With all of that weighing down on her, she needed some more space from him. She had to make him understand that there were boundaries he couldn’t cross. Because when he crossed them, everything just ended up out of whack for her in scarily pleasant ways—ways that she couldn’t afford for them to be.
The worst part was she started to imagine more and more with every moment she spent with him a life in which they could be together all the time. And in which she didn’t think about work or Kim or anything. She could just be free like him. And they could be happy. And broke. And unsuccessful at everything but love. No. She couldn’t afford to even think about that life. She had to make him back off.
When she threw open her apartment door, having steeled herself to tell Chace that he just couldn’t drop by all the time, she was hit by the aroma of the most heavenly jerk chicken she’d ever smelled outside of a Caribbean restaurant.
“You cook?” Whitney dropped her briefcase to the floor and kicked off her shoes. Leaving her laptop bag on the coffee table, she followed her nose into the kitchen where he stood, looking like a Hollister model posing as a cook. He wore deconstructed denim and a black T-shirt beneath an apron. She was surprised he’d found one. She didn’t do much cooking. Well, that was an understatement. She rarely used her stove for more than boiling water for tea.
“Yeah. Don’t look so shocked.” Of course he gave her the grin that made her want to dissolve into a puddle at his feet. She hated that grin because it made her so weak for him. Especially when he’d cooked for her. “I used to be a short order cook. I really liked it, so I took a few culinary courses at a community college back when I lived in Richmond. Cooking is kind of therapeutic. Besides, I like making people happy. What makes people happier than food?”
“Mm. Dirty rice. And plantains, too. Why do you know me so well?” Whitney hovered over the pots on the stove, her stomach growling.
“I pay attention,” Chace said, coming up behind her and resting his hands lightly on her arms.
She sank against him. It would be so easy to give in. She’d had such a tiring day at work. He’d cooked for her. A serious meal. Something she would’ve never been able to do in a million years. His chest felt so solid and warm and reassuring.
“Chace,” she whispered as he ran his fingers up and down her arms.
“I have something else for you, too. I made you something. A present. I’ll give it to you after dinner.”
“Why are you doing all of this?” She looked up at him, and he looked down, giving her a crooked grin.
“Because I like you,” he said simply. “And you’ve been more stressed than usual this week. And your motion was this morning, right? It’s over. We need to celebrate.”
“We lost.”
“We still need to celebrate it being over,” Chace said matter-of-factly.
She grinned. “I love—”
The silence between them was heavy as she scrambled for a way to end that sentence that wouldn’t incriminate her.
“Being around you.” Whew. She’d almost slipped in a huge way.
He chuckled. “I love being around you, too. You should go change out of that suit. Dinner will be ready in a few minutes.”
Whitney smiled all the way to her bedroom. She changed into a pair of sweatpants and worn light blue T-shirt. She put her hair up in a ponytail. She didn’t want anything to give the idea that she was trying to impress him at all. Because with the way that night was going, she was already going to have to fight the impulse to give Chace the wrong impression. She really wanted him to have it. She decided not to make it easy to give him that dangerous wrong impression.
She came back out and dinner was already on the table. They sat down to a savory, well-spiced meal. She made an absolute pig out of herself. She had hardly eaten all day, and the food was almost too good to be true.
After dinner Chace told her it was time for her present. He pulled a giant board filled with pictures out from behind the sofa and brought it over to her.
“What is this?” she breathed, taking the board from him. At the top was the heading Whitney’s Favorite Places.
“It’s all your favorite places in the city. There’s the bistro you like, that place near H Street, the National Portrait Gallery, the bird house at the zoo, and more. They’re all there.”
Whitney grinned. They really were. He’d made a collage with digital prints and had them printed onto the white background of the board he’d given her. She ran her hand lovingly over the whiteboard—sturdier than poster board and thicker as well—and then propped it against a leg of the table.
She felt so bad for being angry at him even though he hadn’t known she was before she walked through that door. Sitting there, eating food he’d made for her, she couldn’t believe she’d almost snapped at him.
She stood up and hugged him close. “Thanks.”
“For?”
“Being you. Just being you,” she murmured into his shirt. “How can it just be like—you’re everything I need sometimes?”
“Only sometimes?”
She laughed. “You know I don’t like to have this conversation.”
He pressed his nose to hers and his hands into the small of her back. “Yeah, but you could change your mind about that. Or maybe I could change your mind about that.”
“We can’t start talking this way.”
“Why?” He kissed her lower lip and her knees nearly buckled.
“Because…” She couldn’t finish her sentence. It just didn’t feel right to tell him that she couldn’t let herself fall in love with him.
He pressed his forehead to hers. “How about dessert?”
“Huh?” She was in a trance as he nuzzled his face against her neck. In that moment, he could have had anything he wanted from her—anything at all. It was a good thing he couldn’t read minds.
“I’ll be right back.”
She bit her lip to keep from telling him not to pull away as he pulled back and walked to her kitchen. She stared at his back hungrily, as if she could stare away his T-shirt.
Chace came back to the living room with a bowl of grapes. They sat on the couch and put the bowl between them. He turned on the television, but neither of them watched it. They were too busy watching each other. She couldn’t concentrate on their conversation because he kept feeding her grapes. The words weren’t important. The grapes were.
Chace took the last grape from the bowl as she reached for it.
“Hey!” she cried. Then she laughed. “You can’t do that.”
“Why not?” He held the grape between his index finger and thumb, giving her a playful grin.
“Because I wanted that grape.”
“If you want it, come get it,” Chace said, putting the grape between his teeth.
Whitney swallowed hard and moved closer to him on the couch. She put her mouth close to his, looking up into his pale eyes. Her heart beat faster as she ran her fingers along his chin. Emboldened by the fact that he almost dropped the grape, she moved closer until their lips were almost touching. He put his hand behind her neck, gently resting his fingers there.
Her tongue slid past his teeth and around the grape. For a moment, they sat still, teeth, tongues, and grape becoming the focus of their worlds.
When she thought the anticipation of the moment would kill her, she pulled the grape into her mouth. His lips closed over hers in a kiss. She kissed back, deep and hard. She straddled his lap without ever separating their lips. He pulled her close and she closed her eyes, gratefully sinking into the escape he provided.
She grabbed him by the front of his shirt. She leaned in close, running her nose from the underside of his chin, down his throat, across his collarbone. He groaned, a small encouragement, but all she needed. She traced kisses over every place that her nose had touched. He rested his hands loosely at her hips. She reached up, planting kisses behind his ear.
“We need...” She murmured the words into his skin before caressing it with
her tongue. To her disappointment, he pulled back.
“I should go,” Chace whispered over her lips.
“I know,” she said, but she still moaned in disappointment when he pulled back from her. She didn’t want him to, but he was right.
“Whitney.” His fingers made their way slowly through her hair and down to her neck, then her shoulders. “I really want you. But I have to go. It wouldn’t be right. Not tonight. Not yet.”
“I’ve told you—”
“Shh.” He was dangerously close to her lips when he shushed her. “I know.” He stood and reached for her hands. She gave them, and he helped her to her feet.
She wanted another kiss so badly she could almost taste his tongue on hers, but she didn’t go in for it and neither did he.
“I’m gonna go. Right now,” Chace said, but he didn’t move from the spot where he was standing.
“Okay,” Whitney said, but hoping all the while that he wouldn’t.
Eventually Chace stood and Whitney walked him downstairs. She looked through the window of the door that led out of her building. Flurries of snow danced through their air, but nothing stuck to the ground. He reached for the door, and she stopped him. She wrapped her arms around him and pressed her head into his shoulder.
“I’m sorry,” she murmured into his shirt before breathing him in.
“Hey. You don’t have anything to be sorry for,” he said, rubbing small circles on her back.
“I’ve never tried to do this before and I don’t know how it works. And I just feel like everything in my life is going crazy right now and—”
“Sweetheart. I’ve never asked for more than you can give, have I?”
She shook her head.
“And I never will.”
“I hope you don’t give up on me.”
“I’ll never do that, either.”
She gave his cheek a soft kiss. “Good night.”
He kissed the top of her head. “Good night, Beautiful Whitney.”
She hugged herself as she watched him walk away, wondering if it was possible to really have something more with Chace. Could he possibly be over Kelly so quickly? Regardless of whether he was or not, she was too close to making partner to screw up now. Everything could fall apart if she lost focus. Things were already starting to crumble around the edges.
Chapter 20: The Accidental Chef
Whitney was going through the argument for an upcoming hearing in the Bevyx case for what felt like the thousandth time and it still didn’t make sense to her. She was surrounded by a paper sea, made mostly of cases she’d printed out. Other cases were up on various windows on her computer. She was chewing the pen cap in the corner of her mouth into oblivion. Worse than seeming illogical, the argument seemed just plain wrong.
The thing seemed impossible to win. Any way she looked at the facts, their client was liable, although Whitney wasn’t allowed to say the l-word out loud, of course.
There was another l-word she wouldn’t let herself say as well. But the situation was different there. She didn’t have to worry about saying it anyway because it wasn’t true. She couldn’t afford for it to be true. She was drowning in the middle of the biggest case of her life, Kim kept dropping hints that she wasn’t partner material, and even Andersen was starting to look at her differently. Andersen had never taken Kim’s warnings about Whitney too seriously before, but ever since she’d lost that motion argument in the Bevyx case—which had been impossible to win—things had been different with him. Colder. She couldn’t afford to lose out on making partner. And that meant she couldn’t afford to feel anything for Chace.
She sighed and flipped a page. Her eyes were nearly crossing after reading pages and pages of technical crap. They had a patent guy on their team since the case involved both patent and copyright issues. Still, she had to wade through some of the patent stuff to get to the heart of her part of the case. And it wasn’t fun. She’d never been the technical, science-oriented type.
Kim wanted her to fail. That wasn’t paranoia. She was certain of it. That was why Kim had her working on the most technical angle of the copyright argument. Of course Kim had phrased it as knowing Whitney was capable. With a mocking smile on her face that only Whitney could see as Kim’s back had been turned to the other associates in the room at the time.
Whitney jumped when her phone rang. She’d been so intent on the section of the Copyright Act she’d been reading that the ringing sound startled her. She punched the button for speaker phone.
“Yeah?” she snapped.
“Wow. You don’t sound like a happy girl right now,” Chace said with a grin in his voice. So carefree. Not a worry in the world. They were worlds apart. What had she been thinking, inviting all of that chaos into her life?
She grunted a response, still poring over the statute in front of her.
“Sounds like this would be a bad time for me to come over.”
“Come over? Why?”
“Well, it’s just—you said I could start shooting you tonight.” His voice changed.
“Oh.” She winced. She’d forgotten all about that. She’d forgotten all about everything when Kim had dropped the news about the upcoming injunction hearing. The plaintiff was still busy throwing rocks at them and their client still refused to talk about a settlement conference. They had very little time to prepare a defense. Then there was the counter-claim the junior associates were working on, and she was supervising them on that. And a new case had just come through and Kim wanted Whitney to take the lead on it, take a couple of associates, and get a memo to her by Monday.
Did Kim do these things on purpose? It was like she’d hidden the news about the injunction until the last moment. The only thing that made Whitney realize that couldn’t be true was that Kim might have been petty, but she wouldn’t have risked her own legal career by doing something that would have made her look bad as well. Still, it hardly seemed fair that she’d ended up with the most assignments and the least amount of time to do them more often than not.
“Whit? You still there?”
“I’m sorry. Tonight is bad. Really, really bad. Kim dumped a ton of work on me today.”
“Oh. Wanna talk about it?”
“Actually, I have to go. I have lot of work to do.”
“Okay.”
“And Chace. I—I think you should come over a lot less, actually. A whole lot less.”
“Really?”
Her career was at stake. Nothing could come before that. Not only for her—not even most importantly for her. But because of what it meant to those she held close to her heart. “I can’t do this.”
“Can’t do what?” His tone grew colder.
“This. You. It’s just—you’re distracting me. You’re screwing everything up.”
“Oh. Really.”
“Could you just respect me needing space, please?”
“What? Are you serious?”
“Yes. Just—I have to go. I don’t want you around all the time.”
“Fine.” He hung up.
Whitney picked her phone up and flung it across the couch. Everything hit her at once—job, Chace, being mean to Chace, the stress that came from mediating her mom and her aunt’s fights.
Her gaze fell on Chace’s extra tripod—the one he kept at her place. She dropped her legal pad, pushed her laptop aside, and burst into tears.
* * *
Whitney felt like crap after what she’d said to Chace. Especially since he’d followed her wishes so well. Not one phone call, email, or text message, zip. And this made her realize what a huge part of her life he’d become without her even noticing. She’d been more sad and lonely that week than usual. She’d stayed at the firm until nearly midnight every night that week, and she’d never hated her job—a job her life had once revolved around—more.
On the day after the injunction hearing, she decided to try to make up with Chace. But she was afraid to contact him directly. She knew she’d been wrong. Really, really
wrong. Besides, she wanted to surprise him. So she called Rob.
“Hey,” she said to Rob. “How are you? How are things going with the store?” Rob was supposed to have a grand opening for his T-shirt store’s brick and mortar location soon—Valentine’s Day weekend—which was only a couple of weeks away.
“I’m good. And don’t forget how well I know you, Whit. That’s not the reason you called.”
“What? I’m just being a good friend, checking in to see how things are going.”
“We were texting back and forth a little while ago. You wouldn’t have called just to ask that. You’re calling about Chace.”
There was no point in trying to deny it. “How mad is he?”
“Pretty mad,” Rob said, seeming to know exactly who she was talking about.
“I need him to come over. I want him to know how sorry I am for the way I acted.”
“Whit, you know I love you, but you can’t just go jerking people around. Especially this guy. I really like him. He’s nothing like the stray losers you usually find.”
She told Rob what she’d done. She was sure he’d gotten a version from Chace, too. “What did he say to you?”
“Not much. He spends a lot of his time either on his laptop looking all sullen and emo or else out taking pictures.”
Whitney’s heart hurt. Taking pictures. She remembered her collage. The collage that had taken so much thought to put together and time in taking pictures and designing the layout, which was unlike any she’d ever seen. He must have known quite a lot about graphic design in addition to photography. She smiled. Chace was amazing. She’d been so oblivious.
“How are things coming along for the grand opening?” she asked.
“Pretty good, but don’t try to butter me up.”
Holding Her Breath (Indigo) Page 15
