Avoiding Temptation (Avoiding #3)(54)
Author: K.A. Linde

“I want to postpone the wedding.”

Ramsey let loose a strangled cry at the words, and Lexi felt like her heart was breaking.

“You said it was okay…”

“I didn’t think you would actually want to do it.”

“So, you…lied?” she asked, her brow furrowing in confusion.

Ramsey stood slowly. He was so tall that he towered over her, even with the weight of everything that had happened holding down his shoulders. “I didn’t lie. I want to marry you whenever you’ll have me. I just worry about postponing.”

“Why?” she whispered, feeling like she knew what was coming.

He sighed and dropped his head before answering. “I’m afraid this is a reaction to what just happened, not a reflection of how you really feel. I promise it doesn’t change things with us, Lexi.”

“No,” she said, shaking her head. “This isn’t about Parker. This is me. This is my decision.”

“It just seems like you didn’t want to do it before, and now you do because of what just happened.”

“I’m telling you that I’m making up my mind about what I want. This is my decision. The pressure at work is too much. I don’t feel in control.”

“Are you ever going to be in control?” Ramsey asked, running his hand back through his hair. “You keep talking about control like you’ll ever have a grasp on it. If we ever had control over our relationships, then I wouldn’t have just found out about Parker’s miscarriage. That,” he said, pointing out the door that Parker had just left through, “that is what it’s like to be out of control. You just use it as an excuse.”

“An excuse? Seriously?” she growled. “It’s okay for you and Parker to be out of control but not for me? I get it. This was a mistake. I guess I shouldn’t have even brought this up to you.”

She whirled around and out the door. Rushing into their bedroom, she grabbed a change of clothes and an extra suit and stuffed them into a bag.

Ramsey appeared in the doorway a minute later. “What are you doing?”

“I’m taking control,” she spat.

“Lexi, wait, wait, wait…you can’t leave,” he pleaded, grabbing for her bag.

“I’m sorry—what? I can’t leave?” She held the bag to her chest and away from him.

She turned to walk to the bathroom, but he blocked her path.

“I don’t want you to leave. That’s not taking control. That’s leaving.”

Lexi pushed him aside and walked into the bathroom. She dumped her makeup bag, a bottle of mousse, and her toothbrush into the bag. “That’s right. That’s leaving. I’m taking back the control in this situation. I flushed it down the drain two years ago when I let you make me think that Parker wouldn’t be an issue and that you would trust me.”

“I do trust you,” he pleaded, his voice rising hysterically.

“And Parker?” she asked, arching an eyebrow.

“Lexi, please…”

“You’ll never let it go. If you would just let it go,” she said.

“I’ll let it go. Just don’t leave.”

He grabbed her around the middle and tried to get her to stay, to kiss him, to hold him, but she couldn’t. How could she stand there for another second, feeling this way? She was aching all over. Her body felt like it had been pounded into the ground from being overworked, and then when she had come home to see her fiancé, he was emotionally distraught over another woman. No, she couldn’t be in this house for another minute.

“Lexi,” he called, following her out the bedroom door and down the stairs, “please just stop and think about this for a minute.”

“I’ll think about it when I’m gone.”

“Are you leaving me?” he asked, snatching her wrist and forcing her to look at him.

“I’m leaving the house. I can’t stay here—not with the way I’m feeling right now.”

“Lexi, I love you.”

She sighed, her resolve breaking. This wasn’t what she wanted. This was the man she had spent more than three years loving, the man she had agreed to be with. He was perfect, absolutely perfect—except when he wasn’t, except when she saw his flaws, the flaws he never let the rest of the world see. She knew him inside and out. She knew all of his quirks. He was hurting right now, and he wanted her to make it right. She didn’t want to argue with him, but she was stubborn.

He didn’t get to pick and choose when he was going to be the man that the rest of the world saw. Relationships were work. They were really hard work, and she had put her fair share into this one. She wanted it to work so desperately. But how could it with everything else hanging over him right now? These were the things she needed to figure out, and she wouldn’t do that while she was still around him.

“I love you, too,” she said before standing on her tiptoes and kissing his lips tenderly. “I do. I really do.”

Tears hit her as he held her in his arms, silently pleading for her not to do this.

“But…I have to go,” she said, pulling away from him and walking out the front door.

Chapter 20

Lexi sat in her car, her hands shaking. What the hell had she just done?

She had walked out on Ramsey. She had left their apartment with a change of clothes and her toothbrush. Did that mean they were over? She looked down at her diamond engagement ring, and the tears came harder.

No. They hadn’t broken up or broken off the engagement, but she had actually just walked out of their place.

She didn’t know what to do. She could barely breathe.

Through her tears, Lexi backed out of the garage and started driving aimlessly. She didn’t even know where she was going to go. She wanted to talk to Chyna, but her friend was thousands of miles away on a private island for her honeymoon. She wouldn’t be back until next week.

How did it keep happening that Chyna was out of the country when she and Ramsey were having problems? Chyna needed to stop leaving!

Not that Chyna would be able to do much more than talk her off of the ledge. She would have been in New York when Lexi needed her in Atlanta. Granted, her best friend had access to a private jet and could have been in Atlanta in a few hours, but Lexi needed her now. In any case, it didn’t matter because Chyna wasn’t even close to a couple of hours away.

Pulling off the road and into a parking lot in frustration, Lexi let the tears fall until her fingers and toes tingled from hyperventilation. Her cheeks were hot and wet, no matter how many times she tried to dry them. She wanted the pain in her chest to go away. She wanted to feel human again.

Wasn’t this supposed to be the happiest time of her life? She kept repeating that to herself, but it didn’t matter if she said the mantra a million times. She had to admit that she wasn’t happy. She was sitting on the side of the road in an abandoned parking lot, crying her eyes out. If that didn’t show how low she had sunk all over again, then nothing did.

Her phone buzzed at her side, and she glanced down. Ramsey.

Please come back.

No, she couldn’t. She couldn’t do that. She wasn’t ready.

Exiting the screen, she found another number and dialed, knowing it was the only place she could go.

“Lex, I didn’t think I’d hear from you again today,” Jack said pleasantly into the phone.

The sound of his voice made the tears fall harder. She didn’t even know why. Maybe it was the prospect of talking to someone else about what had happened. Maybe it was just Jack.

“Are you okay? Why are you crying?”

“Ramsey,” she said. It was the only word she got out.

“Do you need me to come get you?”

“No,” she said, hiccuping through her tears. “I’m parked somewhere.”

“You shouldn’t drive like this,” he said, concerned. “I can be there in fifteen minutes.”

“Can I just come to your place?” Lexi asked weakly.

“Of course you can. Are you sure you don’t want me to get you?”

He paused, and she could feel the tension in his stillness.

“I don’t want anything to happen to you,” he said.

“I’ll survive.”

She hung up the phone, dried her eyes, and set back out on the road. She knew it was probably stupid to go see Jack when she was so emotionally messed-up, but where else would she go? A hotel probably would be the better option, but the last thing she wanted was to be alone tonight.

Jack would take care of her.

The drive over to his place happened in what felt like a matter of seconds, or it could have been a couple of hours. She didn’t remember any of it. All she remembered was walking out of her place, leaving with a bag of clothes…leaving Ramsey behind.

She parked the car in front of Jack’s place and walked deliriously through the entrance. No one was waiting around in the lobby, and she was thankful that she didn’t have to face anyone else in her condition. The elevator dinged open, and then she was standing in front of Jack’s door.

What was she going to say to him? How could she begin to explain what she had just done? Jack wouldn’t judge her, of course. He had never judged her, but it didn’t change how she was feeling in that moment.

“Lex,” Jack whispered when he answered the door.

His brow furrowed when he saw her face swollen and red from tears that she hadn’t been able to hold back. And when she looked up into his handsome face—his hair, dark and shaggy, his eyes, her favorite color of blue, that jawline so well-defined—she started crying all over again.

He sighed and pulled her into his arms. She grabbed the T-shirt he was wearing between her fingers and buried her face in his shoulder. His hand came down on her back, holding her securely against him as he toed the door closed.

“Shh,” he said softly.

He ran his hand through her hair over and over again, stroking it soothingly, until she settled against him. The tears were still flowing, but the hysterics subsided, and she felt like she was able to breathe again.

“You know,” she said against his T-shirt, “that I don’t hate you, right?”

He chuckled softly and kissed the crown of her head lightly. The gesture seemed so perfectly in tune with what she needed in the moment that it didn’t even make her freak-out.

“I know you don’t.”

“I kind of hate myself though.”

“If you don’t hate me, you can’t hate yourself,” Jack said, holding her at arm’s length with a smirk.

Lexi grinned and shook her head. “You don’t know the kind of person I am.”

“Oh, believe me…I do.”

“I was a total bitch.”

“Yeah?” he asked. “And no one deserved it.”

Lexi sighed and looked away. “I walked out on Ramsey.”

Jack sputtered and then coughed to try to cover it up, but he did a terrible job at it. For someone usually so collected, he was anything but in that moment. She didn’t know how to read him then, and all she wanted was to curl into a ball on the floor and feel bad for herself. She deserved that at least.