Page 12 of My Bossy Valentine

He smacks my ass. “I'm being serious.”

But there's a teasing light in his eyes that I've never seen before. Suddenly, my throat feels thick and it's hard to swallow.

“You detonated those walls without even trying and laid my heart bare, ugly wounds and all.”

I want to swear I'll never hurt him. How can I say that if I don't know who made those wounds? “Tell me?”

He scrubs a hand over his jaw, then nods. “Sit with me?”

“I—yes.”

Spencer scoops me into his arms, rounds his desk and sits in the chair, settling me on his knee. I wrap my arms around his neck and get comfortable. This is nice.

The smallest smile touches his lips.

My chest squeezes tight. If he smiles at me even once, I might fall in love with this man.

“I was engaged seven years ago, when I live in Philadelphia. Bianca was smart, beautiful, and driven. A vixen in bed. Everything I thought I wanted. She was an attorney with her sights set on becoming a partner in her firm.” He rubs a hand up and down my back. “I knew she loved money. Making it, spending it. Especially mine. I had a similar business to this, doing well with some big contracts. It wasn't until our wedding expenses hit one hundred thousand, most of which came from my accounts, that I started to see her more clearly. Bianca was always pushing me to get a higher paying job, despite the fact that I love the work I do. The money was never enough. She loved fucking me, but she wasn't happy with where I lived. She had her eye on some big ass house that cost millions.” He shakes his head. “Even then, I wasn't ready to give up on the commitment I'd made to her. She didn't have such qualms. A week before the wedding, she landed that partnership and brokeoff our engagement. She'd be fucking her way up the ladder at work until she found the right man to manipulate. She didn't need me anymore.”

His muscles are rock solid beneath my hands, tension in every line of his body. A hundred responses cross my mind, like: what a bitch. How could she cheat on him when he was giving her everything she wanted? Thank God she broke it off. I hope she chokes on thatD. Karma is a bitch with a long memory.

Words somehow don't seem enough. Cupping his face, I meet his gaze, then place a soft kiss on his lips.

He sucks in a sharp breath.

“Avery.”

The tremor in his voice slays me. “She didn't know what she had.”

He yanks me closer and buries his nose in the crook of my neck. “I do,” he whispers, lips skimming my skin.

“Is that when you came to Hope Peak?”

“I got as much money back as I could from the wedding, sold my business, and looked for a place that I could call home. A small town like Hope Peak, with the mountains and fresh air, was what I needed. I rebuilt nearly everything I'd lost and told myself it was enough.” He threads a hand through my hair, rubbing the strands between his fingers. “It was until I met you.”

I want to believe that. But... “You don't know that much about me.”

“I know you're a vampire who shouldn't leave the office while the sun is out. What else is there?”

A laugh bubbles out of me. Spencer Sullivan cracking a vampire joke? He really has come unhinged. I like it. “I live in my grandmother's house with her cat while she ditches me for a world cruise.”

He snorts, and as I watch transfixed, a slow smile spreads across his lips.

My heart cracks the last little bit, opening fully to the love I'd already begun to let in. “Good thing I like cats. And grandmothers.”

“I swear she had an ulterior motive for hiring me, but at the time, I didn't care. I needed a place to live and a job while I figured things out.”

He tilts his head. “Why? What brought you to Hope Peak, Avery? What brought you tome?”

Chapter Eight

Spencer

I never would havethought this woman who is sixteen years my junior would be the one to put my world back together. I've always heard the saying that age doesn't matter when it comes to the heart. I never believed it. How could it not when their life experiences would be so different? But I've come to understand that they can complement one another, filling in the gaps one lacks.

Avery adjusts her glasses, a flush spreading over her cheeks. I smooth a hand up and down her back, savoring the contact. “My parents had pretty solid ideas about what my brother and I should do with our lives. They shot down anything that deviated from that plan. My brother rebelled and went into the Navy. He's nine years older than me, so I had a lot more conditioning. I couldn't follow my dreams. I had to go to college and get a degreein a technology field so that when, notif,my foolish ideas fell through, I'd have a career I could count on.”

“What did you want to do instead?”

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