The Boy Who Has No Hope (Soulless #6) - Victoria Quinn Page 0,56

as if this were an interview rather than a conversation between friends.

He kept his eyes on the floor, his hands together, his hair disheveled since he must have had his hands in it all night.

Fuck, he was going to fire me, wasn’t he?

After a few seconds of silence, he lifted his gaze and finally looked at me. Intense and deep like always, his eyes made me feel like he could see all of me, every single thought as it passed through my mind. “I don’t want to be with anyone else. I can’t be with anyone else. It’s impossible…I tried.”

My heart pounded harder. I wasn’t getting fired, but that gave me no relief.

“I can’t explain it.” He took a breath and cleared his throat. “It doesn’t matter if it’s just physical or if I’m desperate to get laid…I just have no desire. I’m in this relationship, even though we don’t have a relationship, and I’m completely committed, completely faithful to you. I’m not the same man I used to be. The only desire I have is for you.” He held my gaze as he said those words, spoke freely without censorship.

Now I could barely breathe.

“I’ve felt this way for a long time. The last woman I slept with was a poor attempt to ignore my feelings for you…it didn’t work. I don’t want to do that again, especially when the results will be the same.”

I didn’t realize just how deeply I wanted him until he said those words, until I was allowed to feel that way. I hadn’t even thought of another man in so long. My soul was wrapped around his, and I could never untangle it.

“I didn’t think I’d ever want to be in another relationship again…until I was in one.” He rubbed his palm over his knuckles, his eyes shifting back and forth as he looked into my gaze. “My stance about kids hasn’t changed, but I don’t want to lose you…because I have a feeling I’m never going to feel this way about anyone ever again.”

My high was quickly demolished when I heard that.

“So…I’ll try.”

My eyes dropped and looked at my fingers in my lap. “What does that mean? Because there’s no try. You either agree to be with Lizzie too—or you don’t. I don’t want to get attached to you, expose her to you, and then you just leave us both.” I raised my chin and looked at him again. “You don’t have a child, so you don’t understand how essential that is, to take us as a pair.”

He studied me for a long time, his eyes shifting back and forth and looking into my gaze. “I do, actually…”

My eyes narrowed.

“My stepmom fell in love with my dad and loved me like her own…while my own mother abandoned me.” His gaze remained as hard and strong as ever, but there was a subtle drop of his voice, like this information still haunted him even as a grown man. There was a scar somewhere on his heart that had never really healed. “So, yes…I get it.”

The pain in his voice crossed the space between us and dissolved into my blood, made me feel as shitty as he did. I adored him, so of course that information hurt, but as a mother, it hurt in a more potent way because I would never, ever walk away from Lizzie like that. “I’m sorry…”

He lowered his gaze and looked at his knuckles. “Let’s be together, and in time, we’ll get to Lizzie.” He massaged his hands before he lifted his eyes to look at me, that intensity returning full force.

I wanted to join him on that couch and finally have the man I’d been worshiping for months. But I was pragmatic to a fault, and I knew there were so many things standing in our way. “Derek, if we do that and it doesn’t work out, it’ll be impossible for us to work together again. You’ll lose me and never be able to replace me. I’ll lose my job. We’ll both lose this friendship.”

“I would separate our personal relationship from our professional one. I would never expect you—”

“Like how you ignored me for two weeks then screamed at me?” I challenged.

He stilled at the accusation. “That won’t happen again, and no matter how angry I am, I would never fire you. We can still work together without being in the same room if it really came down to it. But I don’t want to focus on something that may

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