Always Loving You (Danvers #6)(4)
When Declan had surprised them all by falling in love with Ella Webber, the receptionist at Danvers, Mac suddenly took notice of the hollowness that he had felt for years. Suddenly, it had become almost unbearable. Then when Declan married and started a family almost overnight, it had forced Mac to make a difficult decision. He had to move on with his life. He wanted a wife and a family in the near future, and he had to accept that Ava might never be at the same point in her life.
There was no choice left but for him to start pulling away, inch by painful inch. He had asked Gwen Day, who worked at Danvers as well, out on a date. She was an attractive woman with long red hair and an outgoing personality. Although she didn’t make him weak in the knees, he was attracted to her, and she seemed to feel the same.
They had been dating for a couple of months now and his frequent dinners with Ava had all but stopped. He knew he couldn’t have both. There was no way he could move past her with someone else and still spend so much time alone with her. It was one of the hardest things he’d ever done. He missed her so much he physically ached. But he couldn’t keep going on as he had been. He wasn’t doing either of them any favors. Maybe without him as a crutch, Ava would be able to move forward. Sometimes you had to take the training wheels off and see if you fell on your face or made it on your own. This was as much for her as for him. He just had to remember that.
Chapter Three
“Oh my God, what’s he done now?”
Ava scowled at her assistant and future sister-in-law, Emma Davis, as she settled into a seat in front of her desk. Ava had been a vice president at Danvers International since she and Brant sold their family business to Jason Danvers. Truthfully, she enjoyed the work as well as the challenge of something new.
Ava gave an unladylike snort at Emma’s question and resigned herself to playing twenty questions. There was no way her nosy assistant was going to let her off without explaining her shittier-than-usual mood. She gave her best innocent look and said, “I have no idea what you’re talking about. Don’t you have some work to do in your own office?”
Emma smirked back at her disgruntled expression, knowing by now that her bark was worse than her bite. Ava didn’t have many close friends, and with Mac now mostly avoiding her, Emma was pretty much it. Oh, Ava would never let the other woman know it, but she had grown to love her dearly since her engagement to her brother Brant. Between Emma and her other brother Declan’s wife, Ella, family occasions were no longer akin to a gathering at the morgue. Emma and Ella had breathed some much-needed life into the Stone family. “Nah, I’m on a break, so I have time.”
Rolling her eyes, Ava said, “A break, huh? You seem to have a lot of those.” Secretly, Ava knew why Brant had enjoyed arguing with Emma when she worked as his assistant before their engagement. It was just freaking fun. Emma was actually fabulous at her job and took a lot of the load from Ava’s shoulders.
“All right, enough of this stalling crap. What’s happening with Mac? I take it you’ve spoken to him again, since you’re acting like someone with a monthlong case of PMS.”
Putting all pretenses aside, Ava said, “Yeah, I ran into him and—her—in the parking garage yesterday.”
“Oh, shit! Did you, like . . . speak to the tramp?”
Ava smiled even though she felt the need to defend the woman who’d stolen her sorta man. “I don’t think she’s a tramp, Em. Mac wouldn’t be interested in anyone like that.”
Emma shook her head in disgust. “You’re totally missing the point here. This woman is messing with your guy. We don’t take that lightly. Until we get rid of her, she is the ‘tramp’ to us. So . . . how did it go?”
Ava tried to hide her pain as she relayed her run-in with Mac. “Well, he was walking her to the car when I saw them. He helped her inside and kissed her, and then she drove off. He saw me and we talked for a minute, that’s it.”
“Why do you put yourself through all this? If you leveled with Mac about how you really feel, he’d probably kick the tramp to the curb faster than you could say bye-bye. He loves you. According to your family, he’s never made a secret of that fact. And . . . you love him. Are you really going to let her have him?”
It all sounded so simple when Emma put it like that, but the reality seemed anything but simple. After years of being terrified of intimacy and feeling as if she wasn’t good enough for Mac, Ava had finally decided to do everything she could to overcome her fears. She had purchased every self-help book that she could find and was seriously considering going to a therapist. She was so very tired of being afraid all the time. Just when she was on the brink of confessing to Mac how screwed up she really was, and how she felt about him, he had pulled the rug out from under her. Apparently, they had both arrived at the same conclusion—that they needed to move forward. Only she had wanted to move toward him, but unfortunately, his moves had taken him away from her.
Since then, she had been reeling in shock. What now? He had been her reason for finally getting her shit together. He had waited for her all these years, and just when she thought they might be on the same page, he was gone. He’d freaking left her behind. And damn it, she couldn’t even blame him. “Em, it’s not that simple. What am I supposed to say? ‘Oh, Mac, please toss your new girlfriend aside. I’ve decided that although I’m too f*cked-up to have a relationship with you myself, I can’t let anyone else have you. I’m going to need you to masturbate for life and remain true only to me’?”