Chapter 4
Ishouldn’t have been surprised at the knock that sounded on my front door a couple hours after I made it home from the disastrous security detail.
After all, it was very much like Gray to come back hours later to talk.
However, it was midnight, and the last thing I wanted was to talk to him alone when I’d already embarrassed myself enough for one night.
Because, if he got me alone now, I was afraid all my defenses would fall the way they always had whenever it’d just been the two of us, and I couldn’t let that happen.
Not after I’d surely revealed my heart sometime during our elopement. Not after he’d immediately turned around and broken it. Broken me.
And I was. Broken, that is . . .
Emotions had never had a place in my family. They complicated situations and got in the way of what needed to be done. However, being the only daughter, my mom had helped me carve out small moments to release those complicated emotions whenever they became overwhelming.
Small moments I’d been grateful for, but had always viewed as a weakness.
And then I’d woken up married to Hudson Gray . . .
I hadn’t been able to grasp the meaning of small moments since.
What was worse? I’d still needed Gray in those not-so-small moments. I’d needed his comforting presence and understanding. I’d needed his patience and ridiculous ability to make me laugh. I’d even needed the infuriating way he pushed my buttons until I snapped.
More than a decade of managing to keep my emotions—my weaknesses—from him, yet I was sure I would’ve laid those hidden parts of myself at his feet if I would’ve given in and seen him the way he’d begged me to.
The reminder that he’d been the source of my humiliation and grief had always stopped me, like tonight.
Lifting my paintbrush to the wall again, I released a pent-up sigh when my phone chimed.
But despite my best efforts to ignore the pull, I glanced at the screen just before the push notification disappeared, then scrambled to grab it when I saw who the message was from.
Swiping out of the picture I had pulled up, because I was apparently a masochist, I went over to the messages to confirm what I’d seen.
Grumpy Asher Briggs
Open the door.
Confusion pulsed through me and mixed with a whisper of disappointment when I realized it wasn’t Hudson Gray standing outside my condo after all. But this was much more worrisome.
Briggs had never once attempted to visit my condo before. Considering the time of night and the way I’d lost control at the job earlier, I had a sinking feeling I knew why he finally had.
I knew I hadn’t been giving my all these past months. I knew I’d messed up tonight. But, even though I didn’t know how to be around Gray anymore, I was terrified Briggs was about to rip this part of my life from me.
I loved my job. I loved these men—one considerably more than the others, as my destroyed heart refused to let me forget. I loved Shadow.
Swallowing the knot in my throat, I dropped my phone, hurriedly cleaned the brush, then set it down before rushing through the condo and to the door.
Glancing at myself to make sure there wasn’t any incriminating evidence of what I’d been doing, I unlocked the deadbolt and handle, preparing to slip outside before Briggs could get a peek inside, and was shoved back as the door was flung open.
“Knew that’d get you,” a distinctly not Briggs voice said.
“Get out,” I snapped as Gray charged in.
But then he was standing in my open entryway, hands lifted like he’d already been preparing for me to demand he leave, eyes wide as he stared straight ahead, and an unfamiliar feeling stole into my chest and gripped at my heart, urging it faster and faster.
Gray might’ve been the comfort I’d always craved and clung to, but this had been my safe space. Once I’d moved in, no one else had ever set foot inside my condo.
Until now.
Before tonight, if Gray had wanted to talk to me here, he’d always knocked before waiting for me on the tailgate of his truck. He’d never asked for an explanation, he’d simply understood that I hadn’t wanted anyone past that threshold.
And he’d just bulldozed past it.
“What . . .” he began, the word soft as it dragged from him. Slowly blinking, he shook his head before refocusing on the wall across from him. “I’m sorry, what?”
“Get out,” I repeated through clenched teeth.
He lifted one of his hands higher, his voice a numb sort of confusion as he continued toward my kitchen. “I brought tacos.”
“I don’t care. I said—”
“Did you do this?” he asked, finally looking at me for a split second before his attention drifted back to the wall.
My stomach twisted and humiliation burned through me as I watched him close in on the wall to more easily inspect it.
The first wall I’d painted after moving in.
It was what I did when I was stressed, which was all the time—painted designs and stories onto the surfaces of my home.
Other than my parents, no one had ever known that I drew or painted.
Which meant, now only my dad knew. Well .
. . he’d known. It was made clear when he’d first found out that I’d needed to put an end to it.
But it was something special for my mom and me, so we’d continued whenever training hadn’t been taking place.
Just another weakness to hide from my dad and brothers.
And now, someone was standing in the middle of it. Not just someone, but Hudson Gray. The owner and destroyer of my heart.
“Have I gotten it wrong all these years?” he asked as those pale eyes swung my way again. “Are you really a Disney princess instead?”
“Don’t start,” I said in warning, but he continued as if I’d never said anything.
“Should I change your name to Rapunzel?”
I had no idea what Rapunzel and Disney princesses had to do with my walls, and nearly asked how he did, before remembering who I was talking to.
This was Gray . . . the man who’d come back to Dallas more times than I could remember with lingering glitter and messily applied nail polish from the tea parties his little nieces had roped him into over the years.
If my walls reminded him of Rapunzel, he was probably right.
Still, I hated the nicknames he’d always been quick to dole out. I hated that he was seeing this part of me and likening it to a fictional princess, once again connecting me to something I’d always been told was weak.
My jaw clenched, earning a brief, bright smile from him and a flash of those infuriating dimples. When it fell, he explained, “I couldn’t sleep.”
“That’s nice.”
“We need to talk.”
My heart wrenched in response because that was all I wanted to do—curl up on a couch and share pieces of myself with him that I’d kept hidden from everyone else.
But this wasn’t before, everything had changed, and I was still so sure I wouldn’t make it through a one-on-one with this man without breaking down.
“We really don’t,” I said stubbornly.
A disbelieving huff bled from him as he turned fully toward me. “I can think of four other people who don’t agree with that.” The side of his face scrunched up—an action that really shouldn’t look as attractive as it did on him. “Maybe only three. Not sure if Evans cares about anything these days.”
With a quick scan around my condo, he walked over to the kitchen nook and sank into one of the chairs at my small table, talking as he did. “More importantly, the future of our jobs doesn’t agree. And I really don’t feel like losing my job or being chained to a desk.”
“You sit at a desk every day,” I reminded him.
“But it’s only half my job,” he countered as he started pulling foil-wrapped tacos out of the bag.
“Please,” I began, my tone dripping with dry sarcasm, “make yourself at home.”
He glanced my way and slowly raised one eyebrow. “I will. Thanks.”
A bitter, disbelieving laugh tumbled past my lips as I demanded, “Leave, Gray. What makes you think you can just show up here?”
“Every single time you’ve shown up at my place unannounced,” he said without hesitation, as if he’d been prepared for this argument.
He twisted in the seat and leaned toward me, frustration lining his handsome face.
“In the six-or-so years you’ve lived in Texas, I’ve never once asked what you were doing or told you to leave when you showed up at my apartment.
But I’ve never been allowed past your front door. ”
“For good reason,” I claimed.
“What reason?” Gray ground out, then gestured to the wall behind him, painted with random nothings, dreams, and memories, just as the rest. “This?”
“Because this is my space.”
“And my apartment isn’t mine?” he countered on an exasperated laugh, then leaned back and dragged his hands over his face. “Mallory, what is this?”
I stiffened at the sound of my name leaving him for the second time tonight.
He never called me Mallory.
But before I could get caught on why he suddenly was or what exactly the feeling was in my chest and stomach, he continued.
“You need to help me out here, because I don’t know why you’ve been this stranger at Shadow, and a ghost outside of it.
And, even though you’re acting somewhat like your normal self now, I don’t know why you’re standing there, trying to shut me out and spouting these hypocritical statements like they’re a hill you’re ready to die on, when that’s never been you.
” He pressed a hand to his chest before halfheartedly tossing it to the side.
“I don’t know why you’re taking Aruba out on me. ”
Any surprising, disconcerting feelings I may have had over the sound of my name abruptly fled at the mention of Aruba.
Swallowing around the wholly unwelcome knot of emotion in my throat, I straightened my shoulders and asked, “And how was Aruba for you?”
Gray’s eyes narrowed and head slanted like he knew the question was a trap just waiting for him to walk into. After long seconds passed in strained silence, he carefully answered, “Full of surprises.”