I walked into the shower. It was good and cold, but it wasn't going to cool the heat in my body anytime soon. I decided to give Shay some time to figure out what she wanted to do. In turn, it gave me time to know what to say to her without making things worse. She had every right to hate me. I had only been thinking of my own needs when I came up with the stupid plan. I'd used her without any regard as to how the whole fucking thing would affect her. I figured she'd be walking away with a nice sum of money, but I'd forgotten to factor in that she was human, with a soul, a human soul. Something it seemed I'd lacked . . . until now. And when Shay walked out of my life, which she surely would, she'd be taking a big part of that newly found soul with her. My heart would be thrown into the mix as well. A heart I barely knew I had but that I'd found through the simplest everyday events, like watching Shay make sure to butter every bit of her toast to the edges and then she always finished the ritual by licking her fingertip. Or watching her wrinkle her nose at an unfunny comedy show or the way she nibbled on an apple while deeply enthralled in a book. And then there was the way she walked and talked and laughed and scoffed and even argued. Even her temper was fucking adorable.

In her distress, she had rambled some, making it hard for me to follow her line of thinking. But she'd brought up my own moment of scoffing when I assured her she would never fall in love with a jerk like me. Was it possible she had fallen for me in some degree? I'd never even considered it because deep down I knew I was my father's son, great at business but wholly unlikeable as a human. I'd fed my needs with money, business successes and non-stop sex and that had left me feeling incomplete and worthless. Shay had helped me see some light in my darkly empty existence.

And that was what I would tell her. I would make it clear as day that she had changed me. It was no longer about lust, or nefarious contracts, or reaching physical limits. It was about a connection that I'd never had and one I hadn't ever expected. In a week and a half, Shay had helped make me a better man.

I finished the shower and dried off. The house was quiet. I concluded Shay had showered and climbed into bed. She'd come dangerously close to drowning, dangerously close to dying the same way her mother had, a nightmarish end that I was certain had haunted Shay her whole life. And selfish ass that I was, I tried immediately to take advantage of her shaken state by taking her to bed. I was an idiot.

I pulled on my clothes and walked out into the hallway. I considered letting her nap, but there was just too much I needed to say. I walked to her door and knocked. No answer.

I leaned my forehead against the door. "Shay, I need to talk to you." No answer. I headed toward the living room, deciding to let her sleep.

I turned toward the kitchen and headed to the refrigerator for a beer. Our blanket and picnic were still out on the sand, now overrun by a flock of seagulls who had decimated all the food. I chugged back some beer and spun around to head out to the beach to retrieve what was left of the picnic. As my eyes grazed past the kitchen window, something was different. My gaze shot back to the window and out to the driveway. Shay's car was gone.

I raced down the hallway and threw open the bedroom door. Her few belongings had been packed up and taken away. She'd straightened up the room and bed as if she had never been in the house. A piece of paper was sitting on the bed. Her pretty handwriting stared back at me.

I folded the paper and held it tightly in my grasp as I walked to the window and stared out. With every edible crumb gone, the gulls had finally deserted the blanket on the sand. My heart raced again as the few terrifying moments in the water came back to me. The day ended badly, but it could have ended much worse.

It looked like I was alone again. Loneliness was something I'd grown up with, something I'd grown used to. I'd even taken a crazy amount of comfort in being alone. But now that I'd had Shay in my life, now that I'd felt what it was like to be with someone who I wanted to spend every minute with, loneliness was going to feel like a hopeless, dark hole in the pit of my stomach.