Chapter 20

He groaned but rolled her back off him and sat up. He ran a hand through his hair and took a few deep breaths. He didn’t come here for this. He came here to save her from making a mistake with Nathan not for her to make an even bigger mistake with him.

“Brian,” she said, her voice small and uncertain.

He looked over his shoulder at her and he nearly just said fuck it, but he wanted more from her than this. She was upset and emotional and hurt. He would be just easing her pain, it would just be sex to her and Brian didn’t want just sex with Cassie.

He turned to face her. She was sitting up in the middle of the bed and the look on her face was so forlorn that he wanted to tuck her up under his arms and tell her everything would be all right.

“Cassie, I really like you,” he said, cupping her cheek and lifting her head so that she looked him in the eye, “but I can’t sleep with you tonight.”

“Why?” she breathed. “Don’t you want me?”

“God,” he shook his head and chuckled ruefully, “I want you so much Blue that it hurts.” He ran a hand through his hair. “But that’s not what you need tonight. Tonight, you need a friend and I want to be that friend.”

She blew out a puff of air and closed her eyes. “You’re right,” she said. She opened her eyes and looked at him. “But will you stay with me?”

“I have a better idea,” he said. “Grab some clothes and come up to my suite.”

She looked around the room, unsure.

“Come on,” he said. “My suite is bigger and it even has a second room. We’ll check you out tomorrow morning and you can stay the rest of the week with me.”

“Are you sure?” she asked, still uncertain.

“Cassie, I want to be your friend and I want to spend time with you. You don’t have to sleep in my bed, but I would feel a whole lot better if you were at least in the same apartment.”

She bit her bottom lip and closed her eyes. He willed her to say yes. Everything he’d said to her was true. He wanted to get to know her better and he wanted her near him. But he also wanted to run interference between her and Nathan. At least if she was staying with him, Nathan wouldn’t be able to ambush her like he had tonight.

“Okay,” she said and his heart whooped.

Cassie let Brian gather her and her belongings up and took them to his suite. She felt a bit awkward about him turning down her advances (who says no to sex?) but appreciated him for it. She’d noticed his steel-hard erection and knew it hadn’t been easy for him to say no and it was just another way he showed her how different he was from his step-brother.

She felt like such a fool in regard to Nathan. Why hadn’t she seen this before? He told her he loved her, but he didn’t treat her like he loved her. Had she really been so blind? She’d vowed she would never become one of those women who lost brain cells whenever a hot guy was near, but that’s exactly what she’d done whenever Nathan had crooked his finger.

Cassie had thought that the arrangement she had with Nathan was proof that she had evolved. She thought it had proved that she had a mature and realistic view of sex. She was a woman who liked sex and she wasn’t ashamed of it. By having an understanding with Nathan, she had deluded herself into thinking that she was above the affectations of lust and was avoiding those awful, uncomfortable moments when you didn’t know where you stood with a man. She’d thought she knew where she stood with Nathan and she thought she was okay with that.

But she hadn’t been okay with it at all. The way she freaked out when she heard that he was getting married had shown her how much she’d been deceiving herself. Cassie had convinced herself that she was above other women who mooned over their latest crush, but she was no better. She and Nathan had had this arrangement for five years and she hadn’t dated anyone else in that time. She knew he had, but she had kept herself for him, convinced that he would eventually see the light and realize that he was in love with her all along.

Fuck. She made herself sick.

“So what do you feel like doing?” Brian asked as he walked back from depositing her bags in the second bedroom. “Movie? Card game?”

“Dessert?” she asked and he smiled.

He walked to the freezer and removed the tub of gelato that she’d brought earlier. God was that only a couple of hours ago? It felt like days since she had stood outside his door feeling nervous about spending the evening alone with him.

Brian grabbed two spoons and brought them over to the kitchen counter where she was sitting. He dragged a stool around to the other side of the bench and sat opposite her.

“Do you want to talk about it?” he asked handing her the tub and a spoon.

“No,” she said, scooping out a large mound of mango gelato and putting it in her mouth. She was willing to risk brain freeze rather than discuss with Brian what an absolute fool she had been.

“Okay then,” he said with a smile taking his own giant scoop of the icy confection.

“You think I’m an idiot, don’t you?” she asked after she had swallowed her mouthful.

He didn’t answer straight away, taking time to slowly finish his own mouthful. He tapped the spoon on his lips before answering.

“I don’t think you’re an idiot,” he said. “I don’t understand, but my ignorance doesn’t make you the idiot.”

“I think I’m an idiot,” she grumbled before scooping some more gelato into her mouth.

“Why?” he asked. “What makes you the idiot in this scenario and not Nathan?”

“Because we had an agreement and I was the one who reneged,” she replied.

“No, I think Nathan was the one who changed the terms of the contract without negotiating it with you.”

“But I was the one who fell in love,” she murmured and shoved the spoon into her mouth.

“Is that such a bad thing?” he asked and she rolled her eyes.

“Well, obviously,” she said. “I wouldn’t feel like such a bloody fool if I hadn’t.”

“How long were you two together?”

“Five years,” she replied.

Brian whistled. “And neither of you felt the need to ask for more? You didn’t feel at some point that the arrangement wasn’t working for you anymore and that you wanted more?”

She shook her head. “The last few months we were together I began to, but I suppose I just thought that eventually we’d end up together,” she said, licking her spoon. “Isn’t this weird for you? Talking about this stuff?”

He shrugged. “I’m just trying to understand what the allure is, what changed so that you suddenly decided the arrangement wasn’t working anymore.”

“That’s easy,” she replied. “When he told me that he was getting married.”

“But he’d had relationships before,” Brian said.

“Well, yeah,” she responded, “but they were never serious, they were never permanent.”

“So suddenly someone else would have a claim on him and you got all territorial.”

“No, it wasn’t like that,” she argued, but…

“Are you sure, Blue? I don’t deny that you love Nathan, but are you in love with him or is it more that you don’t want anyone else to have him?”

Brian’s words battered against her like waves breaking over rocks in a storm, slowly eroding her protestations. Is that what this was? Was this reaction just a form of jealousy?

“You make me sound like a child fighting over a toy.”

He lifted his eyebrow at her but didn’t reply, stuffing a spoonful of gelato into his mouth nonchalantly.

“Do you honestly think that this is a tantrum?” she asked, anger rising up in her suddenly. But she wasn’t angry at Brian, although he was the focus of it. No, she was angry because what he said felt a little too close to the truth and it made her uncomfortable.

“I think,” he said calmly, “that you and I wouldn’t have had such a powerful connection if you were really truly in love with Nathan.”

“Our she shook her head. “The only connection we have is sex.”

“Bullshit,” he said, conversationally.

“Bullshit?” she was getting agitated with his utter calmness.

“You heard me,” he replied. “I call bullshit. What we have goes way deeper than sex and you know it.” He stood and walked around the counter to stand next to her. He leaned down to whisper in her ear. “If this was just sex then your pulse wouldn’t speed up when I get close to you. Your breath wouldn’t hitch when I brush against you. Your eyes wouldn’t seek me out whenever I walk into the room and you wouldn’t feel the need to touch me in public, to brand me, to mark me as yours.”

She closed her eyes as his hot breath skittered over the soft skin of her neck. Her heart rate had increased as he’d gotten closer to her and her breath did hitch when his beard brushed across her bare shoulder. He stood and walked away and she felt the loss of him keenly. She kept her eyes closed though, feeling the physiological changes in her body caused by his nearness.

She had been confused because she couldn’t understand how she could have such an attraction to Brian when she had told herself she was in love with Nathan. She had never stopped to consider that she wasn’t in love with Nathan at all.