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SERIOUSLY, WHERE HAD she been all my life?
She had the same taste in music. The odd love for musicals no one I’d ever known shared with me. It was like I was peeking into some weird, alternate dimension, meeting the female version of myself for the first time. There was far more to Charlyse than her stunning beauty suggested. She had depth, intelligence, and God, was she ever fun. To be honest, it scared me a little.
The way I was feeling in that moment as the stars came out, a full moon illuminating my drive, made me think I might be falling for her in a way that surpassed lust and admiration. I could already feel myself fighting against it. It wasn’t my thing, getting too close to people. Hell, I hadn’t allowed myself to fully think bringing her along on the trip all the way through. That was a thing of mine, too; racing headlong toward something I wanted without weighing the potential consequences.
Except in business. In business, strategy was a given, and you’d better be good at it if you intended to get anywhere. In relationships, I didn’t have a true strategy because I never opened myself up to the possibility of a connection truly going anywhere. Most of my dalliances were just that, flings.
You couldn’t have a fling with a woman like Charlyse. One look into those eyes, and objectifying her as something other than a vibrant, sexy, firecracker of a woman, who also happened to be a hell of smart cookie, was impossible. She didn’t seem like the type of woman who would tolerate being put on a shelf to play with later, or not being called back after playtime was over.
Of course, this only deepened my fast-growing affection for her.
Tightening my grip on the wheel, I trained my focus ahead of me, fighting the exhaustion beginning to creep up at the edges of my consciousness. Another forty minutes and we’d be in a tiny, tourist town sure to have a bed and breakfast we could stop to shower in. I stole a glance at the dash’s clock: 5:20 p.m. We were actually making good time. Good enough to allow a short detour for a meal before we hopped back on the highway.
The deepening sounds of Charlyse’s breathing drew my attention, and a grin found my lips as I saw her finally succumbing to slumber. I’d let her sleep. She deserved it. Not many girls would have stayed up to help me stay awake for a long-ass drive through deep country.
But Charlyse wasn’t just any girl. There was so much about her that set her apart from the women I’d known before her.
After lowering the volume on the radio, I lifted the last of my coffee, chugging down the cold remnants and setting it back in the cup holder. Yeah, I was falling into something. Something way bigger than me, and I was more than a little scared I might fuck it up. I was good at fucking things up. I had little to no experience in the realm of personal relationships of the romantic variation that lasted any longer than three weeks, at best.
But there wasn’t much point in thinking about that now.
This trip was meant to be a fun one, and I refused to interrupt a blessing by focusing on all the ways something could go wrong with the first good thing I’d been able to enjoy in a long, long time.