Forbidden Nights (Seductive Nights #5)(51)
Author: Lauren Blakely

There was a woman he desperately wanted to let into his heart, but he didn’t know how. Joanna had made it impossible for him to love.

And he hated her for it.

When he reached the red light at the crosswalk, all that anger coiled in his chest, rising up inside him. Tightening, like a hard metal spring with no give. He wanted to eradicate the side effects of Joanna, but he’d had no luck doing that. He didn’t know if he ever would.

He cocked his arm and slammed the streetlamp with his fist. It hurt like a son-of-a-bitch, reverberating into his bones. He cursed loudly.

“Are you okay?”

He swiveled around to see a young woman in running shorts and a T-shirt, her hair in a ponytail, a look of concern on her face as she bounced on her sneakered feet.

“Fine. Sorry,” he muttered.

“Hope your night gets better,” she said, and picked up the pace, running across the street, returning to her evening jog.

“Me too,” he mumbled to himself as he shook out his hand, the pain still echoing in his knuckles.

* * *

He sounded empty when she’d called, his voice terribly hollow. The Joanna effect, she reasoned. Surely, it would dissipate soon. It had to. She waited outside his building, fidgeting with the silvery pendant she wore as she stood under the navy-blue awning. She ran her thumb over the smooth, stone surface. Worry flooded her nervous system—worry over him, over her, over them. Soon, she spotted him turning the corner onto his block. Her heart rose as the tiniest sliver of a smile formed on his face when he saw her, then it fell when he was close enough for her to see the scrapes on his hand.

“What happened?” she asked as she reached gently for his right hand. The knuckles on his index and middle fingers were cut open, the skin snarly and scratched up.

“My fist met a streetlamp. They did not agree,” he said, chuffing out a humorless laugh.

“Let’s get you cleaned up,” she said, immediately segueing into Nurse Casey mode, as her brother had called it when they were kids. Though Jack was older, she was usually the one who’d tended to his scrapes and bruises from the baseball games he’d played in. Grasping Nate’s other hand, she led him past the doorman, through the lobby, up the lift and to his apartment with its view of Central Park. She parked her hands on his shoulders, pushing him down on his couch.

“Stay here.”

She headed for the bathroom, opened the medicine cabinet, and rooted around for Band-Aids. She tried to shield her eyes from the big box of condoms. True, he’d used them with her. But he had the large stash because he didn’t like being tied down. He operated free and easy. Played the field. He probably hadn’t said a word about wanting more with her because he preferred what they had—hot sex, good friendship, and no commitment.

A weed took root in her belly, twisting insidiously around her organs. She forced herself to focus on the task at hand. She found peroxide in the vanity, grabbed a washcloth, wetted it, snagged some Band-Aids, and returned to him on the couch. He was sunk down in the plush gray cushion, his eyes closed.

“Give me your hand,” she said softly, and he held out his bruised fingers. But he didn’t open his eyes. As she cleaned up the cuts, him wincing a few times, she asked what had happened.

“I really don’t want to talk about it,” he muttered.

That statement lodged like a brick in her chest. How were they ever going to be together if he couldn’t talk about the simplest things? She’d never been one to shy away from tough topics. Hell, she’d pushed her big, broody brother to open up. She could certainly do the same with Nate. “Hmm. Let me play a guessing game. I’m guessing it happened when you went to Joanna’s gallery?”

He tapped his finger to his nose in answer. At least they were getting somewhere with that small admission.

“And I take it that it didn’t go well?”

“It went fine. I gave the sculpture to her husband,” Nate bit out in a snarl, his eyes snapping open.

“Ugh. That must have sucked to see him,” Casey said, squeezing his wrist gently. But even as she sympathized with him, the weed twisted tighter in her gut with the reminder—the reminder that came in the tortured look on his face, and the acid in his tone—that he was still so easily affected by the past. How could he move forward with her when he hadn’t yet moved on?

“Sucked is putting it mildly. That guy made a chump out of me for a year. A whole fucking year. Hell, it’s not like Joanna and I have kids. Or joint custody of a dog. There’s no reason I should have to see her, let alone him. But there he was. In the fucking middle of it all, making small talk about how awesome—” he stopped to sketch air quotes, “—she is.”

“And that pissed you off so much that you hit the streetlamp?” she asked as she pressed the Band-Aid softly over his knuckles.

He nodded, a heaviness to his voice. “Yep. That’s the whole story. I should have taken you up on your offer to smash the sculpture. I swear, I should have.”

She brought his hand to her lips and brushed a soft kiss to his skin. “It’s better not to expend that type of negative energy on her. You did the right thing. It may not feel that way now, but it’s part of the healing.”

He scoffed. “You sound like a shrink now.”

“Maybe Michelle is rubbing off on me.”

“Maybe. I still think I should have dropped it from ten flights,” he said with a sigh, then ran his fingers through her hair. His touch felt good; it probably always would. But the gesture didn’t reach all the way inside her soul. The emptiness in him was evident even in how he touched her—it wasn’t the way he’d touched her all their other nights together. It was hollow. He was not her Nate right now. He was the Nate defeated once again by his ex-wife. Her heart cried, leaking crimson tears inside her chest as the evidence mounted, so clearly pointing to one conclusion: he wasn’t over that woman. He wasn’t ready. She had no idea if he was ever going to be ready.

“Enough about my fine night. Tell me all about Mr. Abbott,” Nate said, that bitter edge still present in his voice.

She chose to ignore it, focusing on answering as she would have one month ago, one year ago. He was her friend, and she craved his comfort as a friend now. “Turns out Grant never thought of me romantically. I went to the meeting ready to tell him I was happy to be business partners, but there was nothing happening between the two of us. But he served first, making it pretty damn clear that he had no attraction for me whatsoever,” she said, holding out her hands wide.