Chapter 24
Chapter Twenty-Four
Oliver
Moonlight streams into the windows. The moon is so bright tonight as if it senses the battle I’m having with myself.
My fingertips dance along the ridge of Shaye’s side. Her skin is warm and soft. Her body fits against mine like it shares the same mold.
I tried to sleep. I closed my eyes, I counted sheep—I even grabbed my phone and fed my virtual farm. But no amount of jumping ruminants or satiated cows can distract me from Shaye being here.
With me.
In my bed.
I stare at the ceiling, listening to her smooth breaths and feel the steady, rhythmic strum of her heartbeat against me. Her hair tickles my chest. One arm is stretched over me. Her ankle lays on top of mine as if it’s some kind of security system.
It makes me smile.
It’s also maddeningly confusing.
With every minute that passes, I expect panic to set in.
I wait for the familiar sick feeling to elbow its way into my stomach.
I brace myself for the alarm bells of my own internal security system starting to ring, letting me know that it’s time to untangle myself from this woman and reset my brain. Reclaim my space. My bed.
I wait, watching shadows dance around my bedroom, and hold my breath.
Nothing happens.
If I lean in to the moment—allow myself to absorb the feeling instead of waiting for it to flee—I like it.
A lot. Lying with her without tightness in my abdomen is relaxing.
Not having to plot an exit strategy from this entanglement is refreshing.
The absence of a mental bulletin that chastises me for the events of the past twenty-four hours—a state of mind that’s always the case if a woman manages to make it to my bedroom—is satisfying.
But leaning in to this moment is dangerous. I’m not na?ve.
Shaye stirs, her arm stretching before she settles into the blankets again. I hold my breath and look down to see if she’s awake. She looks sleepily up at me.
“Hey,” she says, her voice thick with sleep.
“Hey,” I whisper back.
She tucks her chin to my side, resting her forehead on my chest, before rolling over onto her back. It takes everything I have in me not to grab her and haul her back next to me again.
“Have you been awake long?” she says, her eyes struggling to stay open.
“Nope. Just woke up.”
She hums as her head nods subtly.
“It’s the middle of the night,” I tell her. “You can go back to sleep.”
Her head turns against the pillows and she opens her eyes. Under the moonlight, she looks younger, more unguarded. It stirs something deep inside me.
I lean over and press a kiss against her forehead. She smiles.
“What’s keeping you up?” she asks.
The question rolls softly off her lips. It comes across as a genuine thought, a natural inquiry. And I know that’s intentional. There’s a tilt to the words, a one-octave rise in the tone that tells me that she’s thinking. She’s curious. She’s worried.
I move so that I’m on my side and facing her.
“It’s hard to sleep when a beautiful woman is in your bed,” I say.
She grins again.
“What’s keeping you up?” I ask.
“Nothing. I just woke up.”
“But you aren’t going back to sleep, are you?”
She looks at me through her lashes, knowing I just read her like the sweet book that she is.
“I’m just thinking,” she says.
“No. You’re worrying.”
“Yes. I’m worrying.” She laughs softly. “You know me so well.”
“So, talk to me. Tell me what you’re worrying about.”
She pauses and mulls over my request. Then she rolls onto her side to face me too.
I can see the trepidation in her eyes, the glimmer of uncertainty that she can’t hide. I hate it. I hate everything about it.
After the night we had together, how could she possibly be worrying about anything? Didn’t I make her feel good? Didn’t I make her happy?
Doesn’t she want to be here?
I take her hand in mine and lace our fingers together. I stroke the top of her hand with my thumb. She watches the motion as she thinks.
“Be honest with me,” I tell her, bringing our interlocked hands to my mouth and kissing them. “Trust me.”
As I set them back on the blanket, she sighs.
“I don’t have a problem being honest. But the trust part is hard for me.” She nestles into the pillows. “It’s hard for me to just dive into this—whatever it is—headfirst. I worry.”
“Why?”
“You are Oliver Mason. There’s nothing I can do to you that would compromise that. But I’m … me. I don’t have the same level of mastery over my life that you do.”
I stare at her. “Sweetheart, I don’t understand.”
She shifts around on the pillows. I release her hand so she can use it to get situated. It doesn’t escape me that she puts some distance between us when she resettles, but I don’t comment on it. I’m too focused on what she has to say.
“In every relationship I’ve had, it’s always come down to a power struggle,” she says. “To live in that space with the other person, I had to give up something. I had to give up me or at least pieces of me.”
My chest aches as I listen to her. It downright hurts.
“My mom made it her mission in life to keep me in my place,” she says, the words picking up speed.
“I had little control over my life until I finally moved out and in with Luca. I probably moved in with him so soon to escape my home life, I don’t know.
I haven’t explored that enough, I suppose.
But it was always ridiculous curfews, punishments for the smallest offenses, and embarrassing me in front of my friends. ”
As she continues, her voice softens. Her eyes turn watery. Her hand finds mine.
I take her palm and give it the tightest squeeze I can give without making her wince. I want her to know I’m here, I’m listening—that she has me.
“And then Luca …” She presses her lips together, her chest rising and falling. “It started off good. He was nice and thoughtful. But looking back, I can see where things went wrong.”
I can’t help it. I close the distance between us.
I reach for her and slide her across the bed until she’s tucked beside me. I’m not sure if it’s for her good or mine—or which one of us needs the connection more.
We lie together quietly. The only sound is the occasional hoot of an owl.
I rest my head against hers and give her the space I think she needs.
I also need a bit of time to try to rope in the emotions swirling inside me.
To be honest, I haven’t wanted to know—to really know—a woman in a very long time.
I don’t even know that I wanted to know Kendra, really.
I’ve had dates, one-night stands, but I haven’t wanted their thoughts.
Their hearts. To know what makes them tick, what makes them smile.
Yet I want all of this from Shaye. I barely know her.
That fact is not lost on me. In fact, it sits obtusely on my heart as I feel her try to maneuver around whatever wound she carries.
A wound I don’t know. But as we lie together with nothing between us but the secrets we keep and the sheets on which we sleep, I understand that I’ll never truly know Shaye until I know the scars on her heart.
I wanted men in the room tonight to know that Shaye was with me. Now I want Shaye to know that she has me.
“It’s a bit of a messy story, so I understand if you don’t really want the specifics. If you don’t want to know, Oliver, it’s fine. I won’t burden you with—”
“No. I do want to know, Shaye. I … I want to know you. It’s just not the pretty pieces of our lives that make us who we are.”
I give her a gentle squeeze and think about how my relationship with Kendra helped make me who I am … and who I might want to be someday.
“I’d love to hear anything that you feel willing to share with me,” I tell her.
She reaches up and places her soft hand on my bristly cheek. Smiles at me. God, she’s beautiful.
“Okay.” She gathers her courage. “Things … declined. With each step, he … repositioned himself. I lost a little bit of my autonomy every time. When I moved in. Joint banking. When we got married.”
I squeeze her tighter.
“It’s not all his fault because I let it happen,” she says, her voice cracking. “I wrote everything off and made excuses for him. The affairs, the debt, the abuse …”
My body stills. I’m afraid to move. I’m afraid to look at her or touch her or breathe too hard.
Did she just fucking say abuse? Affairs, okay, fuck him for that. But abuse?
It’s a good thing he’s already dead.
“He’d yell,” she says, sniffling. “He’d call me names.
Made me quit my job because the boss wanted me—or so he said.
He took away the checkbook because I didn’t know how to manage money, yet he was the one that took out a one-hundred-fucking-thousand-dollar loan against my mom’s house and made me sign the papers too. ”
Her tears are hot and wet against my bare chest. Her body shakes as she lets loose what must be a life’s worth of pain. Her mother. Her bastard husband.
I hold her, biting back the explosion I want to spew into the room, reining myself in. I try to wrap my brain around what she’s telling me, but I know that if I do, I’m going to have so many questions. It’ll prevent her from talking … and that’s what she needs right now.
“I got you,” I whisper, moving us both until she’s on top of my chest. I wrap my arms around her and press kisses against her head.
My heart splits open with the weight of her words. The only bandage for me is that she’s here—trusting me with this truth. Even though I know that she needed to do this long ago, the fact that she feels safe enough to do it with me makes me feel more powerful than any deal I’ve ever closed.
Finally, she sniffles and wipes her face with the back of her hands.
“Are you okay?” I ask, leaning back to get a better look at her.
“Yeah.” Her voice sounds like it’s wrapped in cotton. “I’m sorry for this. I don’t know why I chose right now to break down.”
I smile at her. “I’m glad you did.”
She laughs and scoots off me. I hate to let her go, but I don’t know what she needs. Maybe it’s best to let her choose.
She pulls the sheets up around her. “I haven’t talked about things like that with anyone besides Lisbeth. I don’t like to let people see me cry.”
“You’re a pretty crier.”
Her smile stretches across her tearstained cheeks. “That’s probably not true but thank you for saying it anyway.”
“It is true.” I remove a chunk of hair that’s stuck to the side of her face. “Can I tell you something?”
She nods.
“I have trust issues too.” Admitting my weaknesses feels like a huge mistake, but it’s the only way I think I can get through to her. “When your fiancée leaves you for a much older, much richer man and you realize she never really loved you at all, that stings. No, it hurts like a motherfucker.”
“She’s an idiot.”
I smile at her. “I’ve been fucked over in a hundred business deals. My parents are now divorcing, which isn’t about me, I know, but it does feel like … if you can’t trust your parents to stay together at our age, is anything even sacred anymore?”
“I’m sorry to hear that, Oliver.”
“Thanks, but that’s not the point.” I lace our fingers together again. “The point is that this thing with you makes me worry too.”
Her eyes search mine. “Why?”
“Because this … us … feels like it has the potential to be infinitely more important to me than Kendra or a business deal or my parents’ marriage.”
Her brows raise toward the ceiling, but she doesn’t say anything.
“I’ve laid here all night and couldn’t sleep because I was trying to wrap my head around you.
Me. This.” I tug her close to me again. “I thought about last night at the gala and seeing you with Marius. I thought about having you in my house and in my bed. I thought about waking up and making breakfast and …”
I peer down at her. She looks up, my apprehension reflected in her eyes.
“I don’t know what we’re doing, Shaye. And we both have every right to be scared as shit. But I don’t want it to end. I want this to be the beginning.”
“Of what?” she asks softly.
“Of whatever it becomes. To hell with your ex-husband and your mother and Kendra and—”
“And the fact that I work for you?” She sighs. “I love working for you. But if we … if this is the beginning of something—”
“Don’t you want it to be?”
A slow smile slips across her face. “Without a doubt.”
I bend down and place a chaste kiss on her lips. “Then you work for me.”
“Should I work for Wade?”
I flinch, making her giggle.
“Do you really fucking think that it would be easier for me to get anything done knowing you were in another office that I could just barge into?” I scoff. “Please.”
“Okay.”
“Okay, what?”
“I don’t know.” She shrugs. “Okay, that I will try not to overthink this. And … I’ll try to trust you.”
A lot of women have said a lot of nice things to me in my life. Funny things, sexy things, interesting things. But no one has ever said anything as important as Shaye is saying right now. Because trust comes with a price that both of us have paid before. And lost.
My heart pulls in my chest as if I’ve just been deemed worthy of some great responsibility. It’s baffling and a little disconcerting, but also, it’s amazing.
“Come here, you,” I say, pulling her on top of me again.
I hold her as close to me as I can. She wraps her arms around me and holds me as if her life depends on it.
Maybe it does.
Maybe we both depend on it.
“I have a question,” she says, smiling against my chest.
“What’s that?”
“What does level three look like?”
A band of heat uncoils in my groin as I flip her over in one swift movement. Her laughter pierces the air as she bites her lip.
“You want level three, baby?” I ask.
She nods.
I jerk the blankets off her and let my gaze feast on her naked body. The sweet curve of her hip, the roundness of her stomach, the fullness of her breasts—it’s all mine.
A few things in the last twenty-four hours have struck me as odd. The fact that her dancing with Marius made me insanely jealous. Hearing her call herself my EA annoying me. Enjoying her in my personal space not shocking my system.
But the one thing that tops them all is this fierce, instinctive need to make her mine. I don’t know where it comes from, and I don’t know why. I only know that I’m powerless against it.
I just hope that I can figure out how to deal with it.
“What are you waiting for?” she asks, reaching for my cock. Her hand wraps snugly around it.
“I’m just trying to figure out what to do with you.”
She leans up and kisses me. “Let’s start here and figure out the rest together.”
I lay her back and do as she suggests.
We’ll start here and figure out the rest.
Together.