Page 82 of Keep Him Like Secrets

But if it was for the best, why the hell did it feel like someone had cracked open my chest and carved out my heart?

CHAPTER EIGHTEEN

Soren

I was her dirty little secret.

I was the apartment she slipped into after dark.

The hands she sought when no one else could see.

The post-climax clarity that had her stiffening in my arms, then scrambling to dress and get out of my apartment before she could allow herself to see what was already so glaringly obvious to me.

That this wasn’t some random hookup, some casual affair.

There was something between us.

And it wasn’t just our similar traumas, our similarly shaped scars from being unloved, from being hurt and hungry, and desperate to prove ourselves.

There was just a sense of comfort around her that I’d never once felt before. It was almost the feeling ofhomethat I’d never known.

I comforted myself with her complete and utter lack of control.

The first time she’d stayed away a whole week.

The next time, just three days before she was bursting into my bathroom unannounced, eyes on me as she stripped out of her clothes, then climbed into the shower niche with me.

The time after that, it was only two nights.

And the next time?

She was home before I even got there myself. I’d walked in to find her draped over the couch with Chinese takeout spread over the coffee table, and her nose buried in a book.

“I was hungry,” she said, gesturing toward the food. “You weren’t here to cook,” she added, glancing over the book to narrow her eyes at me.

I slid onto the couch, pulling her legs over my lap, then reaching for the lo mein that still had her fork sticking out of it.

“Maybe I can make it up to you with breakfast instead.” I tried to keep my tone casual, even if there was a desperate ache in my chest for her to say yes, to be there in the morning when I woke.

“I can’t stay.”

“Why not?”

“I just can’t.”

“Not even if I make French toast with challah bread with a side of homemade hash browns and whatever eggs you like?”

Her gaze cut to mine, narrowed because we both knew I was playing dirty. Food was her Achilles’ heel.

“You get up before God does,” she said, flipping her page a little dramatically.

“I’ll sleep in.”

I’d stay in bed all day if she wanted.

“You have work.”

“I’m the boss.”

---