Falling into Forever (Falling into You) - By Lauren Abrams Page 0,7
a reel of a dozen other memories of him and me over the years we had been together. He’s flicking his fingertips over my hands and face and laughing with me in cafés and falling down on the ice and dancing on rooftops and brushing his lips against my temples and we’re making love on a beach in Spain while he whispers “I love you” into my hair.
It kills me that he looks almost exactly the same as he did at eighteen. I don’t even recognize myself when I look into the mirror now. But even if Chris Jensen had never become a movie star, even if his face wasn’t on billboards and television shows and grocery stores, I still would have known him in the middle of any crowded street. Of course I would. His face is imprinted on my brain.
Shoot. I ram my head against my hands over and over again, as if that could make the memories disappear. He shouldn’t have the power to affect me like this. I should have been prepared.
But neither the glossy photographs nor the memory reel in my head had prepared me for the way he dominated a room with his presence, the way the air changed when he stepped inside it, the way everyone around him became more alive. Time and distance had eaten away at the edges of my memories, and I had let his physical presence take me by surprise.
I hadn’t been the only one who was taken aback. He hadn’t known I was going to be there. I would bet my life on it, even if I make some minor adjustments for his prodigious acting skills.
I shouldn’t have been there.
When Eva had first mentioned the name of his company, I had thrown a fit.
“No,” I told her. “Not that one. Any one but that one.”
After days of pleading with me, she had finally said the only two words that would have gotten me to change my mind—creative control.
Ben would have wanted that.
Judging from the look on Chris’s face when I said the word wife, he didn’t know about Ben and me, either. It meant that he either didn’t know about it or he hadn’t made the connection. I wasn’t going to do it for him.
I’m about to give up my pacing and throw the heels out the window when I hear a relentless knock at the door. I would know that knock anywhere. When he had given in to the plea of my eyes at the meeting, I had the faintest glimmer of hope that he wouldn’t try to hunt me down. Maybe he had forgotten what we had been, once. Enough time had certainly passed. He hadn’t tried to contact me in five years, not even after…
The pounding is loud and insistent. I have two choices, really. I can curl up into my bed and pretend that none of it ever happened. Or I can go to the door and face him and do what I hadn’t done five years before.
The first choice is infinitely more appealing. However, he’s a man with unlimited resources and he’s always had a penchant for dramatic scenes, so the chances that I’m able to escape without ever having to see him again are slim to none. Just like the stupid meeting, it’s probably better to get it over with.
Maybe if I had looked away, if I had marched out the door the second I saw his face, Eva and millions of dollars and Ben’s wishes be damned, he wouldn’t be knocking at my door right now.
The little voice inside my head whispers an alternate truth: All of this was inevitable.
Him. Me.
Like ripping a bandage from a still-fresh wound, I open the door hastily. He nearly falls into my arms, but I take a giant step backwards and narrowly avoid disaster.
“Mr. Jensen.”
I try to echo Eva’s brusque tone from earlier. Maybe it’s possible that we can both pretend that this is nothing more than a business meeting.
“Hallie.”
Nope.
It’s been five years since I’ve heard him say my name and the sound of it on his tongue conjures a thousand memories that burn and tear at me.
His mouth curls into a tiny smile, and he looks up at me. There’s danger there, and something else that I can’t quite read.
“If you want to pretend like we don’t know each other, Hals, that’s fine.”
He leans an arm against the door and gives me a long look up and down. I have no words, but he