me off and has me snapping back at him, “This isn’t working.”
“Really?” He lifts a brow. “Because I thought it was working pretty damn well.”
“But you’re not the only one in this relationship. And I happen to think it’s a really bad idea for me to be fucking the boss.”
His eyes narrow even further at my deliberate crudity. “Is that what you think this is? You fucking the boss? Me fucking a hot employee?”
Again, there’s that tone—direct, demanding, brooking no argument—and it makes me want to throw something at him. And then it hits me. It’s his cross-examination tone.
“Don’t talk to me like that.” I spring out of my chair.
“Like what?” The second brow goes up.
“Like I’m some witness for the other side and it’s your job to poke holes in my story. Karl used to talk to me like that, coming at me like a lawyer every time I disagreed with him. I hate it.”
“That’s not what I’m doing—”
“That’s exactly what you’re doing. I put up with it from Karl for our entire marriage because I didn’t think I deserved better. There’s no way I’m putting up with it from you, too.”
“Don’t.” Nick’s voice cracks like a whip. “I am nothing like your ex-husband and you know it, so don’t you dare use some bullshit comparison between us to justify what you’re doing here.”
“What I’m doing here?” I repeat, incensed. “Please, Nick, tell me what it is I’m doing besides objecting to being talked to like some kind of criminal.”
“I’m not that kind of attorney, Mallory,” he growls. “I don’t fucking cross-examine witnesses. I file tax paperwork and write letters. And how the hell did I suddenly become the bad guy? You’re the one breaking up with me here—and comparing me to your limp-dick sleaze of an ex-husband while you’re doing it.”
“Yeah, well, you’re acting a hell of a lot like him right now,” I shoot back. “Do you always throw a fit when you don’t get your way?”
“I do when the woman I’m falling for hands me a line of bullshit a mile long and expects me to buy it.” He comes out from behind the desk so that we are standing nose to nose and toe to toe now. “You want to know what’s really going on here?”
“Oh, please.” I gesture magnanimously. “Enlighten me, oh wise one.”
“You’re scared.”
“Scared?” I squawk even as my heart beats thunderously. “Of what? You?”
He nods. “Damn right, of me. And of you feeling something for me whether you want to or not. But because you haven’t learned nearly as much from your bad marriage as you think you have, you’ve decided to blow everything up instead of sitting down and having a conversation with me like a normal person.”
“Excuse me? Are you saying I’m not normal?” I demand.
“Are you kidding me?” He snorts. “Honey, you are a lot of things. Normal isn’t one of them.”
“Don’t call me honey in that tone.”
“Oh, sorry. Did Karl do that, too?” he asks.
My head threatens to explode. “You’re a real asshole, you know that?”
“Maybe.” He inclines his head. “But I’m also a pretty decent guy, which you’d know if you ever let yourself talk to me without an agenda. But you’re too busy running away from whatever you think this is to bother asking me what I think it is. Or what I want from you.”
The weight is back, pressing on my chest like a bad marriage and the thousand mistakes that killed it. “So what do you want?”
“Too late and not enough, Mallory.” He walks over to his office door. “But I’ll tell you one thing. It probably wouldn’t be to fall for a woman who comes with an entire eighteen-wheeler full of baggage attached. Someone who makes you realize that—before her—you weren’t really living. That you’ve just been existing in a world without color since your wife died. Or one who’s too scared to turn all that color into a real, authentic, beautiful life.”
His words are still hanging in the air between us—painting pictures in the empty spaces of the room and the even emptier spaces of my soul—when he yanks his door open. “Goodbye, Mallory. Have a safe life.”
Chapter Fifty-Four
I spend the next two hours after Nick kicks me out of his office driving around aimlessly. It’s probably not one of my better moves, considering Jimi Hendrix doesn’t get the best gas mileage. He does, however, have a fantastic compilation of CDs to wallow to, and I’d be lying if I said I