Otherwise Engaged (18 page)

“Don’t say
that,” he said. “I don’t want to lose you as a friend.”

She gestured
into the apartment. He didn’t move. Dragging out a sigh, she crossed the
threshold. He went in after her and elbowed the door closed behind him.

“This friendship
has been dead for a long time,” Daphne said. “We just put the final nail in the
coffin when we—in Puerto Rico. At least we had fun doing it, right?”

He crossed the
room and set the groceries on the bar counter that separated her kitchen from
her small dining room. He put his back to the counter and faced her. “What do
you mean, it’s been dead?”

“How many times
have we seen each other since graduation, Rain? And we live in the same city.”
She twisted a ring around one of her fingers and looked at it. Probably
avoiding his gaze again.

He swallowed
hard. Another reminder of how he’d taken her for granted. He was lucky enough
to have people like Carolina and Daphne in his life, and he kept abusing the
privilege until he lost it.

“We were so
close in college,” he said, reflecting on just how true that’d been. The late
nights they’d spent talking. The days they’d cut class to take a long weekend
and go hiking in upstate New York.
The weekends at Skylar’s
parents’ place in the Hamptons.
He’d liked the weekends Daphne was there
the most even though he hadn’t gotten any those weekends because he spent the
whole time hanging out with her instead of flirting with potential hook-up
partners. They’d always had so much fun together. Way before sex came into the
picture. It fully hit him how much he missed that. He took a deep breath and
stared at the top of her head because she still wouldn’t look up. “What
happened to us? Our friendship?”

“You know
better than I do,” she said. It was impossible to miss the bitterness in her
tone.

“I want to make
up for it now.”

“The best thing
for you to do is leave.”

“Really?” He
closed the small distance between them. The physical one anyway, which was the
only one he had any idea how to close. He placed his fingers under her chin and
gently lifted her head. She still wouldn’t meet his eyes. “Daphne,” he
whispered.

She finally met
his gaze. Tears welled in her eyes.

“There are so
many things I’d give anything to take back. You have no idea. I hate the idea
that I’ve hurt you. I never want to do it again.”

“But you will.”
Her voice quavered.

“You don’t know
that.”

“And you don’t
know that you won’t. Nobody can possibly know such a thing about anybody. And
considering your track record, I’d rather not take any more chances on you.”

“Maybe I’m
willing to change, to try my damnedest to do better and be better. For you.” He
leaned in until their lips were nearly touching; he was so close that he heard
her breath catch in her throat. She smelled as good as he remembered.
Like a flower.
Lilacs maybe. That smell drove him crazy with
memories like the sight of her had earlier. He was drunk on her. He was any
time he was near her.

She gave her
head a slight shake, but she didn’t pull away. At the moment before his lips
brushed hers, she said, “Don’t. Please.”

“I don’t think
you mean that.”

“I need to. And
you need to leave,” she said. She drew in a ragged breath. “I couldn’t stand it
if you…no. I’m done. If you really do care about me at all, you’ll let me walk
away now. While I can in one piece.”

He pulled back.

“I can’t do
this, Rain. Not with you. Anybody but you.” She pressed her fingers to her
lips. He wondered if she was trying to stop herself from saying more or if she
regretted him not kissing her as much as he regretted not doing it.

He put his
hands behind his neck. “Okay. Okay, I’ll leave.” He’d never felt so shitty
about anything. “If that’s what you really want.”

“It is,” she
said, biting her sweet lower lip. Stunning.

He walked to
the door. She was right behind him. He turned to face her. “I truly am sorry. I
should’ve handled it differently when you called me after Puerto Rico. I should
have handled everything differently. You have no idea how much you mean to me.”
He hadn’t even had any idea until very recently. “That time we spent together
in Puerto Rico…I’ve never experienced anything like that before. I loved every
minute of it.”

She waved one
hand at the door in a gesture meaning that he should go. Her other hand was
still pressed to her mouth.

An ache crept
from his chest down to the pit of his stomach.

“Bye, Daph.”
His kissed the two middle fingers of his right hand and pressed them briefly to
her lower lip. She flinched, but didn’t draw back to slap him or say one word.
He walked out of the door. She shut it behind him. He leaned against it, heard
her lock it from the other side.

He walked down
the hall dejected, but determined not to give up on her. He bumbled down the
hall, to the elevator, and when the elevator reached the lobby, through it and
out onto the street where he picked up the carry-on suitcase he’d forgotten all
about earlier.

He walked
toward the nearest metro stop in a semi-daze, thinking about all that had
happened so quickly. Seeing her again. Getting kicked out of her life. Being
flooded with so many memories all at once. She’d been involved in some of the
best moments of his life. Did she happen to be there for them or did they
happen because of her?

Her smile. Her
laugh.
Her way of looking at the world.
There wasn’t a
thing he didn’t miss about her. He wanted to be around her all the time. When
he wasn’t, it felt like his heart was ripping out of his chest. Especially
after seeing her for the first time in weeks and being sent away. Being so
close to her had definitely made it worse. Wait a minute.

His heart.

 
“Oh, shit,” he said, stopping dead in the
middle of the street and pissing off pedestrians all around him. “I’m in
love
with her.” The realization hit him
full force in the gut and immobilized him for a moment. And it was real this
time. It felt tons different from how it had when he thought he was in love
with Carolina. If Daphne told him she was marrying someone else, it would do
more than make him jealous and cause him to decide he had to have things his
way. It would kill him.

His next
thought was
,
I’ve
got to get her back.

Chapter Twenty-Three

“It was just
rebound sex. And the friendship is dead now.” If she said these things to
herself enough, maybe she would start to believe them.

“Okay. Right,”
Bettina said from the other end of the phone.

It was Troy
she’d been talking to when she came home and found Rain sitting on the steps in
front of her building. She wasn’t ready to call him back yet. She’d called
Bettina first to tell her what happened in hopes that would help her regroup.
No such luck.

“So what do I
do now?” He’d definitely looked like he’d just stepped off a plane. He probably
wasn’t lying about that part. But how much of it was he lying about? Even all
scruffy like that, he was the most attractive man he’d ever seen. His black
hair needed a cut and had fallen into his eyes. Stubble covered his square jaw.
Those lips he was so good with had been so close. She almost wished she hadn’t
told him to stop. But that had been the right thing to do. She needed to believe
that.

Daphne paced
the room, waiting for her cousin’s response. “Well?” she asked.

“I’m fresh out
of ideas for you, cuz. Every thing I tell you to do, you do the opposite of
anyway.”

“So what’s the
opposite of what you think I should do?”

“Run into
Rain’s arms and tell him you want to have his babies and tell Troy to forget
you exist.”

Daphne laughed
so hard for a moment she thought she was going hysterical. “I did the right
thing, right?”

“Right.”

“No, I’m an
idiot.”

“You know, this
doesn’t make any kind of sense. You were doing just fine, and then this man
comes back into your life for a few minutes and turns you into a basket case.
What does he have between his legs? A magic wand?”

“It’s not just
the sex.”
Although the sex had been really good.
“Oh,
wait. What am I talking about? It’s not anything. He’s done. We’re done. He
isn’t good for me.”

“Let’s talk
about someone who is. Troy called today, right?”

“Yeah,” Daphne
said. She tried to sound as enthusiastic as she wanted to be about it. Troy was
a catch. She was lucky he was interested. “He wants to get together for dinner
this week on his day off. He’s done with being on-call at the hospital for a
while.”

“You better
take him up on it.”

“I don’t know.
I have a lot going on at work. Now that our project has the green light, things
are moving really quickly.”

“She’s back,”
Bettina said in a
sing-song
voice.

“Who?”

“The closed-off
woman who’s much quicker to hide behind her work than to let herself have a
life. So busy playing it safe that she lets everyone else have all the fun.”

Daphne rubbed
her big toes against each other and stared down at the chipped gold toenail
polish she needed to replace soon. “It’s not that.”

“What is it
then?”

“Fine. I’ll
call him back. Set up a dinner date.” Even though her heart wasn’t in it.
Hadn’t she just been telling herself that it was better that way? To not get
all carried away? Look what had happened with Rain. Her heart had definitely
been involved there. She’d had way too much of an attachment to that man before
making an even bigger mistake by sleeping with him.

It probably
wasn’t fair to blame it all on him. She’d known what the deal was. And she’d
wanted it.
So badly.
But keeping him away now was best
regardless. If she kept going on this path, she’d get into something she
couldn’t recover from. That man had more of an effect on her than any one human
being should ever have on another. That wasn’t something to mess with. She was
safer with someone nice
who
she could see herself
getting along with okay.
Someone who was safe.
Compatible. Who didn’t send her pulse racing and shut her mind down just by
looking at her. Who wasn’t a professional
heartbreaker.
Someone who could genuinely care about her.
Someone like Troy.

“Daph? You
there?”

“Yeah,” she
said. “Just thinking about asking Troy out.” That was as much of the truth as
Bettina was going to get.

“Quit wasting
time on the phone with me then. Call him so you can call me back and tell me
where you’re going for dinner.”

“Okay,” Daphne
said. She ended her call with Bettina and pressed her phone to her chest. She
closed her eyes, and Rain’s lips were descending over hers. She didn’t stop him
this time. Her eyes flew open, and she hurriedly pulled up Troy’s number on her
phone and called him. She wasn’t going to get sucked back in. She’d survived a
lot of smooth talking. Rain wasn’t going to be the one who took her down for the
final count. One way or the other, she would purge him from her system.

#

Rain stopped in
mid-crunch when heard his phone going off. Hoping it was Daphne, but knowing it
probably wasn’t, he sat up with a sigh. Skylar. Grumbling, he put the phone to
his ear.

“Rain! You’ve
been a ghost since I got back into town.”

“I know,” Rain
said. He’d been throwing himself into his work and he’d started training for a
triathlon. Any moment of the day he could fill was good. Because he spent all
the other ones thinking about Daphne and ways he could get her back. If he
spent every single moment thinking about her, he might lose his mind.

“This triathlon
nonsense you’ve been talking about is really cramping my social life. You never
want to go out anymore. You always have to sleep or train or sleep so that you
can train. Or something.”

“I know. I’m
sorry.”

“Don’t worry.
You can make it up to me. We’re getting our summer league softball crew
together. You want to be on the team.”

He didn’t, not
this year, but he’d been a really shitty friend lately. “Sure. But I might not
be able to make all the practices at the beginning.”

“Yeah, yeah. You
and that heinous training schedule.”

“No one hates
it more than I do.”

“So why are you
doing it?”

Because it
helped him keep away from the demons he didn’t want to face. “It’ll be
rewarding in the end.”

“God. You are a
walking, talking motivational poster.” Skylar paused. Then he said, “I meant it
when I said we’ve lost touch. You never did tell me what happened with that
chick.”

Rain had tried
everything over the past few weeks, but nothing had worked. He couldn’t tell
Skylar that, though. “Oh, I don’t know. I guess it’s not going to work out.”
He’d sent her flowers. He sent letters because he knew how she loved getting
mail—real mail from the post office, not email. They’d been returned to
sender. Same with the birthday card he’d sent her. He’d tried to call to wish
her a happy birthday, but he’d known that was a lost cause. To all of this,
she’d responded once. A text message:
It’s
better if we both move on.

He was a mess
because of her. Such things just didn’t happen to him. It was very new.
And very scary.
If this was what love was, he’d done good to
avoid it all this time. He wished he could run away from it now. It was painful
when it didn’t work the way it was supposed to.

“Thank
goodness,” Skylar said. “You must have finally come to your senses.”

“Yeah.” He had,
but not in the way Skylar meant.

“Okay, so I’ll
send you more info about the softball team. In the meantime, we need to get
together soon. And not just to discuss business. Although, I’m impressed with
how things are coming along with your uncle’s business.”

“Yeah. Me, too,
actually.” They got into a conversation about business. That was much easier.
He didn’t want to talk with Skylar about Daphne. Skylar knew a lot of things
about a lot of subjects, but he knew virtually nothing about women. The only
thing he knew less about was relationships.
Of any sort.
With anyone.

Skylar had
always been sort of a loner.
A genius loner with not much use
for most people.
He’d always been a good friend to Rain, though. Skylar
had his reasons for shutting most people out. He didn’t share much about those
reasons because, well, he shut most people out. He even shut Rain out when it
came to talking about stuff like that.

Rain could tell
from the few interactions he’d seen between Skylar and his parents, though,
that a lot of it had to do with the parents who’d shipped Skylar off to
boarding school starting when he was six because they didn’t want to deal with
him.
Parents who had unreasonable expectations of their only
son.
Parents he could never do enough to impress. Skylar’s big moment
had been when they started Bevyx. He’d finally gotten free of his parents and
their demands. That was one of the main reasons Rain couldn’t hold a grudge
against Skylar no matter what happened with the company or anything else.

Sure, everyone
had
their
own shit to deal with. Rain sure had his.
But that didn’t mean he had to stop trying to see where other people were
coming from.

He wondered.
Had he ever tried to see where Daphne was coming from? The more he thought about
it, the more he realized he probably hadn’t. In her position, he probably
wouldn’t be so quick to give him another chance, either. What proof did she
have that he was really willing to change and not trying to win some game the
dumbass way he had been with Carolina? None. No proof at all.

He was going to
be a better friend. Starting with the softball league. He was also going to
find a way to get Daphne back. He was going to convince her he needed her in
his life.
Even if only as a friend.
He’d be lucky to
have her back as a friend. And he would treat her right this time. No more of
this disappearing and showing up only when it was convenient for him. Nope. It
was time to stop being so self-absorbed. Everybody had busy lives, but you made
time for the people who mattered. Otherwise, you would lose them.

And Daphne
mattered more to him than anybody else in the world.