The Will (Magdalene #1)(106)
Author: Kristen Ashley

“Jo—”

“No. You didn’t. I was so in love with you when we first started working together, every day held pain. But it was put up with the pain or lose one of only two people in my life I cared about and respected. So I put up with the pain.”

His face had blanched. “You were in love with me?”

“Head over heels.”

His voice was aching when he whispered, “Sweetheart—”

“To find you were the same and you didn’t even ask why I was protecting myself. Why I was aloof. Why I was disconnected. Didn’t even attempt to find a way in. I never thought for one moment you returned those feelings because…because…I don’t know why you did it but you never, not once, gave me any indication that you felt that way for me. You gave many other women that indication, right in front of me, but never me.”

“I showed you all the time, Josephine,” he said gently.

“No.” I shook my head. “Jake did. He knew all that about me and he knew he had to proceed with caution but the point is he realized he liked me, he was attracted to me and he proceeded.”

“I’m afraid he had an unfair advantage, honey, because I didn’t know any of this shit,” Henry pointed out.

“You…didn’t”—I leaned in— “ask,” I hissed and I leaned back. “Two decades and you didn’t ask, Henry?”

“How was I to know there was something to ask about, Josephine?”

“If you love someone, you want to know everything. You want to heal all hurts. You want to be there for them when they need you. You just want to be with them all the time.”

“Are you saying you’re in love with a man you’ve known two weeks?”

“No, Henry. I’m saying that’s what I gave you for twenty-three years.”

I watched him flinch again. He knew it was true. Every word of it.

He recovered and inquired, “How do you press something like that with someone you employ? Someone that matters. Someone that, if you don’t get it right, you could lose and you know you can’t lose.”

“I don’t know. Maybe you do it because it’s worth the risk of whatever might become of it.”

“I’ll remind you, sweetheart, you felt the same way and you didn’t take that risk either,” he said softly.

He was right.

Absolutely right.

“I was afraid,” I told him.

“I understand that now. I could have no idea then.”

He was right about that too.

I looked to the dirt at my feet.

“Josephine,” Henry called and my eyes went back to him.

“It wasn’t meant to be,” I stated.

“How can we know that if we haven’t tried?” he asked.

“Because I’m falling in love with a man I’ve only known two weeks but even falling, I already know I can’t imagine what a day would be like without him. No,” I shook my head as Henry’s face started getting hard again. “I can imagine it. I just don’t want to.”

“I’m not certain he’s right for you,” he told me.

“And I’m not certain you would be, saying something like that when you don’t know him in the slightest.”

“I know we had our words yesterday, Josephine, they were unpleasant, he was there throughout, and he didn’t intervene for you once,” he pointed out.

“You’re right. He didn’t. But then again, you were my employer, had been for years, I’m a forty-five year old woman and it really wasn’t his place to intervene. However, when I was overcome by emotion after that scene that was when Jake intervened, holding me in his arms, stroking my hair and talking to me to soothe me.”

“So this guy is perfect,” Henry stated disbelievingly and perhaps a little sarcastically.

“Not at all,” I told him. “He’s ludicrously protective and preposterously overbearing. He’s also got this thing where he selects my seat for me, usually next to him, and does this by planting me in it. He can be very dictatorial and it isn’t infrequent when he is. He laughs when I’m being serious and bellows from wherever he is in the house at wherever the person he’s talking to is. He also uses curse words frequently, even in front of his children, and allows them to do the same, especially his eldest son, this latter I intend to have words with him about very soon. I’m certain he has other bad habits that I’ll discover, given the chance. The thing that makes me happy is that I have that chance.”

“So it’s you giving up on us,” Henry noted.

“No, it’s me saying that we had our time, that time passed. We both made that mistake. And now it’s me moving on. I didn’t drive here to fire me, Henry. You did.”

“Knowing how I feel about you, can you work alongside me? And if you care about me, can you honestly wish to do that while making me watch you fall in love with another man?”

“No, I intended to resign,” I told him honestly. “However, I had hoped to do it and salvage a relationship with someone I love very deeply who means a great deal to me. I just hadn’t come up with how to do that yet.”

He said nothing but held my gaze.

I did the same.

Henry was the first one to break the silence.

“Fuck, I should have come to Lydia’s funeral with you,” he clipped tersely.

He should have.

He really should have.

But he didn’t.

And if he did, I would not have Jake.

Or Amber.

Or Ethan.

Or Conner.

So I said nothing.

“I f**ked us up,” he whispered and the way he did made my anger fade but my pain increase.

“We both did,” I said quietly.

“You had no choice with your past the way it was. I did.”

I couldn’t argue that.

“I f**ked us up,” he repeated and I moved to him and put my hand on his chest.

“Stop it, Henry.”

“Twenty-three years, I’d look forward to you walking into my hotel room every morning with a coffee, sweetheart. Daniel’s nowhere near as attractive as you and completely the wrong gender. He sends it up through room service.”

I closed my eyes and dropped my head to rest it on my hand on his chest.

Oh, how I loved walking into Henry’s hotel room with a coffee every morning. The smile he’d give me. We’d sit down and chat, about the work to be done that day, where we were going, what was next, or nothing at all.