Page 3 of Forced Proximity
From a young age, Daniella had always had trouble being in public places, especially if those public places were with people that she didn’t know.
As time went on, that anxiety grew and she’d allowed it to start controlling her life.
She found solace in finding men that would take care of her and give her whatever she wanted.
Honestly, wanting a man to take care of you wasn’t necessarily a bad thing. However, when you did it in such a co-dependent way, tailoring your life around a man that would one day leave because you asked him where he was ninety-two times in seventeen minutes, it wasn’t a good thing.
And for Daniella, I could literally see the erratic behavior building, and I knew this time, it wouldn’t end with them breaking up.
It would end with a restraining order, which Daniella would certainly break, because Eugene was a powerful man. And though he liked my sister’s utter devotion, one day he would realize that she was just too much.
I couldn’t take it anymore.
It was literally making me sick knowing what was coming.
She’d already quit her job at the apartments where she and I had once lived. Daniella had been the manager there and I lived there at a reduced rate.
And since she’d done it on such bad terms, the owners had decided that they didn’t want anyone with the last name Rossi at their properties, forcing Daniella and me to get out.
For Daniella, it hadn’t necessarily been a super bad thing.
She’d just moved in with Eugene—God help her.
However, for me, I’d had to move into a shitty apartment in the downtown area.
I literally had all of my valuables locked up tight in a storage facility in Plano while the stuff that I didn’t care about was at my apartment.
I wasn’t one hundred percent sure it’d even be there when I got home.
I quickly shifted my hair to cover the tattoo on the back of my neck, allowing my long ponytail to hang straight down the length of my spine.
I wasn’t tall. Wasn’t super in shape. Wasn’t overly attractive.
However, I did have great hair.
It was long and auburn, shone like whiskey fire in the sun, and I never had a bad hair day.
It looked great in a ponytail. Great down. Great in an updo.
“…are you looking at?”
I tensed.
I immediately cursed my stupidity for wearing something that showed off the windchimes on the back of my neck, inked in black and gray.
Normally I tried to keep it covered because those windchimes held a special meaning, and I hated when people asked about them because I then had to lie.
Eugene was one of the men that I lied to, but he’d studied them extensively when he’d walked in on me changing one day and hadn’t told me until I was half naked with him behind me.
At least the rest of what I was wearing wasn’t my normal garb.
I was in all black today, covered from head to toe in long sleeves, long black jeans, and ankle boots that covered the rest of me.
The only thing that was showing was my neck with the scoop-necked top and my hands.
I’d dressed as circumspectly as I could and hadn’t much thought about my neck until just now.
“Nothing,” the deep timbre of the man behind me drawled. “Thought I saw someone I knew.”
