Instead of laughing, as he’d expected, she frowned, way too somber for his own liking. She watched him as if she knew all his deepest, darkest secrets…and didn’t judge him one little bit. But she didn’t. Couldn’t. He went to great lengths to hide how messed up he was from everyone.
Especially her.
She turned away and lifted the lid off the glass container in her kitchen, and he let out a sigh of relief. It had cupcakes in it. It always did. As if owning a bakery wasn’t enough for her, she also felt the need to bake at home. It was her way of self-soothing.
He drank and fucked. She baked things.
Not all that different, really.
“Do you ever worry you don’t have your life as together as you might hope?” she asked, her voice distracted and shaky. “That every choice you make is only messing it up even more, until it’s a tangled mess you’ll never recognize?”
“Every damn day,” he admitted, even though he didn’t want to. But he refused to lie to her, even if he couldn’t stand the idea of her discovering he wasn’t the strong, resilient man she thought he was. The type of guy she could call on nights like these.
Even if he could never call her his.
Chapter Four
When someone broke into her house while she was naked in the shower, and scared half a year off of her life, obviously the first person Lauren called had been Steven. And when the door shut behind her intruder, and she poked her head out, and the only stuff missing had been the stuff she laid out for Brian…
Yeah, she’d put two and two together pretty quickly.
But by then Steven was at her door, and about to come in, and she’d had little to no time to recover from the scare. And when he’d hugged her tight, concern etched all across his handsome face…an idea had come to her.
One that, once planted, had been impossible to ignore.
Earlier, she wished there was a way to make sure he was okay. To make him remember the good things in his life. This was the opportune chance to do that, up close and personal. If he thought she was still scared, or was shaken up, he would never leave her side. It would give her the opportunity to remind him how fun life could be…
If you were with the right person.
So she rolled with it. Maybe she over-acted on some points, but it had worked. He was here, and she was here, and now all she needed was a game plan of fun.
But despite her excitement at this opportunity, she couldn’t ignore one cold, hard fact: for the first time in their relationship, she lied to him. And if he found out…
God, he could never find out.
She, more so than anyone, understood his hatred of liars. It stemmed from childhood, when his parents had lied about being happy but had been sleeping with other people behind each other’s backs, and continued throughout his adult years. It continued when his one and only girlfriend as an adult had done the same thing to him.
He couldn’t abide lies of any kind.
She’d seen him walk away from friendships over them.
Up until a few moments ago, Lauren hadn’t had a reason to worry. Now, she did. It was a small lie. More a lie by omission than anything else. Brian had come in, and she had been scared…for a second or two. She took a deep breath, staring down at the red velvet cupcakes with cream cheese frosting and red sprinkles as if they held the secrets of the world. They didn’t. She’d know, since she’d made them. They were just cupcakes, and she was just her, and Steven was just…
Steven was just Steven.
Her best friend.
Glancing at him over her shoulder, she took a deep breath. His reddish blond hair—he’d lecture her for calling it that, because it was too feminine, and according to him it was just red—and hazel eyes were topped off by loyalty, dedication, selflessness, strength, and a hell of a six-pack. The rest of his muscles matched that toned abdomen of his, all the way down to his huge…
Well, really, tight boxers only hid so much.
Especially on a guy as big as Steven.
She’d never been as fond of underwear as she had been the first day he came out of her bathroom, wearing nothing but a whole lot of damp skin and form-fitting black boxers. It had been a sight pretty enough to wake the dead. Maybe that was how the zombie apocalypse would come. Steven in a pair of boxers…walking through a cemetery.
That was part of being friend-zoned—he stripped down to his boxers in front of her as if she didn’t count as a woman at all. Sometimes, she thought he forgot she was one. He certainly didn’t treat her like one.
Not that she wanted him to, of course.
She was all too aware that he went through women faster than she went through sugar, and she didn’t exactly have the best track record either. Take her habit of falling too fast and too hard, add a pinch of his promiscuity and inability to commit, and they’d be an undeniable recipe for disaster and heartbreak.