The Price of Inertia (The Seven Sins #4) - Lily Zante Page 0,129
would be in.”
“You packed everything?”
“Everything. I took the liberty. Hope you don't mind.”
He hands me over the bag. “I'll go and grab the other one.” He disappears and I rush into the bedroom and slide on a pair of jeans and throw on a sweatshirt.
When I return, he’s standing in the doorway. “Here you go.” He puts the bag inside, but doesn't walk in. We look at one another warily. Each time I take in his face, and his build, and his countenance, I can't help but wonder how he has managed to turn things around.
He’s not the one who lost a mother, though.
But I remember, now that I am connecting the dots, that his mother had died not so long before we met. Knowing what I have been through, and knowing a little about his past, I find myself wondering about him and how he would have dealt with something like that.
“You can come inside. I don’t bite,” I tell him. He seems reluctant to take up my offer. “I’d rather not have you standing in the doorway like that.”
He walks in and shuts the door, but doesn’t move far from it.
“I was going to come around with Jamie and get everything,” I tell him. “It’s been busy here with my …” I still can’t bring myself to say it.
“It was last week?” he asks.
“The week before that.”
“It must have been a hard day.”
I clasp my hands together, as if I need the strength to hold myself together. He has packed my things and brought them to me so I should at least thank him. “Thanks for these, but I would have come over eventually.”
“I wanted to see you, and I needed an excuse.” His confession confuses me. While I’m not so sure that I hate him as much, I’m trying to move on and forget him. Words like these don’t make this easy. “An excuse?”
He doesn’t smile but there is a twinkle in his eyes which I remember very well. “I had a feeling you weren’t going to let me in if I came without your belongings.”
“Why did you want to see me?”
“To say goodbye.”
Goodbye? Why am I so shocked? It was going to happen at one point, I just never expected it would happen like this.
“I’m going back to New Orleans next week.”
“What happened to the book?”
“I man’d up, like you suggested, and printed another copy off, and sent it to Rob. He got it a few weeks later than planned, but … he got it. My editor is still talking to me. Looks like I might have salvaged things.”
“Good for you.”
I recall our argument and the good time before that. Rollercoaster times some of them, but unforgettable times, too. We are extremes he and I.
Deep dirty passion, reckless friendship, extreme hate.
He kept me on my toes. He was what I wanted, what I am drawn to: risk, and danger, not average or nice, or boring. For my sins, these are the types of men I am drawn to and Ward Maddox fit the bill one hundred percent.
Looking at him my heart begins to flutter, and just as quickly I am reminded that we have too much bad history between us to fix anything.
“My dry-cleaning,” says Jamie, pushing the door open. Ward steps out of the way, but the two men are eye to eye as Jamie walks in his face growing ugly as he fixes his gaze on Ward. “What are you doing—”
“He came to drop off my things,” I say quickly, all too aware of the growing animosity between these two men.
“How do you know where I live?” Jamie asks, but he looks at me. “Did you tell him?”
“Mari had nothing to do with it,” Ward says, smoothly. “I should have brought everything over the last time I came—”
“He’s been here before?” Jamie shrieks. His anger isn’t directed at Ward, it’s directed at me.
“He … he came once … when he found out about my mom.”
“You never thought to tell me?”
“There was nothing to tell,” I reply. I am sick of Jamie policing my every move.
He scoffs. “You’re going to take him back?”
“Jamie!”
“I always said you were a pushover. Don’t you ever learn?”
“Stop it.” He’s embarrassing me. Thankfully, he marches into the bedroom, and I hear him banging the closet doors.
“He doesn’t like me,” Ward states when it’s just the two of us again.
“You don’t have much affection for him,” I point out.
“I wonder why.” The way his eyes burn into mine, I can tell