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“Thank goodness,” I muttered under my breath as we followed Lucas.
“But I still want you to know something,” he said. “I won’t let Will come within an inch of you.”
I gazed up at him, my eyes meeting his deep brown ones. I felt like I was made of liquid when he looked at me like that. “I can live with that.”
We walked side by side, our shoulders briefly touching, and Sean didn’t pull away. “When Will shows up, I still want to be able to call you my girlfriend, even if we aren’t together.”
My heart squeezed in my chest, even as I shook my head. I played along with this game where I pretended I had a dating life, like normal people. “Am I really going to have no dating prospects while I’m working for you?”
Sean nodded, his gaze roving over me. There was something different in the way he was looking at me. Something that hadn’t been there before. A guarded sense of respect and perhaps even admiration. “You could say that.”
“It’s going to be a long six months then.”
His eyebrows rose a fraction of an inch. “I’ll have you know that most of my PAs haven’t lasted longer than four months.”
I grinned back at him. “Ah, but I’m not just your PA, am I? As your bonding coach, I might just last longer than six months. And, yes, you can call me your girlfriend at the Gild Gala, if you please. Though”—I chuckled—“that makes me wonder, what do you call the women you really date?”
His intense, probing gaze met mine, and a wave of tingles spread down my arms. His tongue ran over his lower lip as though he was thinking of something dirty, and heat bloomed between my thighs.
“Stick with me long enough, and you’ll soon find out.”
21
CHLOE
Acouple of days passed, days when I simply couldn’t get Sean’s words out of my mind.
“Stick with me long enough, and you’ll soon find out.”
Find out what it was like tobethe woman he was seeing? Or find out based on another woman he would eventually see?
I flushed as I caught myself going over it again. Why had I asked him that ridiculous question? Now, I was picking apart his words, and none of the meanings I came up with could ease the nervousness in my stomach. I wouldn’t let anything happen—that much was sure—but the idea that Sean could be interested in me was enough to send flutters going in my heart. Silly, trivial flutters that would amount to nothing.
It had taken me a year of knowing Bruce casually before we dated. I went into that relationship with the knowledge that he knew Henry and Henry’s condition well enough and was understanding about how much time went into thinking about solutions to Henry’s problems. So, Bruce’s words from when he’d broken up with me, reminding me of how I was destined for a miserable life, stung more than it should have.
After Henry had returned home in a wheelchair, our father had vanished abruptly a month later. At eighteen, I’d become responsible for Henry, sacrificing my dreams and my perception of a normal life.
Sean knewnothingabout how I had become a parent of sorts to Henry. Once he knew how much of my personal time was spent thinking or worrying about Henry, he’d want nothing to do with me.
Dad had been the first man to leave me when I needed him the most, but he wasn’t the last. Bruce had followed suit, in spite of my rigorous vetting process. I simply couldn’t find a way to have both—a love life and be there for my brother.
During my evening out in Central Park, Henry had been so worried, waiting for ages by the door for me to return. I would never forget that look of relief when I’d come back home at a reasonable hour.
I couldn’t bring myself to regret it for too long though. Sean’s recent payment had come through, and I’d actually paid off not just the bills for the new meds, but Henry’s recent doctor’s appointment visit too. For once, my financial situation was not in the forefront of all the things that worried me. It gave me the motivation to tell Henry that I was going out with Sean and Lucas again this week. I told him that, financially, we needed it.
He had tried to be more understanding about it ever since.
In spite of my resolve to keep things strictly businesslike, I couldn’t help notice that Sean seemed to be more and more busy as Friday approached. I’d seen him in meetings—surrounded by people holding computers, showing stock market graphs, and whiteboards with more numbers and calculations than possible—and knew he was up to his eyeballs with work.
Being around him lately was more electrifying than before, as though the two of us knew we were this close to giving in to the sparks between us.
Just looking at him standing by his floor-to-ceiling windows brought to mind dirty images of what he could do to me. I imagined myself naked, breasts pressed against the glass with his fingers in me, and I had to shake myself out of it.
I exhaled and took my third trip to the bathroom in the past hour to splash some water on my face. I needed to calm the heck down.
By Friday morning, when I googled the event and realized just how exclusive this gala was, I started to worry about a totally different problem. I’d already confessed to Sean that it had been years since I had gone to a party, and that wasbeforeit dawned on me just how selective this party was. I’d never been to an event of this scale. Who would I talk to besides Lucas and Sean? What would I talk about?
By mid-afternoon, I steeled myself, telling myself that I just needed to get through the evening, which was, at max, a few hours long. After all, this event wasn’t about me. My job was to make sure Lucas got to meet Brianna. I owed him that much.