Girl Next Door - The Complete Series (23 page)

He looked completely confused, then angrier than I’d ever seen him. In deliberate motions, he set down his beer and stalked toward me. His eyes were hard, like glass or ice, and so green I couldn’t look away.

“Let me get this straight,” he said in a low voice. “You cut and run on me because you f
ucking love almost everything about me
!”

I was too far gone, with both emotion and alcohol to even flinch. I rose up on my tiptoes so I could yell in his face. “Yes, Patrick. I can’t do it. I can’t have a taste of that and then watch you walk away. It will kill me. I’ve had so much bad,” I said, thinking of my ex, Jeremy, “that I can’t have something good and lose it. When my insecure, abusive, asshole of an ex left four years ago, I knew,
I knew
, that I could never do that again. He fucking broke me, Patrick. You are nothing like him, but you have the power to hurt me more than he ever did. You could obliterate me.”

I was sobbing now and I put my hands over my face. I had never cried like this. Not when Jeremy made me feel lower than spit, not even when he left me. It was as if four years of grief decided to burst out of me at once. I felt warm arms come around me, cradling my hunched body. Patrick’s hand pressed my face against his chest and he shushed me, gently stroking my hair. When my sobs didn’t calm, he scooped an arm behind my knees and carried me into the hallway, up the stairs, and into his bedroom. Gently, he laid me on the mattress and curled around me.

Finally, after what felt like hours, but couldn’t have been more than ten minutes, I was able to get control of my emotions. I felt hollow, gutted. Patrick’s hands continued to stroke my back and my hair and it was so soothing that I began to feel sleepy. Between the alcohol and the high emotions, I couldn’t keep my eyes open. Without thinking, I burrowed deeper against Patrick’s side and threw an arm over his belly and my leg over his thigh. Within seconds, I was asleep. What I didn’t know, is that while I dreamed, Patrick lay beside me, playing with a strand of my hair, until almost dawn. Then he too fell asleep.

I felt something horribly sharp drilling into my temple, jerking me out of sleep. My eyes snapped open due to the pain and I yelped before I slammed them shut again. Not only was someone stabbing me in the temple with an icepick, they’d installed spotlights while I was sleeping. The room around me was so bright it made my eyes feel like they were going to fall out of my skull. I opened my mouth to moan in pain, but all that emerged was a funny croak. My throat and tongue were so dry I thought I must have swallowed a handful of sand.

I burrowed my head under the pillow to block out the light and I woke fully. Then I remembered everything that happened the night before. Everything. I groaned. I’d told Patrick that I was falling in love with him, hell, I’d shouted it. So much for keeping my emotional distance.

Now, the morning after, I was humiliated and hung over. I felt like complete shit. Slowly, I removed the pillow from my head and looked around. I didn’t see Patrick or hear him moving around so I slipped out of bed. I looked down and realized I was wearing a huge men’s t-shirt and my panties, and that was it. I shifted back through my memories of the night before. Even though I had been pretty tipsy, I didn’t recall changing my clothes and my memories were fairly clear. Yet another thing to be embarrassed about, I decided.

I looked around the bedroom for my clothes. They were nowhere to be found. Shit, the sneaky bastard had taken my clothes. I walked over to his dresser and dug around for a pair of boxer shorts. I grabbed the first pair I came across, tugging them up my legs. Well, if he thought that taking my clothes would keep me from leaving, he was damn wrong. I looked around the room for my shoes, and saw them sticking out from under the bed.

My head was pounding and I felt cranky as hell. I snatched up my shoes, cursing Patrick under my breath. I turned toward the door and stopped short. Patrick was standing just inside the door, holding two cups of steaming coffee in his hands. I was getting damn sick of him sneaking up on me. What was he, a ninja? Still, I did need coffee, so when he held the cup out to me, I snatched it out of his hand. The first sip almost scalded my tongue, but it also warmed my belly. I took another sip.

“Where are my clothes?”

Patrick drank from his own mug before answering. “Well, I’m not really sure.”

I gripped my cup so tightly that I thought I would crack it. His face was so smug. I really wanted to smack him, but I knew that would end in a tussle. If we tussled, well that would end in something else that would also prevent me from keeping my emotional distance. I took another drink of coffee, feeling the brew chasing away the fuzzies in my head.

“Seriously, Patrick. I will be leaving with or without my clothes. Tell me where they are so I can get dressed.”

The smirk on Patrick’s face disappeared. “You will not be leaving, Cat, until you hear what I have to say. The last couple of times I’ve seen you, I’ve let you have yours, this morning, it’s time for me to have mine.”

My hand shook. I was pretty sure I didn’t want to hear what Patrick would have to say. Maybe in a billion years, after my embarrassment dissipated, I could handle listening to his thoughts on the last few days.

“I, um,” I trailed off. I wasn’t sure what to say.

Patrick waited patiently for me to stop stuttering. “Are you ready to hear what I have to say? You can leave after I’m finished.”

It appeared there was nothing else for me to say. I walked back to the bed, put my cup on the nightstand, and sat on the bed with my back against the headboard. I crossed my legs at the ankles. Patrick looked amused at my attempt to be casual, as though he knew how hard it was for me to pretend and he found it funny.

He moved to the dresser and placed his cup on it before he faced me. His face was no longer amused. I wasn’t sure what he was thinking and it was freaking me out. I cleared my throat but didn’t say anything. Finally, he walked to the end of the bed, resting his palms on the footboard.

“I think I finally understand why you’ve been so pigheaded about us. I still think it was cowardly but I can’t blame you. There’s just one thing I want you to think about. I’ve known you for six months now, and every time we’ve seen each other you have demonstrated each of the characteristics you used to describe yourself last night. You make snarky, sarcastic comments, usually at someone else’s expense, sometimes your own, and I have often seen you be, as you said, downright bitchy. However, every time I’ve seen that, the other party seemed to deserve it. In the six months I’ve had the opportunity to be around you, you have always been yourself. Now, what I want to know is why you thought I wasn’t completely aware of who you are?”

I knew this was true, but it had been my experience that most men didn’t mind my sarcasm early on in our relationship. Hell, some of them even found my biting comments entertaining. Usually that feeling disappeared after a few months. My quirks became a lot less cute then. I started to open my mouth to argue, but Patrick held up a hand.

“Don’t answer that question. It was rhetorical anyway. I have another point to make. I asked you to keep an open mind when we started this. You didn’t. Before we even truly started, you were already planning the end. There’s a huge difference between wanting to take things slowly and being cowardly. From what I know about you, you are not a coward. You are so filled with life and I’ve never seen you back down from anything else. What about me, or any man, makes you want to hide?”

He stopped speaking and looked at me. I waited, wondering if that was another rhetorical question. Patrick raised an eyebrow.

“You mentioned something last night, but I wasn’t sure if it was the alcohol talking or if it was true. I’m guessing you were finally being honest with me. Who treated you so badly, Cat, that you gave up?”

I licked my lips. “The story’s pretty typical, Patrick. My ex treated me like shit, he tried to isolate me, then, when I finally broke, he got rid of me. My personality, my attitude, was a challenge. He tore me down, got bored, and left me completely screwed up.”

Patrick waited a beat, then asked, “Do you honestly think I would treat you like that?”

I shook my head. “No, you would never treat me like Jeremy treated me. I think you have to be one of the best men I know.”

“Okay, this is where I got confused last night,” he said. “If I’m one of the best men you know, what makes a good relationship with me scarier than a bad relationship with an asshole?”

I blew out a breath. Last night, my courage had been bolstered by alcohol. In the bright light of day, I wasn’t sure if I could explain it without sounding completely nuts.

“Patrick, you have to understand, a bad relationship, like the one I had with Jeremy, wasn’t that hard to leave behind. You are a nice guy, and it’s been my experience, that real, live nice guys prefer a woman who doesn’t throw attitude or make snarky comments on a daily basis. They can’t handle it. You were with Anya, you know how it felt when you were just being yourself and she couldn’t deal. I’ve been there, too. I don’t want to be there again, waiting for you to realize that I’m too much work, waiting for you to see that there’s something missing between us the way you did with Anya.”

Patrick walked to me, nudged my legs over with his hips, and sat on the bed facing me. He leaned forward, putting his weight on his hand, his face close to mine. His eyes were warm.

“Cat, I can’t make you promises about our future or where we’ll be in a year or even two, but I can promise you that, in the six months I’ve known you, not once has your tendency to make smartass remarks failed to turn me on. I told you that something was missing in my relationship with Anya and I wasn’t lying. I realize now she was playing me, but her actions were so passive that her play didn’t work. I need a challenge. You keep me on my toes and you make me laugh more than any other woman I’ve ever been with. I also think you’re the sexiest woman I’ve ever met. If one of us wakes up one day and realizes this isn’t working, we talk about it. That is another promise I can make to you. If this starts to go badly, I will talk to you and ask you to talk to me.”

My brain was still stuck on his first statement about where he and I might be in a year or two, then everything else he said processed and I gaped at him. He thought my attitude was hot? A turn-on? That was a first. The few men I’d dated longer than two months seemed to enjoy my feistiness at first only to set out to change it when things began to get serious. This was the reason I intentionally began dating men who were wrong, as wrong for me as I could find. Men with commitment issues, narcissists, the list went on. Until Patrick, I’d never found a man who truly understood my twisted sense of humor and biting wit.

A small flare of hope warmed my belly and the tightness in my chest relaxed. I hadn’t even felt it before now.

“What are you trying to say, Patrick?” I wanted to be sure I understood.

He smiled a little. Oh, that was the same half-grin Aidan gave Nat and it made my heart pound because it implied something special.

“I’m telling you, Cat, that all your excuses for keeping your distance won’t work with me. I get that you’ve been kicked around by a lot of the men in your life, but all the things about you that are different, the ones other men tried to change, are things that I love. I don’t want to change them.”

I stared at him. He loved my sarcasm, snarky tendencies, and perverse sense humor? I wanted to pinch myself to make sure I wasn’t asleep. If I was, it had to be the best dream I’d ever had. A genuinely nice guy who didn’t want to change me into a Stepford bride? In fact, as I thought about all this, I realized Patrick’s interactions with me had been engineered to bring those characteristics out of me. I scowled.

“Are you sure you know what you’re getting into here, Patrick? I’ll never the kind of woman who’s sweetness and light. If anything, knowing that my personality doesn’t scare you will make it worse.”

He chuckled. “Cat, I’ve been around Nat a lot. I’ve also spent a lot of time with you recently. You two don’t exactly hide what you are, especially when you’re together. What you see is what you get. I like that about both of you. I also know I will never,
ever
, be bored.”

Okay, I was done beating the dead horse. He understood what he was getting into and I honestly thought I might be getting the better end of the deal, but he’d already made his choice.

“Okay, then. What do we do now?”

Patrick leered at me so lecherously I had to laugh.

“Other than that?” I asked.

His eyes were warm, amused, and so green it almost hurt to look at them.

“We keep doing what we did the last week, before you freaked out and ran away. We spend time together, sleep together, and enjoy each other. If things go well, maybe we get a place together, or get engaged.”

Whoa, I backed up a little.

“I think living together would be the next step rather than marriage. I want to be sure you aren’t a complete slob before I promise to spend the rest of my life with you.”