Come to Me Softly (Closer to You #2)(42)
Author: A.L. Jackson

Something like pride filled Jared’s face. “He said he considered it incentive to get his best guy to stick around.”

My attention darted around the little house, unable to grasp that this could be ours. Really ours.

Jared grabbed me by the hand. “Come on, I want you to see the rest.” He tugged me down a short hall off to the left of the family room. We stepped into a room probably twice the size of my room back at the apartment. “This is the master . . . and there’s a bath. It needs to be updated, but it’s functional right now.”

Here too, the carpet had been ripped up, but again, the room was open with a large window running along the back, facing the yard. An arch to the left led into an en suite bathroom. For this little house, the bathroom was huge. A countertop with double sinks lined one wall. Opposite it sat a garden tub that was so large I could swim in it, and a separate shower was tucked in an alcove behind it. A walk-in closet was through a set of sliding doors at the farthest end.

I was pretty sure my mouth had to be hanging open as Jared hauled us out of this room just as fast as he pulled us into it. He towed me along, my hand wrapped snugly in his, and I held on to his wrist with my other hand, securing myself to him in an attempt to keep up with the man who had had something awakened in him.

My heart beat hard and my mind worked faster, trying to process what Jared had put in front of me.

I just want to take care of you.

He had to have said it at least a hundred times over the last two weeks, but I had no clue what that meant to him.

He rushed us back through the main room and into the hall that ran down the opposite side of the house. He ducked into the first door on the right, into a small room with a window that faced the street. “This can be the baby’s room.”

Expectation gusted through me, the fiercest squall of wind that whipped and stirred.

And I was feeling it, all that Jared imagined sinking into my consciousness.

Jared was higher than I’d ever seen him, tripping along with some kind of euphoria that overflowed with ideas and inspiration, burning with the need to create. I recognized it, because I felt it when I had the impulse to draw, the compulsion that I had to press a pencil to paper.

And there was nothing artificial about it, nothing synthetic clouding his mind, nothing destructive bounding through his veins.

This was him . . . something beautiful that had risen up in this beautiful man.

“Jared, this is—”

“Wait,” he interrupted, his smile wide. “You haven’t seen the best part yet.”

He led me back out, pointing out a basic bathroom across from the baby’s room as we passed. He didn’t even stop for me to explore it, just mumbled through a low chuckle, “Yep, this bathroom needs to be redone, too. No surprise there.”

He came to a stop at the end of the hall in front of a closed door. Gripping my hand a little tighter, he opened the door and led me inside a room that was larger than the baby’s, but about half the size of the master bedroom. The carpet had been torn up in here, too. One of the walls was busted in, and the sliding closet doors had been knocked from their tracks.

But to the left was a huge bay window that opened up to the backyard. Muted sunlight bled inside as twilight edged across the darkening sky. Shadows played along the far wall of the room as the last rays of light were cast inside, danced and meshed with the anticipation beating from Jared’s heart.

I inched toward the window and stared out into the backyard. It wasn’t huge, but it was larger than I expected. A covered patio off the sliding door in the main room gave way to what had been a lawn long since dead in the winter, unmaintained in the many months this house had sat vacant. Just outside the window, planters sat barren where flowers had once grown.

A high block wall rose up around the entirety of the yard to guard privacy.

Right now it looked like nothing, but with Jared and me, I knew it could be beautiful, that we could care for it and nurture it and bring it to life.

“And this . . . this room would be yours,” Jared murmured behind me.

Slowly I turned to face him. Confusion twisted my brow. “What do you mean?”

“Where you can draw . . . set all your stuff up in here.” He waved his hand toward the window. “Look at the lighting in here, Aly. You could work in here all day, looking outside. It’s big enough that we can put a couch up in the corner where you could sit with a sketch pad on your lap . . .” Soft laughter rolled from him, feeding me a picture I knew he saw so clearly. No doubt, it was the way he saw me when he caught me drawing, my sketch pad balanced across my crisscrossed legs.

“It’ll give you enough space for a desk and whatever else you need.”

I reeled, struggling to make sense of what Jared was saying. An upheaval of ideas flitted through my mind, all the dreams of my childhood clashing with reality. “Jared, I don’t—”

“Yes, you can,” he cut me off, his voice hard. His eyes flashed with something that almost looked like anger. Then he softened and closed the space between us. He pressed himself to me, one hand tangled in my hair and the other held firm across my back.

He whispered into the top of my head, “Yes, you can, Aly.”

Emotion squeezed my chest, my heart too full. I melted into his warmth, shuddering through the breath I tried to draw into my lungs.

He pulled back. The force of his blue eyes bore down on me. “That night . . . when I came back and you finally showed me what you kept hidden in your sketch pads all those years . . .”

Jared brushed his knuckles down my jaw. A rush of chills skated down my spine.

“Other than this face, I’ve never seen anything more beautiful, Aly. You see things the way no one else can and you somehow make it come to life on paper.” His tongue darted out to wet his lips, and he frowned, searching for an answer. “And I don’t know what or exactly how to make this happen for you, but you can’t settle.”

He brought both of his hands to my face, holding me tight, breathing his own belief into me. “I can’t f**king stand the thought of you settling. Not for one second. Not for anything.” He blinked rapidly, hard and insecure. “And if this house is settling, I want you tell me and I’ll find something better. I will, Aly, I’ll make it right. I promise. You just have to be honest with me.”

Emotions slashed the deepest lines into his face, fear and doubt and that lingering shame. And I knew what he was thinking, that a part of me was settling by being with him.