Four weeks. Kai had made it almost four achingly long weeks without caving, without calling his cousin, or showing up at her work, or dropping by her home in the middle of the night. And that had been difficult. That had taken every ounce of will power he possessed. He’d practically had to mentally abuse himself every day, just so he wouldn’t give in to the overwhelming need to see her, to hold her, to touch her. To watch her smile, to hear her laugh. To wrap a long tendril of her hair around his finger. It had been the most difficult three weeks of his life.
Even his coworkers had noticed his mood. Missy had tried, in her own way, to cheer him up. Mainly she’d flashed him. A lot. At this point though, it did make Kai smile. Shaking his head, he’d repeatedly told her, “Thank you, but no thank you.” He was pretty sure his continued rejections were doing nothing to dissuade Missy. She was anything but a quitter.
Louis had told Kai that he’d find another potential breeding partner. He was convinced that Kai’s quietness had more to do with being dumped by April than anything else. Kai often told him that breaking things off had been a mutual decision. He hadn’t been dumped, and he definitely wasn’t looking for a “breeding partner.” Louis refused to believe him though. Rejecting a beautiful woman went against the laws of nature in Louis’s book.
But April wasn’t the one holding Kai’s heart, and he’d had no problems letting her go. Letting Jessie go though…that tore him apart daily. Even Mason had commented on his attitude. Kai always tried to be as professional as possible with his boss, but he’d been staring off into space more and more frequently, and one afternoon, Mason called him on it.
“Are you happy here at the center, Kai?” The look in Mason’s eyes after he’d asked had been almost hopeful, like Kai would have made his day if he’d said no and turned in his notice.
Struggling against the feeling of not being wanted, Kai had raised his chin and calmly replied with, “Yes, very much so, Mason. I’m sorry if I’ve been distracted lately. It’s a…personal matter, but I’ll do better to not let it interfere with my work.”
A stillness had filled the air, like a moment of calm before a storm. Mason had seemed as if he’d wanted to know more, but then he’d briefly nodded and quickly walked away. Even after all the weeks, Kai had been working there, he had no idea if the man liked him or not.
Kai had been getting through his life since he’d parted ways with Jessie, but in a numb daze that really wasn’t living. Jessie’s words in her bedroom seared through his soul whenever he had a moment to himself: You should be with me. You’re supposed to be with me. If Jessie only knew how much he wanted those words to be true. Things would be so easy, if he could just be with her.
But instead he was maintaining his distance—safety through solitude. Then his grandmother had suddenly decided that he needed to go out and have a life experience. She’d told him that he’d always wanted to ski, and he would never get another opportunity to learn how, unless he took this weekend to go up with Jessie. By the way she’d put it, you would think all of the snow was suddenly going to evaporate, and if he didn’t jump on the chance now, he was going to miss out on it forever. He had no idea what his grandmother’s real motives were behind him going, but she wouldn’t let up on him until he’d agreed.
And that was how Kai had found himself traveling miles away from the seclusion of his studio apartment, in painful proximity to the woman he loved. The woman he couldn’t have. The woman who distracted his thoughts every waking moment and haunted his dreams every night.
After a few tension-filled hours in the car with Jessie, he’d tried to distract himself by taking in the wondrous setting around him, but even that had paled in comparison to being near her again. Then they’d arrived, and fate had seemingly interceded again, and Jessie had said the words he’d ached to hear, words he was scared to hear. She needed him. He had no choice but to say yes to helping her, not just because he loved her, but because she was family, and family did hard things for each other.