“Fine,” he sighed, resigning himself to sanity. “I’ll look at a shortlist and—”
“No shortlist,” Taylor said, checking something on her phone when it buzzed. “We already picked the perfect candidate.”
But he wasn’t quite ready to be pushed around. Fun as they might think it was to tease him, he had to assert himself sometime and now was it.
“No,” he said, “I’m drawing a line, Taylor. You cannot make a unilateral decision about something this important.”
“Something this important that you’ve ignored for a month,” Taylor said, getting up to head for the door. “It can’t be that important if you can blank it off the agenda, meeting after meeting. Well, I’m sorry, brother, but this is the day you’ve been dreading, you’ve run out of White-Out, no more blanking. Meet your new HR manager.”
Opening the suite door, Taylor reached into the hallway and grinned as she pulled someone into the room.
Someone.
Not just someone.
Oak surged to his feet. “Evie,” he inhaled her name.
The moniker stuck in his throat, blocking his windpipe.
Evie and Taylor hugged, one whispered something to the other and then Ian was moving away from the living room with Kody. Both men left with Taylor in their wake.
Alone with Evie, Oak still hadn’t figured out what the hell he was supposed to say.
“Taylor told me that as soon as I saw you, I’d know what to say,” Evie said, her hands loose at her sides. “Usually I always have something to say, but… All I can come up with is… I’ve missed you.”
Was this real? Was she really here? “Evie,” he said again, torn between his need to grab her and his need to ask a million questions.
Except he couldn’t order his thoughts, or any words, and he didn’t know where to begin.
“I called Taylor about a month ago,” she said. “It was part of my therapy. I apologized, obviously, I explained some things, and I thought that would be it. But when she asked to meet me, I… Hell, Oakley, I pointed a gun at her brother in front of her, I figured I owed her one… I could never have imagined that it would lead to this.”
“The job,” he muttered. “You’re here for the job.”
Sheepish and contrite, she licked her lips. “Not really,” she said. “Taylor seemed sure that it was a great idea. I told her that it wasn’t fair on you… It doesn’t matter.”
“Then why are you here?” he asked. “If not for the job? I… I mean, what the hell happened, Evie?”
“I don’t know, I guess… Something that night snapped, I was in the hallway outside the apartment and I just got this vision… I thought I could shrug it off, I’ve had memories like that before. Memories that are more than mental pictures, they’re like nightmares, more than visceral, tangible flashbacks… I could see it, Oakley, I could… I could taste the blood in the air, feel the humidity on my skin, it was… real… Don’t ask me to explain how because I can’t.”
“And then that asshole showed up… Taylor ripped him a new one by the way, promised never to go near him again.”
“She told me… he’s an asshole, but I… I probably shouldn’t have pointed a gun at him either.” Oak shrugged. “I’ve always hated guns,” she said, folding her arms around herself. “I carried, but I never touched it, never acknowledged it until… God, Oak, I don’t know what I would’ve done if you hadn’t been there.”
“But, I was,” he said. “Taylor and I were there, and we wouldn’t have let you hurt anyone.”
A wistful smile graced her lips. “I think it was the smell of Taylor’s hair… I looked into your eyes and I smelled her hair and I… I was myself again. But I hated myself. The thing I’d feared most was hurting you. I know it was Ethan I was aiming for, but… you were in the line of fire. I really can’t… I can’t forget that. In the early days, after Beth, I trashed my apartment when I was having nightmares and I had no memory of doing it… Another nightmare like that might have made me hurt you, I couldn’t have stayed, Oak… I couldn’t. When we started, I think I tried to convince myself it wouldn’t happen… but it did. I hadn’t wanted you with me, staying at my place for that reason.”
“You could’ve told me that. I would’ve told you—”
“What? That it was worth the risk?” she asked and shook her head. “No. No chance. After that flashback, I knew it was a possibility; that it might happen. I had to get away.”
“From me.”
“From me,” she said, and determination lit her eyes. “Oakley, I knew I wasn’t ready to be with you when we started together, but I… I loved you so much that I silenced that voice. I wanted to be with you so badly that I made myself believe that I could do it.”
“But you can’t.”
“I couldn’t, no,” she said. “I had to fix me. Losing Beth was tough, but I think I switched some part of myself off after that night. At first, it was to get through the manhunt, then to ignore my mother’s death so I could get through the trial, then there were appeal hearings, and I had no one to talk to, so I bogged myself down in business. I put on the front that everything was ok, and I believed it… Until you… You made me feel. Opening myself to you opened me to every other emotion I’d ignored for four years. I never faced what happened to me. I never processed it. I only coped. Survived.”
Moving toward her, he reached for her, but dropped his hands without making contact. “But that’s the point, Evie. You survived. You came through. You’re so strong and so capable. I know you can beat this.”
A smile that went beyond her lips warmed her eyes. “I have.” He didn’t understand. “I mean, as much as a person can… it will always be with me, but… I left you that night and I… I guess I had a breakdown. I called Noel, and he tried to coach me, but I got frustrated. I knew I needed more… I went away, to Florida if you’ll believe, checked myself into a rehab place and I stayed there for three months.”
“Rehab?”
“I know it sounds nuts,” she said. “I felt nuts sometimes. But dealing with the trauma and with the grief of losing my sister and my mother has helped me see where I do need help. I’m still in therapy, and I’m taking medications now that help keep me calm, so I won’t freak out like I did… I feel… better.”
“Sleeping through the night?” he asked. She nodded. “Your traps?”
She shook her head. “I still like to be near a phone and I check all my doors and windows like a maniac, but… no razor blades in the vents or pressure sensors on the floor.”
Oak knew what a massive step that was for her. He was impressed that she’d worked so hard to overcome her complexes. “I’m proud of you.”
Of its own accord, his hand rose to her cheek. She was softer than he remembered, both in the way her skin felt and the way she turned into his caress and closed her eyes. She was so beautiful. It was tough to believe that she’d once been his… almost his.
“Thank you for listening to me,” she said, sliding her hand over his to flatten his palm on her cheek, holding him to her.
It had been months, but not an ounce of his feeling had diminished. He hadn’t expected it to, partly because he didn’t want it to. Evie had been a whirlwind in his life, but he wanted her to be a constant breeze, always there to comfort and soothe him. But she hadn’t been. Before he’d been ready, she’d vanished, and he’d been left with a memory that he couldn’t let go of.
Oak didn’t want to stop touching her, wasn’t sure he could let her go again. “I wish you’d called me.”
“I needed to know you were free to live your life. I had no idea how long it would take for me to get my shit together, it could’ve been three months or three years. Spending some time in the sun, listening to other stories and talking mine out every day, it’s made me feel so much lighter… freer… I wanted that for you too. No more darkness. No more woman telling you her sad story. I wanted you to be happy.”
“Sweet,” he breathed out her pet name and put his other ha
nd to her face to pull her up so he could lower and rest his forehead on hers. “I worried about you every day.”
“I wasn’t screwing around.”
Why would she tell him that unless…? Was there a chance that she still felt something for him? That she might let him back in? Searching her face, he couldn’t figure out if her affection for him was current or nostalgic.
If there was a chance she wanted to try again, he wanted to try too. This wasn’t a time for teasing or games.
“Neither was I,” he said. “I haven’t been with anyone since you.”
Worry crossed her face. She tried to withdraw, but he tightened his hold and pulled her back. “I don’t know why I said that, Oakley. I’m sorry, I—”
“What are you thinking about right now?” he asked, maybe hoping too much.
Being together was powerful, just sharing space was intense. Evie curled her lower lip into her mouth in a way that strengthened his optimism, it was only increased further when her attention drifted to his.
She’d said she was better, that she was together, that she was happy. Tipping her head back, he angled her to receive his mouth and as soon as their lips touched she gasped in a desperate mew of need.
Damn. She was still his. It might not make sense to her how he could still love her like he did, but it made no sense to him how she could doubt it.
Tasting her tongue with his own, he withdrew at the same time her fingers curled into his shirt. “Thirteen?” he asked, strengthening his grip on her face.
He hauled her close and threw an arm around her. The ragged way he said her name and their mismatched breathing intensified the air crackling around them.
Gasping in, she tried to find his mouth, but he kept her away and sought her consent. “Ding, ding,” she sighed out.
He’d never heard such a beautiful sound.
Picking her up, he carried her to the bed they’d first made love in and stripped both of them down slowly. She had a tenderness in her touch that was unfamiliar, he’d never felt so cherished as he did when he slid himself inside her. Her whole body yielded to accept him.
But she felt good, like his warm, willing woman had never left him, not really, not in spirit. She’d always belonged to him and here she was giving herself to him in a way more wholly than she had before. Oak felt it was his responsibility to bring her to climax over and over, begging her without words to need him, to trust him, to stay with him.
When he reached his own crescendo, he saw tears in her eyes that terrified him, not because of their sorrow, but because of their adoration and gratitude.
Evie was here with him, the same Evie she’d always been, but a more enhanced version, a better version, one who was more at peace.
Oak didn’t know how long they lay in the sheets staring at each other. A good long while. But he didn’t want to leave the moment and so stayed completely silent. It was Evie who spoke first.
“Oak,” she said, “what do we do now?”
“Now,” he said, punching the pillow that was under his head to elevate it enough to see both her eyes with both of his. “I make a commitment.”
Her smile bred his and they laughed. “Oh,” she said and sighed as she stroked a hand down his chest. “I can’t deny that I love you. I can’t do it… But I’m not sure it would be fair of me to put you through all that again.”
“You said you were cured… as cured as a person can be.”
“And I am,” she said, watching him take her hand from his chest to kiss his fingertips. “But I put you and Taylor through a trauma of your own… How can you look at me without….?”
“Seeing you pointing a gun at me?” he asked. “Sweet, the moment lasted ten seconds… You got with it and… I trust you. Can’t you trust that I love you and want to be with you? Nothing has changed.”
“I don’t have a job,” she said.
“You have one at MatchMate just like I always wanted,” he said. “How are you at spending the night?”
“I haven’t spent the night with a man,” she said. “But I’ve spent the night in rehab and in my new apartment without traps… We did a lot of work on my issues and I spent the night in dorms with other people.”
“So you’d be willing to give it a try?”
“You think we just jump straight into this?” she asked. “We don’t miss a step or date, we just… live together and get married and—”
“Why not?” he asked, infused with hope. “Give me one good reason why not? I love you. You love me. You’ve worked hard to go from traumatized victim to empowered survivor. I’ll support you, just like I always did before. I’m not going to throw our whole relationship away because of twenty minutes one night… Shit, I’ve been with women who’ve got themselves so drunk they’ve waved knives in my face. Sometimes people flip out, and I appreciate that what you went through wasn’t like that, but that makes you a more secure bet.”
“A more secure bet,” she said, squashing her hand to his face.
“We never got a real shot if you weren’t ready. I want that shot now…” He looked up and then back at her. “If that’s the right choice of words.” When he released a laugh, so did she. He kissed her. “I’m going to get a drink, you want one?”
She nodded and stayed in bed as he got up and grabbed his shorts to pull them on as he went through to the bar. He’d just opened his beer when the suite door opened. Shit, he hadn’t even known it was unlocked.
“Ok, shout at me if you’re going to shout at me,” Taylor said, storming toward him. “I’ve been in my room stewing, expecting you to call and yell at me. So, yell at me, I can’t stand the silent treatment.”
Lowering his beer bottle from his lips, he cleared his throat. “Yell at you for what? Did you forget to overnight those contracts I gave you?”
She snapped her mouth shut then croaked. “I… No, I… shout at me about Evie, you idiot. You weren’t mean to her, were you? She’s been through enough and it’s not right of you—”
“Can I have three olives?” Evie asked, opening the bedroom doorway then freezing. “Oh.”
“Yes, Sweet?” he asked as if she was referring to him.
“No, I mean… oh,” she said, stepping forward and smoothing her fingertips down the line of buttons on his shirt that was draped over her body, though he noted she’d only done up the bottom two so her abdomen and cleavage were on show. “Taylor, I… I’m sorry, I didn’t—”
Taylor screamed so loud that even he jumped. “What the fuck, Tay?” he barked, opening his mouth wide to pop his ear.
His sister ran over to Evie and pulled her into a hug then grabbed her hand to drag her over to the bar. “Oh my God! You’re back together! You’re back together, right?”
“We were just talking about that,” he said and looked at Evie. “Are we giving it a go, Thirteen? Are you ready for the love and romance bullshit that comes with being fucked good and hard?”
She didn’t seem to get it, but she looked at Taylor’s hopeful grin and his face that had to be full of expectation and smiled.
“You do make it very difficult, Mr. Orion,” she said and came over to drape herself against him as she begged for a kiss.
“Is that a yes?” he asked, hesitating.
Grinning, she pouted and lowered her voice to a simper. “It’s a sad, unavoidable truth. It’s not a dream you’re going to wake up from. I am actually your girl now. It’s completely real.”
thank you for sharing this adventure!
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Also by Scarlett Finn
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STANDALONE CONTEMPORARY ROMANCE
MAESTRO’S MUSE
GETTING TRICKY
REMEMBER WHEN…
THIRTEEN
EXILE
HIDE & SEEK
KISS CHASE
THE BRANDED SERIES
BRANDED
SCARRED
MARKED
THE KINDRED SERIES
RAVEN
SWALLOW
CUCKOO
SWIFT
FALCON
FINCH
THE EXPLICIT SERIES
EXPLICIT INSTRUCTION
EXPLICIT DETAIL
EXPLICIT MEMORY
RISQUE SERIES
TAKE A RISK
RISK IT ALL
GAME OF RISK
HARROW DUET
FIGHTING FATE
FIGHTING BACK
MISTAKE DUET
MISTAKE ME NOT
SLEIGHT MISTAKE
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Thirteen Page 25
