Page 8 of Reclaiming Love

Chapter 5

Seeing her this morning had been a bonus and he’d been half tempted to jump out of the waiting line to continue talking to her. But it was hard—hard to take a subtle interest without coming across as a stranger who seemed to stalk her. Of course he wasn’t but he still didn’t want to take the risk of her thinking of him like that.

Maybe next time he’d be better prepared. He liked to think she was single but knew that this was based more on his wishful thinking than on any real evidence.

Yet she seemed happy enough to want to talk to him. Had he imagined it or had she lingered a moment before she’d left? And what the hell was this about counting calories?

What the hell?

A part of him warned him to run. The other part of him seduced him to stay.

In the end, everything always came back to Bree. Her words, the ones she’d kept from him, the things she’d hidden from him, all the skeletons in her closet—all of these things now haunted him.

Perhaps he could have saved her if only he’d known.

They’d talked about moving in together. Second time around they’d been even stronger. It wasn’t a high school romance anymore. This was real.

Love the second time around, with them in their early twenties, had been stronger, more overwhelming. Real. If it was real how could he have been so blind to everything?

Only now did he understand how hard it had been for her to be with him as long as she had, to have lived the lie and kept her secrets to herself. That she hadn’t trusted him, meant he couldn’t do a thing to save her. And this truth slapped him with guilt every single day.

Next time, he told himself. Next time, he’d make a bolder move.

His thoughts rushed back to Melissa. At first he thought it was only him that was noticing her, but now, the way she blushed each time she saw him, the way she stared and then looked away, the way she lingered, her body language telling him she wanted to stay when her words said otherwise.

She did like him.

But he would need tangible proof.

He figured that the other sex had it easier. Even in these days of equality, women still wanted the guy to make the first move.

So if she did like him—and he wasn’t even seventy percent sure that she did—he’d have to make the first move. But only when he was one hundred percent convinced that this girl, the one who’d started to make him forget, might be worth making a move for.

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