the retreat center visitors how their projects are coming and if the mountain air has been good for their creativity.
She’s right.
She’s not just a robot.
But that doesn’t mean she’s the right not-just-a-robot for me.
Even if I want her to sit a little closer when she arrives on the couch with fresh-popped cinnamon-sugar popcorn, napkins, and the reusable water bottle I didn’t realize I left in the kitchen.
And even if I want to slip my arm around her shoulders.
Tug her next to me.
Smell her hair.
Tangle my fingers in it.
Kiss her until I can’t breathe.
All because she’s done the bare minimum to be a kind human being.
More than the bare minimum, my conscience whispers.
I hit play on the episode and watch out of the corner of my eye as she reaches into the popcorn bowl, resisting every urge to touch her to the point that I wait until her hand is gone before I sample a bite myself.
And fuck me.
I teeter on the edge of losing all control as I grab another handful of cinnamon-sugar popcorn.
It’s exactly the kind that takes me back to childhood.
To watching movies at home while Mom and I lay in a blanket fort, eating cinnamon-sugar popcorn for a Saturday night dinner after a long work week for her and a long school week for me.
To celebrations after the school year was over, whether I’d had an easy year or a hard year.
To picnics with friends where Mom’s popcorn bowl would be empty before the main dinner dishes were uncovered.
“Is it just me, or would the neighbor and the guy who died in the suit of armor make the best couple? Like, why can’t the neighbor see the ghosts too?” she says midway through the episode.
I stop the show and turn to stare at her.
“What?” she says around a mouthful of popcorn.
Her blue eyes are a little wider. Forehead a little wrinkled. One brow slightly higher than the other.
“Are you fucking serious?” I ask her.
“About shipping two characters on a TV show?”
“I ship them.”
“Obviously. They’d be adorable.”
“No one else on the forums is shipping them.”
Shit. That slipped out.
Didn’t mean to confess to being that level of invested.
But she doesn’t react to me being a forum geek.
Instead, she stares at me with horror. “No one? No one?”
“Maybe five other people. Most of the forums want him to hook back up with the princess ghost.”
Margot makes a face like she tasted spoiled cottage cheese. “I don’t like to say negative things about women in general, but the princess ghost is getting on my last nerve. She’s been dead for three hundred years. I think she can learn how to be nicer to the ghosts who smell like toast.”
I’m sweating.
I’m getting harder by the minute, and I’m sweating, and Margot has a dusting of cinnamon sugar in the corner of her mouth, and I want to lick it off her, and then haul her into the bedroom and make her scream my name.
All because she’s all in on seeing my favorite show the same way I do. “How fucking much did you investigate me?”
One side of her lips curves up in a half grin. “If my team investigated your TV preferences, I didn’t get a dossier on it, if that’s what you’re asking.”
I want to kiss her.
I want to kiss her while she’s smiling, and I want to feel every inch of her body, and I want to—
I want to protect myself from making the same stupid fucking mistake twice, so I turn back to face forward and hit play on the show.
She’s watching me.
I can feel it and half see it out of the corner of my eye.
The show keeps playing, not that I can process a single word that’s being said.
She laughs at something that I completely miss.
I reach into the popcorn bowl to distract myself, and inadvertently grab her hand instead.
Everything inside me freezes.
I’m not a freeze guy when it comes to fight or flight.
Except right now.
Right now, I’m frozen with my hand on hers, having an internal panic attack because she kissed me.
She kissed me, and I can’t get out of my own way to read the signals about if she’d kiss me again, and I can’t get out of my own way to decide if I want her to or not.
“Are you okay?” she says softly.
“You remind me of my ex, and she fucked me over so badly I wasn’t sure I had a heart left after she was gone, and no, I’m not okay.”
Shit.
Shit.
I just said that.
Margot shifts her hand, turning it to wrap it around mine and squeeze softly. “You ever talk about it much?”
“No.”
“Want to?”
“No.”
“Probably should.”
“Yeah, everyone wants to hear about how I was picking out baby names for nonexistent children the week before our wedding while she was fucking my stepbrother in the back of the SUV the company assigned me for work.”
“Want me to destroy them?”
I start to laugh—one of those not-funny laughs—and rub my eyes with the hand that hasn’t been in the cinnamon-sugar popcorn. “You’d enjoy that, wouldn’t you?”
“Honestly? Probably not. I generally—not always, but generally—get far more satisfaction out of helping people reach their best than in tearing them down. But I do have resources, and I do recognize the value of occasionally assisting karma.”
I squint at her. “People call you a shark.”
“I’m smart. I’m strategic. I see opportunities.
That doesn’t mean I’m unkind. Especially—” She sucks in a big breath, squeezes her eyes shut for a minute, and then sighs as she blinks her eyes open at me again.
“Especially since my parents cut Daphne off. And how. She was—is—all heart, and what they did to her was cruel and callous and unnecessary. What they did to her forced me to face some truths I’d been conveniently ignoring about how I felt about the way my father runs the ship. ”
“So you’re not a shark?”
“I’m a lioness. I lead the pride. And the pride is more powerful when every lion in it is getting what they need to thrive. Not when they’re being pushed past their breaking points and taken for granted and abused.”
I swallow hard.
Then again.
I haven’t even started the fire with the wood I brought in for that very purpose, and I’m sweating.
The woman shouldn’t be this attractive. She shouldn’t.
Being in the Marines? Got it. Hard work, sometimes scary, but I’ve got it.
Personal security? Same thing.
Relationships? Being attracted to a woman again?
I’m a fucking baby bird, exposed to the elements and completely unable to handle my shit.
“Forgot something in the garage,” I mutter.
I upend the popcorn bowl when I bolt to my feet, but I don’t stop.
I just retreat.
Because if I don’t, I’m going to fall head over heels for Margot Merriweather-Brown, and that’s the last thing I have space for in my life.
Now or ever.