or want anything from you. I don’t know why you’re here, but you don’t need to pretend anything.” I almost bit my lip but barely managed not to. “We don’t need to pretend anything. But this place is my family—my home—and if you’re an asshole, it won’t end well, all right?”
It was on the second sentence that he flinched. This great, big frown came over that good-looking face that I couldn’t ignore as much as I wanted to. He had been so fucking beautiful to me once, even though he had more in common with a villain than he did a hero, this man who could steamroll over other men like they were bowling pins, which was the last thing I would have expected with his soft voice, those eyes that I’d thought—wrongly—were kind, those freckles over his nose, and those damn dimples.
But he wasn’t anymore though. Beautiful, I meant. He was just a reminder that appearances were only skin deep.
Beautiful people were good. They didn’t do the kinds of things that he had. They didn’t show up to rub salt on a wound that had healed, hoping to reopen it.
Because that’s what his presence here was, regardless of what his reasons were.
Bullshit. It was all straight-up bullshit.
The nostrils on that nearly perfect nose flared, and those tiny, thin valleys across his forehead formed at the same time his frown did. “You think I would be an asshole to you?” he asked in that damn voice that had made me believe once that it was incapable of doing anything wrong.
He really didn’t want me to answer that.
This man who had once made me smile and laugh said nothing. That broad chest rose and fell under his hoodie, and the lines across his forehead got even deeper. His jaw moved from side to side. For a moment, I watched him struggle with something, and then he stood up even straighter, like that was somehow fucking possible.
“Lenny… I never meant to hurt you,” Jonah “Piece of Shit” Collins claimed, so carefully, I might have thought he was genuine if I hadn’t known any better. “You have to believe me.”
I couldn’t help it then. I raised my eyebrows. The nerve of this asshole.
It only took a quick glance at the picture frame on my desk again to help me reel my shit in, reel in the ugly words and the sudden urge to throw my computer screen at him like it was a ninja star. My hand wanted to go up to my eyelid and hold it down to keep it from twitching, but I kept that sucker down. Making a fist, I stared at him, squinting while I did.
“How did you expect not to hurt me? When you didn’t answer your phone once after I called you over and over again? Or when you didn’t respond to a single one of the emails I sent you either? Because there were a lot of them.“
I could see the tendons in his neck flex as he stood there, staring back at me with that grimace/frown/smile, and I was sure he was thinking of whatever excuse he’d made up in his head to justify what he’d done. But I only let him get out a single sentence. “I can explain.“
The smile I gave him didn’t feel as brittle as I figured it should have. And when I reached toward my mouse to prepare to get back to work, I didn’t feel bad for how cold I knew my expression—my entire body language—was toward him. He deserved it. He deserved it and fucking more, and he had no idea how lucky he was that I didn’t toss his ass out and tell him to fuck off until the end of time. He was so lucky I was over him and his shit and was more mature than I had been before.
“I don’t care anymore, Jonah. Decide what you want and let me know. I don’t care one way or the other. That’s all that matters to me, and we can go from there,” I said to him carefully, so fucking carefully, I would have high-fived myself for being so damn good at shooting him one last—fake—smile and then focusing back on my computer screen, ignoring him standing there in my office, in silence.
Because that was what he did. Stand there, looking at me. Whether he was cursing himself out or not, I had no idea. Whether he was cursing me out in his head, I had