Page 114 of Not That Complicated

“Besides, it’s not just his face and his body, although I could look at him all day long. Aaall day long. He’s so kind. Except when he’s being a bitch. But I like that part of him anyway.”

“But you were happy to use him.”

“What? No!”

“Then you do love him?”

“Of course I do!” I shouted. The glasses in the cupboard behind me rattled. “Yes! I love him. I love him a lot. I’ve never loved anyone like it. Why are you torturing me like this? How dare you!”

Liam, the shit, was full-on laughing at my big, incoherent, romantic declaration.

I glared down my nose at him. “I feel sorry for all criminals who cross your path.”

He waited.

“I love Adam,” I said, and slumped. The energy drained out of me. I could almost hear the gurgle as it circled my metaphorical drain. “Fuck my life,” I said. “Seriously. Fuck it. Also, you.”

“No, thanks. Adam would kill me, my good friend Detective Sergeant Patel would arrest him, and it would all get very messy.”

“Why is he avoiding me, Liam?” I asked.

Liam gave me a sympathetic smile. “I don’t know. What was the last thing you said to him?”

“I told you, I asked him to move in with me.”

“Hard to see how he could take that wrong.” Liam mused.

“Oh dear.”

He quirked a brow.

“It wasn’t the most romantic of circumstances. When I asked him. It was kind of a knee-jerk reaction.”

Liam dismissed this. “We all say stupid stuff during sex.”

“It wasn’t during sex. It was, uh. When Fraser showed up.”

“Fraser, your ex? Fraser, the thirty-five-year-old guy who had sex with my twenty-two-year-old-cousin?”

“I’m thirty-three next month,” I said with some trepidation.

Liam said, “I know both of you. Trust me on this, Adam is not the immature one.”

I was going to argue, but I didn’t have a leg to stand on. “It probably wasn’t the right time to ask him to move in, was it?” I said, then carried on without waiting for an answer. “No, it wasn’t. I knew if the second I’d said it.”

“Yeah, I doubt it made him feel good. He’s a prideful man. And no one likes feeling like the prize in a pissing contest.”

“You’ve got that wrong,” I said, thinking of Adam mauling me up against the front door. “I was the prize.” I squinted when Liam gave me a disbelieving look. “Okay, I know how that sounds. I don’t mean it like everyone was fighting over me, but…” I trailed off.

Adamhadhad that unsettling hint of vulnerability about him again when he’d staked his claim, along with an almost frantic desperation.

I chewed this over while Liam eyed up the last donut and eventually caved.

I had been trapped between Fraser and Adam, in more ways than one. Me on my doorstep. Fraser, my past, in front of me in the drive. Adam, my future, behind me and still in the house.

I’d been flustered and angry with Fraser, and still vibrating from the night before with Adam. And then from Adam’s passionate claim.

It hadn’t crossed my mind that Fraser wasn’t just my past, he was Adam’s, too.

---