Turns out that he was much freer than I was. What a dick.
I swallow the rage that’s boiled up and shake my head to clear the negative thoughts. The point is, I can’t be falling for Christian.
He comes out the entrance of the Bowery and I move toward him, feeling instantly calmer now that he’s here in front of me.
It’s absurd, but I feel it.
“You were great in there,” I say with a smile, my voice low.
Christian smiles back. “It was good.”
“It was like you were a different person,” I tease, as we walk toward the photographer, toward the reporters.
Something in Christian’s face shifts abruptly. He’s still smiling, but it doesn’t look quite so real anymore. Am I imagining it, or is he shifting away from me, just slightly?
What the fuck did I say?
I reach out for his arm, arrange my face as if I’ve remembered something important at the last moment. He turns toward me, his back to the press.
“Are you all right?” I keep my voice low.
“Yes,” he says, his smile back. “I’m good.”
“Did I say something wrong?” I can’t let this thing between us affect my job, but if I don’t fix whatever this is, I don’t know how I can help him.
“Of course not,” he says, but I don’t believe him.
“I just meant that it was amazing to watch you with those people. That’s all I meant.”
His face softens, relaxes, and my heart rate slows.
“I know that’s what you meant,” he says, softly, gently, and I know that if we weren’t on the job, if there was no one around, he would lean down and kiss my cheek right now, cocky persona or not.
As he turns back toward the press, confusion zings through me. Is there something he’s not telling me?
It doesn’t matter. It can’t destroy the way my heart sings when I look at him.
The emotion is deafening.
Chapter 22
Christian
My heart thunders in my chest as I turn away from Quinn and go to greet the press, and it continues to pound as I shake hands with the photographer and ask him about his gear. Then I chat with the reporters and mention casually that I’m making more time in my schedule to volunteer. I tell them that my mother did a lot of work while she was alive to try and lift people out of homelessness, and I want to honor her memory. At the last moment, I tack on that I’m making a rather large donation to the Bowery Mission.
The whole thing goes off without a hitch. A guy like me—like Christian Pierce—doesn’t let one moment of awkwardness throw him off his game.
But something nags at me.
I’m beginning to notice a pattern in myself that I don’t like.
The things Quinn says are innocent. She doesn’t know my secret. Intellectually, I know that, but every time she says something that brushes up against those boundaries, I react in a way that’s impossible to hide.
Well, it’s possible to hide it from other people, maybe. But I can’t hide it from her.
How does she know how to read me so well?
We just met each other last week, and already she can read me like we were born to be together. She even picks up on the subtle things that most of my other friends—even the closest ones—have never noticed, or if they did, they gave no goddamn indication of it.
I have to clear my head.
I’m falling so hard for her that I feel off-balance, out of control. I love it and hate it at the same time. I love that a woman has finally made me feel this way, but I hate that there’s something inside me that will bring it all crashing to the ground.
Jesus Christ, I have to get out of this.
It’s a half-hearted thought. I’m barely in it yet.
As Quinn and I walk back to my Town Car, I feel like I’m being torn in two.
Half of me wants to grab her right now and kiss her on the sidewalk, for all the world to see.
The other half of me wants to run in the opposite direction as fast and hard as I can and put Quinn Campbell far behind me.
She’s a threat. There’s no two ways about it. The way she reads me, the way she sees me, the way she is—it makes me want to be around her. Be with her. Be hers. Have her be mine.
And if that happens, I can’t keep secrets from her.
Not the kind of secret that I’ve been keeping.
I just can’t.
Why not?
The little voice in my head wants to play devil’s advocate again.
Why not? Why can’t I just have her, experience the greatest happiness I could ever experience in my life, and put the past behind me?
The answer comes immediately: because it will eat me alive.
When you feel this way about someone, you can’t lie to her for the rest of your life. That kind of guilt would rot me from the inside out. And now, knowing what I know about Derek—knowing what I know about Quinn and the way she always demands honesty, even from herself—how could I do that to her?