Page 81 of Mr. Scandalous

That set him free. Every tender emotion he’d ever suppressed bubbled up inside him. He wanted her as his wife. He wanted her as the mother of his children. He wanted to grow old with her. He wanted to spend the rest of his days trying to please her as much as she pleased him.

He had to go to her.Now.Alec turned and headed for the door.

“Hey,” Randy said. “Where you going?”

“To see Eden.”

“I thought you two broke up,” Randy said.

“We did, but I aim to fix that.”

Jill raised a hand. “Alec, she’s not in Manhattan.”

“What?”

“We stopped by her shop when we got into the city. Her assistant Ashley told us she’s gone on a spiritual retreat to get her head together. Apparently you did quite a number on her.”

Stunned, Alec stared at Jill, the pain in his chest so unbearable he wanted to jump out of an airplane, but then he reminded himself that was no way to deal with his feelings. He had to ride this out.

“Ashley said Eden is convinced you dumped her because of her burn scars.”

“What? But that’s ridiculous. Eden is the one who dumped me...I...” Alec stopped and closed his eyes.

He remembered how he’d acted the morning after their last night together, how he’d been so panicked over the intimate feelings she’d stirred in him that he’d raced back to the city and left her standing outside Wickedly Wonderful all alone.

God, he was an ass, a jerk, and an idiot to boot. He had to get her back, beg her forgiveness and swear to her that if she would give him a second chance he would spend the rest of his days proving exactly how much he loved and adored her.

“Where is she? How can I find her?”

Jill shook her head. “Ashley wouldn’t tell us. She said Eden doesn’t want to be disturbed.”

“I have to see her.”

“It will take a lot to convince her that you’ve changed,” Jill said.

Randy nodded. “It’s going to take a grand gesture, for sure man. Something irreversible, so she knows you mean business.”

Alec clenched his jaw, the mental cogs in his brain whirling. Only one thing would truly convince her. He knew what he had to do.

ChapterTwenty

Eden blasted,Gloria Gaynor’s “I Will Survive” anthem through her earbuds as she shopped in the rustic convenience store outside Sedona, Arizona.

She walked down the narrow aisles, bopping her head in time to the music and filling the blue shopping basket slung over her arm with goodies not allowed at the Sacred Health Tranquility Spa.

A raging urge for chocolate had forced her to defy her New Age spiritual guide Arnold Red Bear to skip a communal breakfast of kale pancakes and faux bacon to sneak down the mountain for her fix. She tossed a box of chocolate-chip cookies into the basket along with a six-pack of cola, two fudge-nut brownies and three devil dogs.

She’d spent the past week finding her center and cleansing her aura and while she’d learned more than she’d ever cared to know about crystals and chakras and color therapy she wasn’t any closer to serenity than the day she’d fled Manhattan, simply because she couldn’t stop thinking about Alec.

In a last-ditch effort to banish him from her mind, she decided to give in to her hurt feelings and anger by listening to Gloria and overdosing on chocolate.

Defiance.

It might not be as pretty as serenity, but she felt better than she had felt since arriving in Arizona.

She hummed along with the tune between bites of a Snickers bar, while waiting in line behind a group of Japanese tourists at the checkout counter.

Okay, so she’d taken a risk and it hadn’t worked out. She gotten battered and bruised, but, by gosh, shewouldsurvive. Not to mention, she’d had some pretty great sex with Alec and that was nothing to sneeze at. So what if he hadn’t fallen in love with her the way she’d fallen in love with him? She wouldn’t be the first woman in history to go gaga over a Peter Pan man and live to regret it.

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