Marriage With Benefits(65)

It might not have changed the outcome. But it might have.

Love. That was the reason he couldn’t move on this time. He’d been too afraid of it, too much a coward to examine what he was feeling, and it would serve him right to have lost Cia forever. But he wasn’t going down without a fight.

He hurried to his office to start on the Lucas Wheeler Philosophy of Cia Wheeler. He had to get it right this time.



Something was wrong with Fergie. Cia had tried everything, but the bird wouldn’t eat. The blob of gray feathers sat in the bottom of the cage and refused to acknowledge the presence of her owner. It had been like this since the day she’d moved back into her condo.

Every morning, she rushed to Fergie’s cage, convinced she’d find the bird claws up and stiff with rigor mortis, which would be about right for a companion she’d anticipated having for fifty years.

One more thing ripped from her fingers.

“You have to eat sometime,” she told Fergie. Not that she blamed her. Cia had no appetite, either, and after cooking in Amber’s gourmet kitchen, the one in her condo, which she’d been using for years, wasn’t the same. “We’ll try again tomorrow.”

At quarter till nine, she went to bed, where she would likely not sleep because she refused to turn on the TV and refused to acknowledge she’d grown used to it.

She didn’t need the TV, and she didn’t need Lucas Wheeler. For anything, least of all to “help” her find another shelter site. She had an internet connection and lots of patience. Okay, maybe not so much patience. Tomorrow she’d investigate using another real estate professional. A female.

Cia stared at the dark ceiling and shifted for the hundredth time into yet another uncomfortable spot on the hard mattress. It was just so quiet without the TV. Without the rustle of sheets and the deep breathing of a warm, male body scant inches away.

Not a night went by without a stern internal reminder of how much better it was to be alone, instead of constantly looking over her shoulder for the guillotine that would sever her happiness.

A knock at the front door interrupted her misery. Grumbling, she threw on a robe and flipped on a light as she crossed the small condo. A peek through the peephole shot her pulse into the stratosphere.

Lucas.

With a sheaf of papers in his hand. The divorce papers. He was dropping them off—personally—this late?

Hands shaking, she unlatched the door and swung it open. “What are you doing here?”

“Hello to you, too.” He captured her gaze, flooding her with a blue tidal wave of things unsaid. Unresolved.

The porch light shone down, highlighting his casual dress. Cargoes and a T-shirt, which meant he hadn’t come straight from work. Was he not working all hours of the night anymore? Dark splotches under his eyes and lines of fatigue in his forehead told a different tale.

She set her back teeth together. She had to get out of the habit of caring.

“Come in, before I let in all the mosquitoes in Uptown.” She stepped back and allowed him to brush past her, to prove his raw Lucas-ness didn’t have any power here. His heat warmed her suddenly chilled skin, and the quick tug in her abdomen made a liar out of her.

A squawk stopped his progress midstride. Fergie flapped her wings and ran back and forth along one of the wooden dowels anchored across the top of her cage. “Lucas, Lucas, Lucas,” she singsonged.

Cia glared at her miraculously revived bird. “I didn’t know she could say that.”

“Took her long enough.” He grinned, and his eyes lit up. All the butterflies in her stomach took flight. “We’ve been working on it.”

So. Fergie and Lucas had been buddy-buddy behind her back. She sighed. Maybe Fergie would eat, now that her precious Lucas was here. Traitor.

She waved at the couch. “Sit down.”

He sank into the giant white sectional, and it shrank as his frame dominated the space. Then he spilled his masculinity into the rest of the room, overwhelming her.

Why had he come here, invading her refuge?

Luckily, he’d had the wisdom to move them into Matthew’s house—his house now—instead of moving in here for the duration. The separation would have been a hundred times more difficult if she’d had to wash his presence from the condo. No way she could have. She would’ve had to move.

Might still have to, just from this visit.

“Will you sit with me?” He nodded to the couch.

“I prefer to stand, thanks. Besides, you’re not staying long. Are you dropping off the papers?”

“In a way,” he said. “But first, I’d like to tell you something. You know my great-great-grandfather founded Wheeler Family Partners back in the eighteen hundreds, right?”