9. Rose
ROSE
Iwoke up thinking about the way I’d practically bolted from Nolan last night.
I’d left him standing there holding two plates with that look on his face—confused, or maybe amused, or something in between I wasn’t sure—and I’d thanked him for dinner sounding like a terrified teenager who’d never spoken to a man before and then shut the door in his face.
I covered my eyes with my hands and groaned.
Honestly, all of that didn’t bother me nearly as bad as what happened right before it. While I’d been standing there, looking up at him, a feeling of want had slithered through my core.
I wanted to stay on that porch with him. I wanted to keep talking. Worst of all, I wanted to reach up and touch the line of his jaw just to know what it felt like right before I kissed him.
That was the part that had kept me up late last night. That was the part that greeted me the second I opened my eyes this morning, too.
It scared me.
Mainly because things with Evan had started like that too.
Not burgers and a porch, but it had started with the same feelings.
Warmth. Butterflies. Flushed cheeks. Evan had been charming at the beginning.
Attentive, too. He’d noticed things about me no one ever had before.
What I liked to drink. What made me laugh.
What I was afraid of. And I’d mistaken that attention for love because I hadn’t known it could be anything else yet.
Now I did.
So I pulled back.
I spent the day at my desk with my earbuds in, writing with a focus I hadn’t had in days—not because the words were flowing, but because I refused to let myself think about anything else.
When Nolan’s truck pulled in that evening, I didn’t peek out the windows at him.
I didn’t go sit on the back porch that night either.
I didn’t like ignoring him because he hadn’t done anything wrong, but that was the problem.
The next few days followed the same pattern.
I kept to my side. He kept to his. The easy thing that had started building between us—the banter, the conversations on the back porch with alcohol in hand—I shut it all down.
Every time he tried to start something up again, I ended it before it could take root.
It hurt more than I expected.
I buried that too, the same way I buried everything else, and I sat at my desk and wrote.
The strange thing—the infuriating, ironic, laugh-or-cry thing—was that my writing had never been better.
The emotional wreckage of pulling away from Nolan was pouring straight into my manuscript.
My heroine was conflicted, torn between wanting the hero and being terrified of what wanting him meant.
She was building walls while her heart was trying to knock them down just as quickly as she put them up.
She was saying no with her mouth and yes with everything else.
It was the most honest writing I’d done in months.
Also, my hero had fully become Nolan on the page.
I’d given up trying to fight it somewhere around Chapter Ten.
He was tall, broad-shouldered, loud, and had hazel eyes.
He said things that were blunt, funny, and accidentally tender.
He noticed the small things, not because he was cataloguing them the way Evan had, but because he just paid attention.
The romance I was writing felt real for the first time since I’d started this book.
Maybe for the first time in my career. Every scene between my hero and heroine crackled with the tension I was living through on the other side of my wall—the push and pull, the wanting and the fear, the way two people could drive each other crazy and still be the best thing that ever happened to one another.
I was too deep in the draft to change any of it now. My hero was Nolan. My heroine was me. And my editor was going to love it because it was the rawest thing I’d ever written, even if the real version of the story was one I’d never let myself finish.
By the end of the third day, I’d written more in that stretch than I had in the previous two weeks combined. The word count was climbing. The scenes were landing. My editor would be happy.
I should have been happy too.
Instead, I sat at my desk, rereading a scene I’d just finished—the one where my heroine lets the hero kiss her for the first time—and I felt hollow.
I’d written something beautiful about two people choosing each other, and then I’d closed my laptop and gone back to pretending the man on the other side of my shared wall didn’t exist. I’d purposely dulled the scene down because I was scared it would be too tempting for me to write fully.
I was selling myself short, and my readers.
My phone buzzed on the desk.
I glanced at it out of reflex. The name on the screen had my blood going cold.
Evan.
I miss you. I just want to talk. Please tell me where you are.
Fourteen words. That was all it took to have my hands shaking and my heart suddenly racing.
Fourteen words in that tone I knew so well.
The reasonable one, the soft one, the one that sounded like love if you didn’t know what was underneath it.
I miss you. Like he was the one hurting.
I just want to talk. Like talking was all he’d ever done.
Please tell me where you are. Like he had any right to know.
My fingers hovered over the little keyboard, trembling, and suddenly all I could see was his face—his sharp jaw, flat eyes, and his smile that could go from warm to cruel so fast it gave me whiplash.
He didn’t know where I was. He couldn’t.
I’d been careful. My mother was the only person who knew where I was, and I didn’t think he’d reach out to her.
He’d never truly liked her. Heck, I’d even paid for this rental with my business credit card he didn’t have access to. He shouldn’t be able to find me.
I knew he was looking, though.
That was enough to scare me because Evan didn’t give up. It was the one thing about him that people who’d never been on the receiving end of his attention didn’t understand. He was patient. He was methodical. He would keep looking until he found what he wanted, and what he wanted was me.
I deleted the text. Then I deleted the entire conversation thread, as if erasing the words from my phone could erase the feeling of them in my chest.
My duplex was quiet, but through the shared space between us, I could hear Nolan moving around his place and the low sounds of a TV. Normal sounds. Safe sounds. Not too long ago, those sounds would have annoyed me. Tonight, they were the only thing keeping me from falling apart.
I thought about going to the porch, hoping he’d come outside. There was a desire to tell him everything, to let the whole ugly story pour out, because some part of me believed that if I told Nolan Bridges someone who hurt me was looking for me, he’d do something about it.
I didn’t do any of that, though.
Instead, I stayed where I was because telling Nolan meant trusting Nolan, and trusting a man was the thing that had broken me in the first place.
I checked that the front door was locked.
Then I turned on every light in the unit and climbed into bed fully dressed with my phone face-down on the nightstand, and the covers pulled up to my chin.