34. Chapter 34
Graham spun around another corner at his phone’s direction.
These were Helen’s streets. The signs she passed on the way to work, the restaurants she ordered from, the bars where she met colleagues for happy hour, the corner store where she bought groceries.
Strip malls and traffic lights passed in neon streaks out the side windows until he turned down a quiet street and his phone announced, “You have arrived at your destination,” in its nonplussed fashion, as if the automated navigator didn’t know or care what a momentous destination Graham finally reached.
He was surprised the first time he looked up her address online that instead of a traditional Craftsman house, like the one she grew up in, Helen lived in an apartment.
Now, appraising the tall windows and dusty blue brick, he realized this two-story loft suited her better.
The mail slot inside the main entrance showed Helen Elsburg, apartment three, second floor. He took the stairs two at a time, and rounded the corner of the landing. After two years and more than a thousand miles, he was finally here.
He knocked. Waited. His veins vibrated. If she wasn’t home, he would sit on the doormat until she showed up. There was no plan B. This was it. This was everything.
The door opened. He saw her dark pink lips first, then those piercing blue eyes and jet-black hair.
Without the slightest warning, they collided, and he was kissing a mouth his lips remembered immediately, her familiar taste plunging him back into the world they’d existed in together.
Where he’d gone to bed every night with a salty, sweaty sheen on his skin and woke in the morning with their naked bodies entwined.
He’d spent hours with his face and his now rock-hard cock buried between her legs, and he never—not once—wished she was anyone else.
Graham barely registered what was happening before she pried herself out of his arms and slapped him across the face.
“Ah,” he shouted, rubbing his stinging cheek. “What the hell?”
She lifted her palm for another slap and he caught her wrist midair.
“I can’t believe you,” she seethed. Helen ripped her hand from his grip and backed into her doorway. “I told you to call me. I would’ve saved you the trip.”
“Really?” Graham demanded. “That’s it?”
“I don’t want you here.”
He’d expected her to build a very tall, very secure fortress around herself. He hadn’t expected the kiss or how hard it would be coming back to earth afterward.
Graham set one hand on the wall beside her doorframe, his voice raw. “Helen.”
One word. It was all he could manage while taking her in. Those eyes could flay a man. He’d forgotten the iciness, the unbridled intensity—and the thrill of having them locked on him.
Her delicate, manicured fingers touched her chin where his beard rubbed the skin red. His back tingled remembering the feel of those nails scraping down his spine.
“I need you to leave,” she said.
He looked down at her bare toes and worked his gaze back up, reacquainting himself with every inch of her. Her hair was longer now, almost as long as Lindsey’s, and her usually pale skin was a shade darker than it ever got during Ohio summers. She was wearing a tight, pale blue T-shirt, no bra—
That wasn’t an accident.
“I had to see you,” he rasped. “Can I come in?”
“No.”
“Helen.” He reached out and squeezed the tip of her finger. She closed her eyes and opened them warily.
“You look different,” she said.
“You look exactly the same.” A step closer and he smelled her jasmine perfume. “Five minutes. It’s all I’m asking.”
She peered behind him. “Are you alone?”
“Yes.”
She searched for another reason to send him away, as if her life depended on keeping him at a safe distance.
His depended on getting her to listen. He wasn’t leaving without talking to her.
And she didn’t answer the door without a bra not to punish him for the last two years.
“Please.”
Biting her bottom lip the way she did if she was nervous or afraid, Helen stepped aside, allowing Graham to cross the threshold into her apartment.