by Inara Scott
A shard of fear pierced through her fog, and Tess froze. “What are you talking about? Are you saying you want me to leave?”
He shoved a tired hand through his hair and took another drink. “No. That’s not what I’m saying.”
“Because I am trying to get my own place. That’s exactly what this is all about. You don’t have to worry—”
He cut her off with a raised hand. “You’re like a living example of the dog with her foot caught in the trap.”
“What?”
“You know, the dog that chews off its own paw to get out of a trap. After biting the hand of the person who tried to open it for her.”
Tess blinked. The rapid pace of the conversation had left her behind a few exchanges ago. Was Mason telling her to move out? Why was she a dog in a trap? “I am not chewing off my own leg.”
“If you say so.” Mason took one more drink. Then he stood and pulled out his wallet, extracting a few bills. “I assume you’ll pay for your own drinks?”
“Wait, you’re leaving?”
“I think Jasper has this covered.” He nodded at the bartender, who had approached from the side, and dropped the money on the bar. “You can call if you need me. But I’m sure you won’t.”
…
Mason didn’t look back as he left the bar. He hadn’t been surprised when he’d gotten the call that she had accepted the offer. In a week, he’d own the lot outright. But he’d still held out hope that maybe she would talk about it with him. Maybe even give him a chance to help. Or tell her how he felt.
Luke had called him on Monday with the name of a real estate agent he might want to talk to if he was interested in purchasing some property near Oakland. He hadn’t said more, but the meaning had been clear. Mason didn’t ask how Luke had gotten involved in the transaction. He didn’t really want to know. The thought that she’d gone to someone she barely knew rather than him wasn’t something he was prepared to confront.
He pulled out his phone and texted Cecilia. You might want to stop by the Outlander. Tess looks like she’ll need some help getting home.
Of course, he didn’t even know where she was going to stay tonight. At least he had Astro at his place. She might leave him, but she wouldn’t leave her dog.
Everything okay? Cecilia texted back.
He and Cecilia had struck up a friendship over the past couple of weeks, mainly built on trying to figure out how to outmaneuver Tess and her repeated attempts to make really bad decisions. They’d talked on the phone a few times, texted mostly. She was sharp and funny, deeply loyal to Tess, and initially at least, deeply skeptical of him. But lately he’d felt her soften. He’d hinted something to her about buying Tess’s land, and she had sent him a series of emojis of monkeys covering their eyes, ears, and mouth. Tess would never forgive me if I interfered, she’d said. Don’t tell me anything you don’t want her to know.
He’d taken that advice to heart and hadn’t mentioned anything further but had been comforted that at least he wouldn’t be bidding against Cecilia.
She accepted an offer on the lot.
There was a pause, and he could practically see Cecilia processing his statement. Less than a minute later, she replied: I’ll head that way right now.
He slipped his phone into his pocket. Tess would never forgive him, either. But he’d confronted that possibility days ago and decided it was worth it. Her memories were too important to sacrifice to her pride. And he loved her too much to let her suffer with a lifetime of regret for letting them go.
Loved her too much.
Oh hell, he did love her, didn’t he?
The realization stopped him in his tracks. He’d felt it happening for weeks now. The growing sense that this wasn’t just a temporary thing. That he was committed with everything he had.
Tess wasn’t a friend with benefits. She wasn’t someone he cared about, the way you might care about someone you’d known in high school, or one of your sister’s friends. He was in love with her, and that love was there when he woke up in the morning and felt for her in the bed beside him, and when he fell asleep at night and felt her spooned up behind him. It was in his need to protect her and his refusal to let her walk away from the only place she’d ever felt safe.
And as far as he could tell, she wanted nothing to do with it.
He wasn’t sure how long he stood there, but a half an hour later, he was knocking on Connor’s door.
Connor must have been cooking, because he had a dishtowel slung over one shoulder that was stained with streaks of red and green. “You look like shit,” he observed.
It had started raining at some point during the walk, and because Mason had left his apartment in a bit of a panic, he hadn’t grabbed a jacket. His shirt and limp, soggy tie were plastered to his chest.
“Thanks.” He walked into the kitchen. Empty avocado skins, flattened limes, and a small bowl of guacamole sat on the counter, alongside a cutting board heaped with fresh onions and peppers.
“I’ll grab you something dry to throw on.” Connor reappeared a few minutes later with a neatly folded T-shirt and pair of athletic pants. Connor only bothered to do things he enjoyed, and did well. Luckily for Nate and Mason, cooking was on that list. Even better during their days of living together—so was laundry.
“What happened?” Connor asked, setting the dry clothes on the counter. He pulled a beer out of the fridge and handed it to Mason, along with a bottle opener.
Mason stood in the kitchen, dripping, and wondered how he could have been such an idiot. “You ever do something incredibly stupid? Something that anyone could have told you would be a disaster, but you did it anyway?”
“Every time I go on a date.” Connor poured tortilla chips into a large bowl, which he pushed in Mason’s direction, then began cleaning the counter. “By any chance does your stupidity have anything to do with the woman living in your apartment?”
“I swear, she’s the most infuriating human being I’ve ever met.” Savagely, he ripped off his shirt and threw it on a stool.
“And that’s saying a lot, because you’ve met Nate.” Connor gestured toward the shirt. “You can leave your wet things in the bathroom.”
“Okay, Mom.” Mason went to the bathroom to change into the clothes Connor had given him, pausing for a moment to admire the uncanny precision with which the shirt had been folded. The familiar scent of Connor’s laundry detergent brought him back to their Boston days, when Connor had done his laundry in exchange for Mason setting him up on dates.
When he emerged from the bathroom, Connor was cooking chicken. Mason grabbed his beer and slid onto a stool. “What’s for dinner?”
“Fajitas. With a side of regret.”
Mason nodded. “You, too?”
“I was supposed to have a date tonight.”
“And?”
Connor shrugged. “She cancelled. I think she texted me a couple of times during the week, but I never texted back.”
“Ignoring your date’s messages does tend to send the wrong signal. If you want to keep the date, that is. If you are hoping she might cancel so you don’t have to go through with it, it’s probably a very effective strategy.”
“Interesting point.” The smell of chili and cumin began to fill the kitchen. “So, you want to tell me about Tess?”
“I found her in a goddamn bar. By herself. After she accepted the offer.”
“I take it she didn’t talk to you about selling?”
“Of course not. That would be way too rational. Or, I guess in her mind, needy. Attached. Something like that.” He glowered at his beer.
“And you talked to her, expressed your feelings, all that crap?”
Mason gave a short laugh. The irony of having Connor giving him relationship advice was unmistakable. Not to mention that things felt infinitely more complicated now that he knew the feelings he was harboring went well beyond anything he’d ever experienced before. “Express my feelings? Who are you, Dr. Phil?”
“I am a doctor.” Connor pushed up his glasses with the back of his wrist and gestured toward a pile of vegetables on a cutting board. “You want to pass me those onions and peppers?”
“Sure.” Mason heaved himself to standing. He carried the cutting board over to the stove. “And no. Well, I tried.”
“You tried?”
“She’s pretty determined not to have this conversation.”
“So you gave up and decided this secrecy thing is better?”
The weight of his helplessness pressed down on his shoulders. “Honestly, if I hadn’t bought the land, someone else would’ve. In six months, there would be two duplexes on it. It would kill her to see it. I know it would. She’ll regret it for the rest of her life.”
“The same way you’ll regret never telling her how you feel?”
He thought about the times he’d tried to talk to Tess about what their relationship had become, or was becoming, and the way she’d ducked the topic each time. He hadn’t pushed, partly because he wasn’t sure he was ready to have the conversation himself. But now? Now he was pretty sure what she’d do. She’d push him away.
That was what she did—push people away.
“How about another beer?” Mason finished his and grabbed two more from the fridge. He opened both and set one on the counter beside Connor.
“Coward.” Connor turned his attention to the stove.
“You asked Zoe out yet?”
“Nice attempt to change the subject.” Connor wagged the spatula in Mason’s direction. “Also, low blow.”
Mason shrugged. “Desperate times, desperate measures.”
“Look, you know about eighty percent of my knowledge of women comes from things you’ve told me. The other twenty percent comes from romantic comedies I was forced to watch while on a date. So let’s not pretend I have any idea what I’m talking about. But that said, I can’t see how you make this better by refusing to talk to Tess about it.”
“Because she’ll leave. You don’t know Tess. She’s got a highly developed flight instinct honed by years of being hurt by the people she loves. So I know exactly what will happen if I push this. She’s going to be out the door.”
“Let me throw a little science at you, okay?” Connor took the pan off the stove and grabbed his beer. “Let’s talk about Newton’s laws of motion.”
Mason shook his head. “This is exactly why Zoe will never date you.”
“We are not talking about Zoe. And by the way, there are about a million reasons why she will never date me. This is just one of them.” He took a drink from his beer. “Anyway, as I was saying, first law. Law of inertia. Objects in motion tend to stay in motion. Things like to keep doing what they’ve been doing. In other words, once you start running, it’s really hard to stop.”
Mason cocked his head. “It’s amazing that even after all these years, I can still be surprised by what happens inside your brain.”
Connor waved of his words. “Law number two: force causes a change in velocity, change in velocity causes a force. The bigger the object you’re trying to move, the more force you’ll have to exert to move it.”
Mason covered his ears. “You are making my brain hurt.”
“And law number three,” Connor continued. “Every action causes an equal and opposite reaction.”
“And all this applies to my life, how exactly?”
Connor rolled his eyes. “And you say I’m bad at relationships. Tess is used to running, right? She’s got a direction in mind, and she’s heading that way, come hell or high water.”
“Sounds about right,” Mason allowed.
“So that means she’s in motion—and an object in motion will tend to stay in motion. Unless it meets with some kind of force. The faster she’s running, the more force you’ll need to stop her. And when your force collides with her motion, there’s going to be some kind of reaction. Probably a big one.”
Mason rubbed a hand across his face. “That doesn’t help me at all. You know that, right?”
Connor leaned back on the counter with an apologetic smile. “Yeah, there’s probably a reason I’m still single. But I think what it means is that you have a challenge ahead of you, my friend. And it’s going to involve some risk and a big collision. But if you don’t exert some force, nothing’s going to change. So I guess you have to ask yourself, is it worth it to you to try?”
Chapter Twenty-Three
A little after ten that night, Cece dropped Tess off outside Mason’s building. She let herself into the apartment without knowing exactly what to expect. She’d been drunk enough when she’d seen him at the bar that she didn’t entirely trust her recollection of what had happened, but she remembered something about a dog gnawing off its own leg.
She had a bad feeling that she was the dog.
Astro met her at the door, tail wagging. Tess bent to pick her up, and that was when she noticed the black suitcase beside the door.
A wave of nausea passed over her. She forced herself to look at Mason, who was sitting on the couch, watching a sports talk show. He flicked off the television when she came in.
“What’s…” she had to clear her throat before she could continue. “What’s with the suitcase?”
“I haven’t been out to the East Coast for a while. I thought maybe I should check in with some of our partners.”
“And you decided to go tonight?”
“Yes.” He paused. “It felt like maybe I needed to get away for a little while.”
The air left her lungs in a rush. She lowered herself to one knee and made a show of setting Astro back on the ground, waiting for her head to clear before she righted herself. There was nothing good about this. She knew it. Not after what he’d said earlier tonight. Not after the way he’d left the bar.
“Why?”
He sighed. “Any chance you want to sit down?”
“With that lead in? Not a chance.”
He laughed without humor. “That’s fair. At least come out of the hall.”
Reluctantly, she forced her legs to work, to move her away from the black suitcase and everything it represented. She stopped when she’d gone a few feet from the front door.
Mason stood, and for one horrible moment, she thought he was going to touch her, and she would scream, or fall apart, or both. But he only walked over to the kitchen, leaving her trembling. For a moment, he rested both hands on the back of one of the stools, then turned toward her with a grim expression. “I’ve got something to tell you, and you won’t like it.”
“Okay.” She was frozen in place, heart racing like a cornered animal. Was this what he meant when he’d compared her to a dog with its leg in a trap? Was he the trap? Because she would definitely gnaw off her own leg to avoid this feeling. “Go ahead.”
“The offer on your lot today. That came from me.”
She gaped, mouth falling open in disbelief. She had imagined him saying that he was dating someone else, or that he wanted her to leave. But this? This she hadn’t expected. “Wait, what? The offer I accepted? It was from some developer. NLE Realty or something.”
“One of Nate’s companies. He’s majority owner in two LLCs that are involved in real estate development in the Valley.”
“No.” She shook her head. “No way. That makes no sense.”
Why hadn’t it occurred to her Mason might be her buyer? She’d considered the possibility of Cece interfering, but it hadn’t occurred to her that Mason might do the same.
“I’m sorry. I should have told you the truth.”
“But why would you do that? Why would you buy it? After all the times I told you I wanted to handle it on my own. Why?” It made no sense—Mason had no reason to throw money around like this. Yes, she knew he didn’t want her to sell, but the most she had imagined him doing was helping her negotiate a construction loan. Not this.
She felt the touch of his gaze like the stroke of his hand. Soft, searching. “After all this time, you really don’t know?”
&nb
sp; “Know what?”
“Tess.” He let out a long breath on a sigh. “Tess, I’m in love with you. I’ve been falling in love with you from the first day we met, and when you love someone, you can’t stand to see them do things they’re going to regret for the rest of their life.”
Her body swayed. The words echoed in her brain but just as quickly, faded away. He didn’t. He couldn’t. “That’s ridiculous. We’re friends. I mean, friends with benefits. Or something. I don’t know what you call it. But you don’t love me. Not like that.”
“I had a feeling this might not go down easily.”
“Don’t play with me,” she snapped. “Don’t do this.”
“You really think I’d make some kind of a joke about this? I’m not kidding, Tess. This is real. I’ve been trying to get you to talk to me for days, and all you do is dodge. You can’t avoid it anymore—you can’t avoid me anymore. So yes, I was interfering in your life. And that was stupid. But the truth is, I love you, I need you in my life, and I don’t want our future to be based on a lie.”
She wrapped her arms around herself and walked to the couch, unable to keep looking at him. Love? He loved her? Her brain couldn’t even process it. It was like he’d said something in a foreign language, and she had no idea what the words meant.
“How did you do it?” She couldn’t actually muster up much anger with Luke. She’d known all along where his loyalties would lie. Maybe had even, in some dark part of herself, hoped he would tell Mason what she was planning. “Did Luke tell you I’d talked to him?”
“Not exactly. Luke introduced me to Christine a few years ago. She sold me this apartment, and we’ve stayed in touch. He mentioned that he’d seen her the other day and that he’d heard she was going to list a property I might find interesting. I figured he must have put you in touch with her. I called her later that day.”
Of course Mason would know Christine. Was there anyone Mason didn’t know?
“You love me, so you tricked me into selling you my land.” She stared into the darkness outside the windows, rubbing the goose bumps that had appeared on her arms.
