Project Runaway Bride(16)

“You’re not staying here, Reid.”

He didn’t respond, instead glancing up at the loft visible from the living area before trailing toward a hall off the kitchen that he suspected would lead to more bedrooms.

“I mean it,” Juliet continued, following behind with her arms tucked angrily across her chest.

He stuck his head into the doorway of a luxury bath—sunken tub, separate oversize shower stall, marble vanity surrounding two basins with polished brass fixtures.

“Why not? There’s plenty of space,” he told her without turning in her direction. She continued to follow.

“Because I don’t want you here,” she stressed.

After checking out another room—a nice master bedroom with attached bath, a few of Juliet’s things already spread on the dressers and near the bed—he faced her.

“We don’t always get what we want,” he said quietly.

He watched his meaning sink in and her features go taut. She took a step back until she was pressed against the hall wall. Fighting a smile, he brushed past, returning the way they’d come.

“Fine,” she called after him. “Then you stay, and I’ll go.”

He was in the kitchen again, her footsteps echoing as she moved toward him. He waited until she stopped before turning to meet her gaze. She looked nervous and uncertain, though she was obviously aiming for tough and unwavering.

Lowering his tone, he leaned in until he was sure she saw the gravity in his own eyes.

“Do, and I’ll follow you. Doesn’t matter where you go or how hard you try to get lost in the crowd, I will find you.”





Five



Juliet couldn’t decide whether she was more angry or frustrated. Annoyed or...oddly touched. Not only that her sisters had been worried enough about her to send Reid after her, but that she meant enough to Reid that he was refusing to leave her alone, even though he knew she was perfectly fine at her family’s lake house.

Oh, it was a completely heavy-handed move on his part, which was maddening. He knew that sticking around would drive her batty, and that was exactly why he was doing it.

But beneath that was a thread of honest concern and the need to be sure she was all right. She’d told him as much half a dozen times, but Reid wasn’t one to take anybody’s word over facts and his own observations.

If she’d been anyone else, he probably would have accepted her assertion. Once he’d seen that his quarry was alive and well, and he’d been assured of her safety and location, he most likely would have turned around and headed back to New York to inform his clients of his findings.

But she wasn’t anyone else. They had history together: a strange, complicated, wonderful yet awful history.

Her time with him had been some of the best of her life, but even as it had been happening, she’d known it was something that was burning too hot and fast to last.

Reid hadn’t been happy about that at all.

She’d warned him from the beginning that it was just a fling. It couldn’t get serious.

She’d been engaged to another man the first time she’d gotten swept up in passion and fallen into bed with him. And though she’d broken off the engagement immediately—so that she could continue to see Reid without being weighed down by suffocating guilt—she hadn’t wanted anyone to know about him.

Hadn’t wanted them to know she’d strayed from her fiancé. Hadn’t wanted them to know she was seeing one man when she should have been planning her wedding to another. Hadn’t wanted to see her parents’ disappointed faces or hear the lectures about how lucky she’d been to be engaged to Paul, who came from such an upstanding and influential family.

And even if she hadn’t wanted to keep her relationship with Reid a secret, he certainly wasn’t looking for anything permanent. Their affair had been wild and forbidden, and completely out of character for her.

Juliet suspected that was another reason he insisted on sticking to her like double-sided tape. Unfinished business, in his mind. Not to mention a badly bruised male ego.

Which wasn’t her fault. She’d been honest with him from the start. But apparently women weren’t the only ones capable of getting attached and letting their emotions overrule their common sense.

She gave a snort of derision, hunching her shoulders and doing her best to snuggle more deeply into her sweater because she refused to go back inside while Reid was using the kitchen as though he owned it.

He’d insisted on fixing dinner—he said to thank her for her hospitality. Sarcasm alert on that one. It had fairly dripped from his tongue and glittered off the pearly white teeth he flashed in a wolfish smile.