Page 19 of Silver Hills' Christmas Miracle

Rook stopped in his tracks and slowly turned to face me. “Why?”

8

ROOK

“Did something happen?” I asked.

Kitty stared up at me with those gorgeous turquoise eyes and my heart stood still. She shouldn’t have this kind of effect on me, and yet every time she looked at me, I was utterly transfixed. There was some sort of magnetic pull that latched onto me every time I was in her orbit, and I was not strong enough to resist.

“No, nothing happened,” Kitty replied after a few long seconds of silence. “I just needed to see you because…” She glanced over her shoulder, checking our surroundings, and then she stepped close to me. She placed one hand on my chest and her fingers slipped slightly into the gaps between my buttons. Her fingertips were a hairsbreadth from my skin, and the warmth of her palm seared right through me.

“Kitty,” I warned, watching her head tilt to the side and her blonde plait drape over her shoulder.

“What? You told me there was danger and then you rushed away. And all I could think about was something happening to you and I wouldn’t be able to help. What would I do then, if you weren’t around to protect me?”

“I am protecting you.”

“Not right then, you weren’t. You locked me away like I’d been a bad girl?—”

“Kitty!”

I grabbed her arm and pulled her inside the manor, slamming the door behind us. My heart was pounding, and blood was rushing around my head at the implications of her words. With Kitty in tow, I didn’t stop walking until we were in one of the empty lounges on the first floor. I kicked the door closed behind us and released her, but she didn’t step back from me.

“Kitty, you can’t talk like that, do you understand me? Someone might hear you.”

“So what if they do?” Kitty jutted her chin up and her eyes flashed as she stared at me. “I don’t care if they hear.”

“Well, I do. I could lose my job, do you understand that?”

“So what?” Her lips pouted slightly. “Then it wouldn’t be in the way.”

“Kitty—”

“No!” She snapped suddenly and placed both hands on my chest, shoving me as hard as she could. “Don’tKittyme, okay? You… you haven’t even looked at me since that night, do you know that? Not in the same way, and I don’t understand why because you made a choice in that house. Youchoseto follow me and you chose to come into the shower and we had an amazing night! Or I thought we did, but now you’re back to acting like Mr. Robotic, like you have no feelings whatsoever or that you don’t give a shit about mine. And that hurts, y’know? It hurts that I put myself out there and you accepted, and now it’s like there’s some huge wall between us.”

I didn’t say a word as she suddenly unloaded everything that she’d been carrying since that night in the safe house. The only problem was that she seemed to have persuaded herself that the reason I was so distant was because I was a one-and-done kindof guy. That couldn’t be further from the truth, and my chest squeezed like a rubber band listening to her.

“So sue me for wanting to try and get some alone time together to see if I really was crazy or if I’m just chasing a dream, because I don’t like feeling used, okay?”

“Kitty!” I grasped her shoulders, leaning down to her height and looking her right in the eye. “You have it all wrong.”

She was panting slightly from her burst of speech after being dragged into the house. As we locked eyes, she slowly licked her lower lip and sighed. “Do I?”

“Yes.” The word barked out of me, tight and painful. “I… you have no idea how hard it is for me to be around you every day and have to stay away from you. But this, whatever this is? It can’t work. I had a moment of weakness and I shouldn’t have slept with you. Not because Idon’twant to but because it’s so incredibly inappropriate.”

“I don’t think so,” Kitty replied sullenly. “How are two people consenting to be together inappropriate?”

“My job for one,” I said as calmly as I could manage. “My friendship with your father? The fact that I’m so much older than you? There’s too much at stake here, Kitty, and as much as I want… as much as I would love to give in to this insane hold you have over me, I can’t.”

“I’m twenty-six,” Kitty snapped back at me. “I’m more than old enough to make my own damn decisions. And friends with my father? He barely has friends, just people he likes to use. And your job to protect me makes it so much hotter. I don’t see these as a problem like you do. Do you think I’m too young for you? Is that it?”

“You are,” I replied in a softer tone. “I’m thirty-seven, Kitty. You should be with someone your own age, someone with shared?—”

“Don’t you dare stand there and tell me I should be with someone withshared life experience,” she barked out, her eyes flashing with anger. “Look at my life. My upbringing. There’s no one in the world I can share this life experience with except, oh, I don’t know, the guards who live in the same world I do?”

It was tough to argue with her since my restraint stemmed from my moral obligations.

“Are you not attracted to me? Is that it? Was I just a–a pity fuck?”

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