“Fifteen.”
“Really, I appreciate it.”
“Ten.”
“So do you think Jeanine will make us do a column on that newjazzercising techni—”
“Lux Kincaid!Do not make me drag you into the bathroom by your hair and torture you for information,” Fae whisper-yelled at me, her eyes glaring daggers. “You know I’ll do it.” She crossed her arms in front of her chest menacingly.
“Oh, relax.” I grinned down at her, leaninga hip against the cubicle partition.
She arched one eyebrow and cast an impatient look at her watch. I held my hands up in a gesture of surrender.
“Fine, fine. It’s just…” I took a steadying breath. “This thing with Sebastian… It’s complicated.”
“Soun-complicate it.”
“Sebastian is—” My words cut off abruptly, drying up in my throat as I caught sight of the man stepping out of elevator banks. The tempo of my heartbeat stuttered erratically, before thundering to twice its normal rate.
“Sebastian iswhat?” Fae snapped impatiently.
“Here,” I whispered, feeling the blood drain from my face. “Sebastian is here.”
***
In my peripheral, I saw Fae’s head spin around so fast she’d probably have whiplash for a week. My eyes, however, were locked on the shiny gold elevator doors that were sliding shut, and the man now standing in front of them. His eyes swept the space, taking in the office layout with a shrewd composure born from his years as a politician’s son. When they skimmed over me, halting for only the briefest of moments, I thought they may have narrowed in disgust or suspicion, but they moved away too quickly for me to be sure.
He was a fortress. A stony castle with walls so high no army could breach them, let alone one solitary woman. I couldn’t read him at all. Yet my own expression, I feared, was unguarded; cheeks flushed, lips parted, eyes wide with surprise and maybe, if you looked a little closer, the faintest remnant of longing. I’d been caught unawares by his abrupt entrance and hadn’t the time to gain composure or don any number of the schooled expressions that would be considered appropriate when one saw a distant acquaintance or a stranger. If he looked now, he’d see it shining from my eyes, radiating from my pores, and saturating the room — a yearning, a need that hadn’t been filled in all our time apart.
I needn’t have worried.
His eyes swept over me, through me, as though I were just another piece of the colorless office furniture littering the room. Either he was the best actor I’d ever come across, or he was sincerely unaffected by my existence. There was no emotion in his eyes, save the cool disinterest of a stranger taking in his surroundings for the first time. He looked like his mother, I realized, both startled and saddened by the thought. There was a tightness around his mouth that hadn’t been there in the years of our youth — lines weathered not by laughter but something far more trying.
One look at him, and I’d known that the boy I’d loved — the one whose very essence seemed a product of light and laughter, who’d grinned freely and joked as easily as he breathed — was gone. The man before me was a hollowed out husk, his carefree soul scrubbed clean from his perfect frame, leaving a heartbreakingly foreign doppelgänger behind.
Physically he was nearly the same. His muscular frame may’ve filled out considerably, but those clear hazel eyes and that mop of burnished gold hair remained achingly familiar to me even after all these years of distance. And yet, at the same time, he was now a stranger.
My throat worked against the lump that had lodged itself painfully in my airway and I studiously ignored the lance of pain that shotinto my heart as thoughts tumbled through my mind unchecked. I wanted to tear my eyes from him yet, being an eternal glutton for punishment, I couldn’t look away as he made his way toward Jeanine’s office without a backward glance at me.
“So that’s him, huh?” Fae’s voice snapped me out of my trance, and when I turned my eyes to face her she was looking at me with more than a little concern. “He’d be sexy if he weren’t so serious.”
I nodded slowly, my mind reeling with thoughts.
Why was he here?
Did Cara send him?
Was he going to report me to Jeanine?
Was I about to lose my job?
“I take it the break up didn’t go well?” Fae asked.
I nodded again.
“I have a feeling this particular Fae Friday is going to call for extra tequila.”
“You can say that again,” I agreed, collapsing into my desk chair with a deep sigh.