Bryn
I cross the lobby and go directly upstairs, where his assistant is hustling to get shit done, as always.
“Is he alone?” I ask.
“Sorry. He’s not.” Click, click, click, I hear the keyboard.
“Did you tell him I called?”
She nods. Click, click, click.
“Why hasn’t he called back?”
Click click…” He doesn’t report to me, dear.” Click, click. “I’m sure he’ll call when he wants to.”
God. That’s it? “Will you stop typing and look at me.”
Robertha stops typing and looks at me, her eyes wide in surprise over my outburst.
“Will he see me or not?” I demand.
Alarmed, she slowly picks up the phone, but I’ve had it with waiting for an ounce of his attention. The least he could have done was call—text. Send a courier. Fucking answer my dozen calls worrying about him. Obviously nothing happened to him. Obviously he hasn’t crashed, gotten robbed, kidnapped, or killed. The man is fine. He’s at work, isn’t he? I start for the doors.
“He’s in a meeting—” she says.
I ignore her and head straight to the double doors leading to Christos’s office. I push them open.
Christos is at the long table at the far end of his office, wearing a white shirt and slacks, his jaw shadowed with three days’ growth of beard—while two men stand with him, reviewing some sort of paperwork.
The relief I feel when seeing him—and confirming that yes, he is fine!!—is nearly knee-buckling. But the feeling is quickly replaced by confusion. He looks raw, a little filthy, as if he hasn’t showered at all.
His eyes lift to mine when he hears me walk in—and all my hope that we could maybe work it out vanishes when I meet his eyes. They aren’t cold. They aren’t hot. They are simply…sunken.
Turbulent.
The opposite of Christos’s eyes.
For the first time since I’ve known him, Christos looks absolutely lost. Like a man living a nightmare.
My stomach roils with my sudden concern. What happened? It’s all I can think. What happened, what happened, what’s wrong?
“I need to talk to you,” I rasp out.
He glances sharply at the men, who look back at him expectantly. “Give us a minute,” he tells the men after a moment.
Even his voice is different, low and toneless. He sounds numb.
It takes forever for the men to depart. I wait until they shut the door behind them, and then we’re alone.
Aaric Christos and I.
His posture is defeated as he rakes a hand through his hair restlessly, pacing as I stand in the middle of the room, stand there like a fool who just barged into his meeting, feeling uncertain about everything.
Something is wrong. He doesn’t love me. I’m so sure I start to tremble. But I want him to tell it to my face. I want him to tell me how stupid I was—how right I was in the beginning. In not wanting to get involved. Wanting to be careful.
Hell, even if I’m wrong, even a broken clock hits the right hour once a day.
He’s lost interest.
I was a challenge. He’s had me. Now we’re done.
After pacing a restless circle, Christos stops at his window and his shoulders look stiff and rigid—acting like a wall between us.
It pisses me off, his silence. Seeing his hard, chiseled profile as I stress to know what he’s thinking and why the fuck he’s pulling away from me.
“Look at me, you son of a bitch,” I say.
He turns around, one brow raised in surprise over my bad mouth. But the moment our eyes meet, the way his eyes blaze at me—as if he’s living in the pits of hell—strikes me once more.
“I waited for two hours Saturday night! Then I fell asleep, still dressed, to wake up and see you hadn’t bothered to call. What the fuck is wrong with you? I left you like 15 messages. You could have died! You could have been kidnapped! There could have been a fire somewhere and you could have been in it,” I demand. My voice breaks, and an unnamable emotion etches across his face as my words register.
“God, I’m sorry, Bryn,” he says. He raises his hands in the air and then he pulls them back, fisting them at his sides.
“Tell me, Aaric. Please.” My voice breaks.
“Miranda’s pregnant.”
One second, two seconds, three seconds…
“What?”
I blink several times, but he still has that look on his face. The look that says he bit out the words that I just heard.
“Miranda.” He drags a hand over his face, the little muscle at the back of his jaw about to break from exertion. “She’s pregnant.”
His ex-girlfriend is pregnant.
Aaric is going to be a father.
Aaric is going to be a father of a baby that is not mine.
My eyes begin to sting. “It’s yours? I…of course it’s yours, you were dating still.”
I speak then. After a long, long moment. “She’s pregnant with your baby.”
Envy.
Jealousy.
All of those emotions that I don’t like to feel, that make me feel low and worthless, are in me now.
I clutch my stomach.
“Bit.”
“Don’t bit me. Don’t…don’t come any closer.”
Christos starts walking forward. I back away three steps and then stop. He stops two feet in front of me. “I never touched her after you came back. You’ve got to believe me,” he hisses under his breath.
I meet his gaze, my chin up at an angle that belies the way I feel. Like crumpling into a stupid goddamned ball. “You know as well as I do you’re not the asshole they say you are,” I say. “You won’t leave your child fatherless like your father did. That’s not who you are.”
He looks at me fiercely, as if he needs me to understand. “I wanted it to be you,” he whispers.
“Well, it’s not me. It won’t be, Aaric.”
I stare at his eyes and quietly beg him, please, I love you, don’t torture me anymore…
We stay there, in silence. Both of us grappling with the news. This is nothing we planned for our future, nothing we could see coming.
“You could’ve at least come and talked to me. Not give me the silence treatment as if I don’t deserve to know…” I whisper.
“I wanted to deal with it before I talked to you.” Again, that tiny muscle flexes angrily as his fingers plunge into his hair. “What am I supposed to do, huh?” He grits out as he grabs the doctor’s paper from his desk and shows me.
I think my face is wet but I don’t know, all I know is the man I want to be with is having a baby with someone else.
My heart breaks when he takes my face in his hands.
He wipes my tears with his thumb.
It’s something Aaric the boy would do.
A lover would do.
But he’s not a boy and he’s not my lover—he’s nothing of mine now.
I never got to say I love you. I wish I’d said it. I wish I could now say the words leaping in my mind. Don’t leave me, choose me, have a baby with me…
Selfish words I have no right to speak.
“Talk to me, bit,” he gruffly demands, clearly fighting his own demons.
My eyes are blurry. I can hardly see him as I press my face into his warm hands. He looks at his palm, wet from my tears, and keeps drying my tears for me.
“I meant every word I told you, Bryn,” he says, softly. Too softly.
“Stop. Please. I can’t.” I step back.
He clenches his jaw, as if I’ve just given him the hardest blow of all.
Rejection of his touch.
“There’s no other woman for me like you. I’ve always known you were the girl after my heart, Bryn Kelly. Even when you didn’t want to sleep with me. When you didn’t want to kiss me. Even when I knew I wasn’t good enough for you.” He looks at me then, gold eyes like lasers, branding me. “I meant every word I told you,” he hisses.
“I wish you hadn’t. It would be easier. I hate you…”
I drop my face to the floor.
“I hate you, Aaric.”
When he touches my chin between his thumb and index finger to force me to look at him, the touch singes a path straight to the tight little knot on the left side of my chest.
I try to breathe but I can’t.
“Don’t be tender,” I beg, my throat tight.
“I’m in hell here,” he says, eyes murdering me with love.
The confession makes my eyes prickle behind my eyelids. It takes me a second to sob out loud, then react and push back from him.
“Congratulations, Aaric,” I say softly. “Really,” I say, trying to gather my composure.
This isn’t fair to him.
This isn’t fair, period.
He grinds his jaw, visibly tortured, his eyes glazed as if he’s been sleepless, drinking, or simply…like he said. In hell.
“Maybe this was just … a little vacation from realities,” I say then.
“What?” he bites out.
“Our little entanglement. Just a vacation from our lives or destinies. I don’t know.” I shake my head, trying to make sense of all this. Unable to make sense of losing the only guy I’ve ever fallen for. “But we’re in business and we’re adults. We can at least act like it.” I take another step back, gathering my courage and my pride close to me. “I’ll be fine. I’ll get over you.”
“Come here.”
“What for…”
“I just need to—” He grabs me and then we’re forehead to forehead, my face in his big hands. “Tell me I’m doing the right thing,” he hisses, his gaze carving into me.
“You’re doing the right thing,” I agree fervently, nodding, my throat aching.
He stares at me.
My eyes keep watering.
“Don’t,” I plead.
“Don’t what?”
“You look like a guy who means to kiss me for the last time.”
I pull free and swallow, putting half of the room between us. We both try to compose ourselves.
Christos’s jaw is working nonstop.
“We’ll be okay. You’re doing the right thing,” I repeat.
He nods, his jaw still locked so tight, it’s a marvel he can speak.
“Bryn, I’m sorry,” he says, shaking his head as if disappointed in himself.
“Don’t say you’re sorry. Don’t be sorry. I want you to forget me. We need to both move on, Aaric.”
He stares at me like I just shot us both, and I smile as if I didn’t, and nod in emphasis.
“Promise me you’ll forget me.”
“No, bit. I promise you I never will.”
I swallow.
“You have to. We have to. For your child.”
“I lost my mother. I lost my daughter. And it kills me to lose you twice,” he hisses angrily.
I walk over and cup his jaw, and then on impulse, I put my thumb on his lips and rise on tiptoe to kiss my thumb. Never removing it. Feeling his lips part beneath my thumb, his tongue come out to lick me.
I inhale back a sob and pull free, hearing his groan of despair and an angry, “sonofabitch” hiss as I walk away with my heart in pieces and my brain struggling to comprehend my new reality. The one where Aaric is with Miranda, and I need to figure out how to live with that. How to be okay with that. Without him.