Page 3 of Not In Love

Goddamn her life.

Of all the men in the world...

He was her niece’s dad, a permanent fixture in her life that she hadn’t chosen or wanted, and he was a decade younger than her.

She bit her lip hard, keeping her chin tucked down.

He left without a word.

Shivering, she flopped back against the sheets, tears rolling down her cheeks.

Three and a half years of no one touching her in comfort or passion, no one to reassure her that she was doing an okay job as a sudden guardian to a child, no one to console her when grief attacked like a stealthy ninja at the most trivial moments of her day.

Kash felt brittle as she rubbed her palms over her arms, like she was only made of bones and grief and guilt and anger. But the brittleness had set in long before Simon and Kat’s accident.

Maybe on that day when their father had walked out and their mother had fallen apart, and Kash had swallowed her own fear and held everyone else up. Or when Kat had racked up reckless credit card debt at sixteen, and Kash had drained her savings to fix it. Or maybe when she had married a man twenty-two years older than her, just because she had been so damn tired of being the responsible one.

She exhaled sharply, forcing herself upright, wiping the wetness from her cheeks.

She couldn’t go on like this.

Maybe it wouldn’t kill her to lean a little on her close friends. Especially Mona and Char. She would see them at Mona and Dom’s twenty-fifth anniversary celebrations in Cancun, in December.

Suddenly, her mind flicked to DP, her high-school summer fling, who would be in Cancun too. Maybe now, with them older and freer, they could explore what could have been all those years ago. If nothing else, she could ask him to hold her.

DP was safe, and easygoing, and it wouldn’t feel so…risky.

Not like with Diego.

Her pulse jumped at the memory of his steady gaze, the quiet command in his voice, the way one look had her body betraying her.

Diego unsettled her in ways she couldn’t afford.

He saw too much, was in her life too much, period.

She couldn’t think of him as anything else than a necessary, stable figure in Tia’s life.

CHAPTER2

His daughter’s feet pattered down the steps with a rhythmic tap-tap that echoed along with Diego Ferrera’s heartbeat.

He stared at Kash's closed door like a pathetic fool, wishing he was on the other side. Restless energy thrummed through him, as if adrenaline had been shot straight into his veins.

The sound of sniffling made his body bow toward the door, as if the woman behind it held the string to it. His chest ached at the idea of Kash crying.

No, she wouldn’t do something as… normal and reasonable and human as crying, would she?

Dr. Kashmira Shah was a paragon of strength and ambition, a stickler for always doing the right thing, a woman who not only took her responsibilities seriously but made it look effortless.

And yet, there was clearly a crack beneath the perfection.

He had no doubt as to what Tia, and he, had interrupted moments earlier.

It had been written all over her—her flushed skin, little dots of sweat over her upper lip, the rigid line of her shoulders, the way her breath hitched like she’d been sprinting. For an unbelievably crazy moment, he’d wanted to climb into the bed to relieve her obvious frustration, get her over the edge and into free fall.

To see the tight reins of Kash’s control snap would be a reward in itself.

There had been something so fragile in the cut of her face as she’d smiled at Tia and tried not to look at him. Something in her expression that made him want to both hold her and fuck the tension out of her.

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