Being Me(Inside Out 02)(40)

We walk side by side again, and when I’m ready to exit the studio, he reaches for my coat and helps me put it on. Immediately I feel my pocket vibrating. Oh crap. How much time has passed? I slide my briefcase onto my shoulder and my hand slips into my pocket. I close my fingers around my cell, cringing because I’ve failed to communicate with Jacob.
Alvarez pauses with his hand on the doorknob. “It’s been a pleasure to meet you, even if the outcome wasn’t what either of us had hoped for.”
“I’m going to try to get your business again, you know.”
“I know.”
He opens the door for me and I step outside, and we say a quick good-bye. I’m about to start for the stairs when a question comes to mind that has me hesitating on the porch. The charity event he did at Allure was for the same children’s hospital Chris champions, but since they don’t seem to be friends, I’m curious about how this came about. I turn to the door to knock and my phone buzzes against my palm again.
I pull it from my pocket and see a text alert and six missed calls. I hit the text from Chris.
Don’t go back in that door.
My heart leaps to my throat and I whirl around to scan the driveway. A shadowy movement draws my eyes and I see the Harley parked in the shadows behind the , with Chris leaning against it.

Chapter Twelve

I start down the stairs of Alvarez’s house and my chest is so tight it feels like I have the damn art tape Chris seems to love binding me with around my ribs, and around my control over my own life. I’m furious that he’s here. I’m embarrassed that Alvarez most assuredly has cameras and will know about this, if not now, then at some point. The line in the sand between my job and our relationship is beyond blurred. In fact, I’m pretty darn sure I’m the only one who’d imagined it ever existed.
The idea that I’ve convinced myself he is less controlling than he is has my heels colliding heavily on the driveway. I charge toward the , the car I’ve let myself drive instead of holding on to my own identity. I don’t look at Chris but damn
him, I can feel him all over, everywhere, inside and out, and in intimate places I can’t convince my body he isn’t welcome. It’s beyond frustrating to know that anger this potent isn’t enough to stop the thrum of awareness that just being near him creates.
Not for the first time, I feel Rebecca’s words from that first journal entry I’d read deep in my soul. He was lethal, a drug I feared.
I relate to her, and I understand the inescapable passion she felt and lost herself inside. I don’t want to be her. I’m not her. And for the first time since my initial first few encounters with Chris, I wonder if I am drawn to him because I’m self-destructive, and he to me for the same reason.
I reach the side of the car and in my haste to seek the shelter of the , I haven’t retrieved the key. Without looking at Chris, I fumble with my key. I know he will be standing by his Harley, all decked out in leather and denim, looking like sex and sin and my satisfaction. The key falls on the ground. I squat to retrieve the key and my composure.
Suddenly Chris is there, at eye level, as he had been the first night we’d met, when I’d spilled my purse. My gaze lifts and meets his, and a blast of awareness shakes me to the core. My breasts are heavy, my thighs achy. My skin tingles. A fine line between love and hate, Alvarez had said, and I understand them in this moment. I stare into his eyes and I wonder if he too is thinking about the night we met and the many ways we’ve made love. The many we have not and I want us to, when I should not.
I should be seeking space, independence, and my own identity, which he is threatening by taking over my life. It makes no sense how I feel in these eternal moments. How can I be this furious with Chris and still powerfully, completely lost in him?
“We have a lot to talk about, don’t we?” he asks, breaking the spell. His tone is low, and the rasp of anger in his voice is impossible to miss. It jolts me back to reality. He showed up at my client’s house and he’s angry with me?
My temper overpowers all other emotions in me and I reach for the key. His hand closes over mine and heat races up my arm and over my chest. “Don’t do what you did tonight ever again, Sara.”
The sharp command in his voice hits a bull’s-eye on every physiological male dominance issue I own, of which there are many. I try to pull my hand back but I am captive to his grip, leaving me with words as my only weapon. “Ditto to you, Chris.
And yeah. We have a lot to talk about—somewhere other than my client’s front yard.”
His green eyes glint fire a moment before he releases my hand and helps me to my feet. There is a possessiveness to his touch that has me leaning into him when I should be shoving him away. He notices, too; I see it in the slight narrowing of his eyes, the gleam of satisfaction in their depths that I both hunger for and reject.