3

That indescribable moment Lexi was in his arms and everything was as it should be. When she buried her head against his chest with perfect trust and he could pretend he was the man she thought he was. Better yet, just for that moment, he could pretend that she was his.

Tyler took a breath and stepped back, because he had to let go first. That was part of the bargain he’d made with himself a long time ago to control his little addiction to this woman.

“You didn’t answer my question.” He grinned down at her in the morning light. “What are you doing here?”

“I don’t know,” Lexi said, and laughed.

That same laugh had done his head in—ruined him, if he was honest— the first week of his first year at the University. He could remember it so vividly. He’d come out of his room, overwhelmed that he’d made it out of his shit neighborhood and to this storied place, and there she was. She’d been talking to someone else whose face he never recalled. He’d only seen Lexi.

That laugh had gotten inside him then, and there was no getting it out. “Better come in then,” he told her.

He took her bag from her and indulged himself when she moved ahead of him, allowing his fingers to graze the small of her back. Tyler loved sex. His appetite was intense, and his preferences more so. He loved women. He loved the journey of it, the breathless distance between a flirtatious look and shaking, screaming woman clamped down hard on his cock while she came for the third time.

He loved every step along the way, from a naughty striptease to a sudden shock of intimacy that could change a bit of fun into a real moment in an instant—then change back. But nothing got to him as much as Lexi Graham, and in case he kidded himself into imagining that might change, there were moments like this. Where the brush of his fingertips against the back of her jacket wiped out all memory of the night he just spent making another woman come and cry all over him, again and again and again.

Tyler came from a long line of addicts, and all things considered, he preferred Lexi to heroine. A junkie is a junkie, he told himself sharply. Not that it helped.

He took her inside, leading her up the stairs to the main part of his house.

It was all arranged to take in the sweeping views of the coast, so he sat her down on his deck, wrapped her in a blanket to keep off the winter chill and then sorted out cups of tea. Then he dropped down in the chair opposite and let himself look at her.

Lexi. In his house. At last.

She smiled at him for a moment, then lifted her mug of tea, and that ring she wore caught the light. That fucking ring.

“You must think I’m mad,” she said after she took a slug of her tea.

She kept the mug in her hands, her legs curled up beneath her in the chair, and it turned out the Olkfield sun loved her as much as the Nemford rain always had. It brought out the hints of gold in her hair, the prettiest brown he’d ever seen. It was longer now, and she’d piled it up on top of her head in a manner he knew most women spent hours to achieve. But not Lexi. Everything about her was elegant and effortless, from that delicate collarbone he could see beneath the collar of her shirt, to those cheekbones that seemed to make her dark eyes brighter. And that mouth that had made him hungry as long as he’d known her.

“I do think you’re mad,” he agreed, lazily. “But then, I always have. So you turning up at my door on a random Saturday doesn’t change a thing.” She was flushed, he noticed, and it almost seemed as if she was having trouble meeting his eyes. “Are you embarrassed about something?”

“It’s a bit cold, don’t you think?” she asked, after a moment. And then, to his astonishment, fluttered her hand in his direction, as if to encompass his whole body. “Shouldn’t you…put that away?”

If it was any other woman, he would have taken great pleasure in the notion that his nakedness made her…flutter. But Tyler had the distinction of being Lexi's friend. Her best friend, she often said, an honor he shared with only one other person on this earth.

And he’d always liked crazy, reckless Lily Mckay well enough, but he knew full well there was no possible way she loved Lexi as much as he did. Because nobody could. And the consistent theme in their friendship was that Lexi resolutely refused to see him as a man. He was going to remember the fluttering. And that flush.

“I’m not cold,” he told her.

Which was true enough. The slap of the breeze was a good thing. It helped remind him that this wasn’t one of those fantasies he’d had so many times. That whatever reason Lexi had for being here, it was not to fling off her clothes and climb on top of him at last. His body needed to calm the fuck down.

“This really is a lovely house,” she was saying, like she was at a tea party. “The pictures you sent years back really didn’t do it justice. I love how it sort of flows, doesn’t it, from room to room, and then of course the view must really—”

“Fucking hell, Lexi.”

She blew out a breath. “I needed to get away. I need to…think about some things.”

He nodded toward the gigantic rock weighing down her left hand. The symbol of what he’d known would come, sooner or later. Lexi was always going to get married, and he’d accepted that, too, hadn’t he? He’d always been a realist. But accepting it in the abstract was a lot easier than the ring in his face. And her here.

“Marriage is a big step,” was all he said.

“Yes,” she agreed, too quickly. “But Victor is a good choice. Really. Some of the men my father sent me out on dates with were awful.”

“Do you love him?”

He shouldn’t have asked that. Because he really didn’t want to know the answer.

And he didn’t need to see her look of astonishment.

“Love him? Oh, no.” She shook her head. “Certainly not.” She considered her tea for a moment, then brightened. “But maybe someday I will. They say that arranged marriages—”