Only thing that managed to do was shut me in with her presence. The feel of her a ripple through the room. She took a step forward, and then another, each one sending another shockwave through the air.
Hammering into my chest.
Blow after blow.
She sat in one of the two chairs that were angled toward my desk, tucking her skirt under her legs as she crossed them at the knee. “Good morning, Mr. Jacobs.”
I cleared the roughness from my throat.
Everything raw and hard.
Predominantly my dick.
“Good morning, Ms. Dearborne.” Couldn’t keep the scorn out of my voice when I uttered that name.
She let her teeth scrape over her plump bottom lip, the flesh slicked with something shiny and tinted the color of a plum.
I was going to lose my head.
“I trust you slept well.”
Translation: I pictured you all night in your bed, touching yourself while you were thinking of me. Exactly like I did.
“It was a little rough, honestly.”
“I can only imagine.” There was an innuendo there. Something I couldn’t keep out of the words.
“I’m . . . nervous,” she admitted.
The anger returned. A vat of hostility poured into my already boiling blood. A chemical reaction.
Possession and this protectiveness I couldn’t afford to feel. I reached into my briefcase and pulled out a white notepad.
Grace smirked. “No pink today?’
A soft chuckle rippled free when I thought of the whirlwind that was her child. The tornado that was her life.
“Not today. I tend to go for a more . . . streamlined and organized look.”
Maybe there was a warning there. That I couldn’t handle the chaos that was their lives. The noise and the love and the responsibility.
My mind was already screaming that I’d taken on too much. But there was something about this girl that made me want to hold it all. Her world and her needs.
God.
I had to stop looking at her like she meant something to me.
Not when she couldn’t mean anything.
Not when there was so much at stake.
I needed to put on armor. Put distance between us. Convince myself to treat this as just another case. If I didn’t, we were both going to lose, and that wasn’t a fate I would entertain.
I cleared my throat. “Shall we get started, Ms. Dearborne?”
“I think that would be a good idea.”
“Why don’t you start by telling me how you first met Mr. Dearborne.”
She hesitated for a moment, looking away, seeming to gather herself. “I was a freshman at The University of South Carolina. Reed was working on his masters. We met in the library of all places. He was older than me by six years. Good looking. Sweet. When he asked me for coffee that same night, I agreed. He was nice to me, and it was easy to fall into a relationship with him.”
Every cell in my body tensed. On edge and unprepared.
This was bad.
So goddamned bad.
I focused on taking notes rather than the urge to come unhinged.
But the thought of her touching another man had something cutting me open wide.
I’ve only been with two men.
Her low laughter sounded of doubt. “I guessed I should have been wary when things started moving so quickly that I couldn’t keep up. One day, I was attending school, and the next, he was putting a ring on my finger and telling me he wanted to spend his life with me. It was only a couple of months after we’d met. I’d tried to convince myself that it was because he was older and more mature. That he was ready for things to progress faster than me.”
Regret dimmed the light on her striking face. “I should have known I was nothing more than an easy target. A naïve girl who was blinded by his promises.”
Her tongue darted out, glancing across the sticky sweetness on her lips. I couldn’t help but become fixated on the action. “It became clear pretty quickly that he had his life mapped out. He needed a wife. Someone to stand at his side and make him look like the perfect guy. The perfect husband and the perfect father. I think I was nothing but a diversion to cover who he really was. It kept people from digging deeper into his personal life.”
Those eyes found mine over my desk. “I just wanted a regular family, and Reed wanted to rule the world. He was committed to doing absolutely anything he needed to do to achieve it.”
I cringed, hating the idea that I could have one thing in common with that asshole.
Her head minutely shook. “You asked me yesterday if I loved him, and I did. But it was never as deeply . . . as passionately . . . as it should have been. But that didn’t matter anyway because Reed had his own penchants.”
My eyes tracked the way her delicate throat bobbed when she swallowed. “He’d be gone at all hours of the night . . .”