“I . . .” He worked his jaw. Where did he even start? Gripping the spiral binding tighter, he lifted her sketchbook. “I found this.”
Her brows rose. “And? Are all the postal workers in France on strike?” He faltered, but she didn’t miss a beat. She let out a harsh, sad bark of a laugh. “I mean, I know the economy is rough, but if billionaire moguls have to resort to taking courier jobs—”
“Kate—”
“No.” She lifted a hand up in front of herself, and he stopped in his tracks, held back from the step he’d been about to unconsciously take forward.
Because she was here. Real and beautiful and everything he’d ever wanted and been too much of a fool to keep back when he might’ve had a chance, and he needed to touch her so badly it ached.
“Kate,” he tried again, “you have to know—”
“No, I don’t have to know anything.” If it was possible, her posture went even more closed.
He took that single step forward. Threw his arms wide, ready to throw her sketchbook, too, if it weren’t the most important thing he had. “You have to know, I came here for you. To see you. This is yours. I found it in our room after you left. It was selfish of me to keep it for so long—”
“For three months. Three months, Rylan. You can’t just walk back into someone’s life after that kind of time.”
“But I’ve spent every second, every moment of it thinking about you.”
She rounded on him, her cheeks flushed, hands curled tightly into fists. “Like I haven’t spent it thinking about you? About what an idiot I was for you? You used me.”
“Never,” he said, and he spat the word. He’d come here to apologize, but not for that. Anger boiled low in his gut, taking up some of the space that had been nothing but regret and hurt. “I didn’t take anything from you that I wasn’t prepared to give back a hundredfold.”
“Except my trust.” Her face scrunched up, her eyes shining, and it was the first glimmer of anything except disgust. Her voice wavered. “Except my heart.”
His own shuddered. He took a deep breath.
He’d always wondered, deep down where he’d nursed the ache she had left in her wake. To get as angry as she had, to have acted so betrayed. She must have felt something for him. His stunted heart that hadn’t dared to feel anything for so damn long had grown three sizes for her, and maybe she wasn’t as attached as he was. But she had—she’d cared. At some point.
And fuck guardedness and fuck silence. They’d had enough of that these past few endless months. He edged even closer, hands in front of himself in a gesture of supplication. He licked his lips. “Like I said. Nothing I wasn’t ready to give right back to you.”
Her eyes snapped wide, her whole body going still, and something inside of him ached. If he could just reach out to her, just bridge this gap. There was something here. She’d admitted it. Something worth salvaging, if only she’d let him.
In the distance, a door on one of the lower floors creaked open and slammed shut. The muffled sounds of footfalls and the jangling of keys. It knocked Rylan out of his trance.
Jesus. They were in a public space here. Anyone could walk by. People in every apartment around them were probably listening in.
He shook his head and leaned forward that final inch. His hand closing around her arm was a jolt of electricity, the warmth of contact that soothed him even as it seemed to set Kate further on edge. He stroked the point of her wrist with his thumb, feeling her tremor through her clothes. He caught her gaze and held it, pitching his tone lower. No one else needed to hear this.
“You told me—before you left. You said I had a lot of things to figure out for myself, and I’ve been trying. I’ve been trying so damn hard.” Gulping, throat dry, he hauled her hand up to his chest, slotting it underneath his tie, pressing her palm flat to the muscle underneath. To where the absence of his father’s ring hung like its own kind of weight.
Did she understand him? He was freer now. He wasn’t running away, not from who he was or from the possibility of being known. And he’d never hide who he was from her again.
“There’s a lot of stuff I’m still working on,” he said, “but there are two things I’m certain of. I’m a better man now. And I’m a better man because of you.”
“Rylan . . .” Her gaze flickered down, to the rise of his chest. To his heart beneath her hand.
“I’m sorry. For everything. But please.” He wasn’t above begging. Glancing meaningfully at the doors around them, he pled, “Please just let me come inside. Talk to me.”
Her eyes drifted closed, her head shaking ever so slightly, and his stomach plummeted into his knees. But she didn’t pull back. “Do you have any idea how angry I am with you?”
“I think I’m starting to, actually, yeah.”
She curled her fingers in the fabric of his shirt, and it was so wrong, so inappropriate, but even as he was waiting for the verdict that would send him to the gallows, heat flooded his skin. His sex drive, nearly MIA these past few months, gave a kick.
When she lifted her gaze back to his eyes, it was with a new kind of uncertainty, one he himself had put there, and damn if he wasn’t prepared to spend the rest of his life working to take it away.
“Me inviting you in doesn’t mean I’m any less pissed.”
The sudden rebound of his gut snapping back into place left him dizzy. Relief, pure and simple, felt like the first breath he’d taken since he’d let her go.
“I can work with that.”
“I know you can,” she muttered.
And it struck him that maybe, just maybe, he had a shot.
Pulling her hand from his chest, she turned toward her apartment. The center of his ribs felt cold without her touch, his eyes sore without the vision of her face as she bent to get the lock. But none of that mattered, because a second later, she was opening the door, and stepping inside, and instead of slamming the door between them, she held it open wide.
She twisted around to look at him and asked, “Well? Are you coming in or not?”
Never, not in the two years she’d been living in it, had Kate’s tiny shoebox of an apartment ever felt so small.
Mechanically, she undid the buttons of her jacket, then dropped her keys into the bowl on the little table beside the door—the one she had literally picked up on the side of the road. All the while, her eyes stayed glued to Rylan’s form.
She’d never seen him dressed anything but casually in their time together in Paris, but damn could the man fill out the lines of a suit. Expensive and perfectly tailored, it made him look even taller than she remembered, more handsome. Her eyes burned.
She wanted to give in to the trembling in her hands and in her knees. Run over to him and kiss him and beg him take her, hard, on her bed or on the floor or against the wall. It took all of her restraint not to.
She wanted to slap him.
It was like he sucked all the air out of the room, leaving none of it for her, and her lungs went tight. He took up so much space. Moved into it with hardly more than a by-your-leave. Entered it and dominated it, the same way he’d pushed his way into her vacation and then her thoughts and her life.
And, God, but how dare he? Three long months after she’d found him out, after she’d done the hardest thing she’d ever had to do in her life and walked away from him. After she’d spent all this time getting over him—and it had been working, too. She’d been so close.
Now she was going to have to start all over again.
What the hell was he even doing here? What was she doing here?
Shaking it off, she set her bag down and hung her coat up. She didn’t let herself look at him again as she made her way into her cramped little kitchen. “Anything you have to say can wait until I eat.”
“Do you want to go somewhere? I don’t know many places in this neighborhood, but . . .”