She couldn’t stop staring at the hard lines of his face. The deep grooves on either side of his mouth, the sharp, hard angle his jaw created, emphasized when he was like this, all tense and angry with her. As if he had any right to those emotions. She tried to remind herself who he was, why she was justified and he wasn’t.
Her throat was dry, though, and her heart was pounding so hard she was afraid it was going to drill a hole straight through the front of her chest and tumble out onto the floor, right in front of him. So he could see just how he was affecting her.
She didn’t even know how he was affecting her—how could he see it? She didn’t know what this was. This gathering ball of tension at the center of her chest that wasn’t comfortable, wasn’t pleasant or easy to identify at all.
Of course, her feelings rarely were. Which was why she didn’t particularly like having them. There was no choice now. Like he had torn layers off of her and exposed her without even trying.
“I haven’t manhandled you,” he said, his voice rough.
“This?”
He had his hands braced on the wall on either side of her face, his body pressed so near hers that only her hands on his chest kept him from making intimate chest-to-toe contact with her. “Not manhandling,” he said, leaning a little bit closer.
Her entire world felt like it was pitched to the side then, everything she thought, everything she knew about herself, everything she had learned about self-protection over the years, had been burned straight through, and now he was burning through her too.
She found herself swaying forward slightly and she still didn’t know why. Until, it hit her. Exactly what she had been about to do. Exactly what this mounting tension inside of her was. If it wasn’t rage, and she knew that it wasn’t, not right at this moment, then it could only be one other thing.
And oh, sweet Lord, there was no way he was thinking the same thing. If he didn’t pity her before, he would if he’d realized exactly what she had been about to do.
So she shoved him again, and this time, he lost his footing, going back a couple of steps. “Close enough,” she said. “Anyway, I agreed to help you, I didn’t agree to accept commentary on the way that I handle things, talk about things or engage in my actual relationships. We—” she gestured between them “—don’t have a relationship.”
“I never said we did.”
“Sticking your nose in other people’s business is just kind of your thing?”
“Actually, I don’t normally get involved in anyone’s business. Because I don’t get involved with them at all.”
“So, I’m special?” She bit those words out, hard, hoping that they would hit him and sting.
“Yes. Whether or not you want to be, you are.” He didn’t seem any happier saying it than she was to hear it. “You’re one of the things that I need to fix. I don’t give a damn about much, Rebecca—you have to believe that.”
“But you care about me?”
He shook his head, his mouth pressed into a firm, grim line. “I don’t care about you. But I care about what happened. I care about dropping a little bit of the burden that I’ve been carrying around for over the past decade and a half. My motives aren’t exactly pure, and it would do you well to remember that. I’m not asking you to trust me, not completely. But I am asking for you to stop snapping at me every time I come within a few feet of you.”
There was something about those words that deflated her. Which was silly. It shouldn’t deflate her to hear him speak the truth. If he had said that he cared about her, she would have hit him anyway. She didn’t want him to care about her. Still, hearing him say all this, unvarnished, completely honest—she knew it was honest—wasn’t exactly heartwarming.
“Fine. What do you want me to do?”
“My house. Tomorrow night after you close.”
A vague sense of disquiet overtook her, and she shoved it down immediately. She was the one who had almost done something crazy. She was the one who was being slightly psychotic around him. She hated him. Absolutely hated him. Had without even knowing him for the better part of her life. The fact that she had thought, even for a moment, about closing the distance