After Chase left, Annie finished the cleanup in the kitchen and locked up. With one last check around the downstairs, she headed up to the loft bedroom. As she performed her nightly bedtime ritual, she couldn’t stop her mind from going back to the letter and the righteous anger it had brought out in Chase.
Too, the bitterness and self-loathing she’d seen on his face as he recounted the details surrounding Kiely’s disappearance kept flashing in front of her. Her heart ached for him. She wanted to cry as she realized how deeply a man like him would have been affected by Kiely’s actions.
Chase was something of a dark horse in the Hudson family. Jason and Beth and even Joely, they were outgoing. They had sparkling personalities, for lack of a better description. But Chase was different. Quiet and intense, he had a brooding sensitivity that put her in mind of historical romantic heroes, only without the troubled mind so many of those heroes seemed to have. Coupled with his looks and the raw, sensual way he moved, it was no surprise he was one of Leroy’s most coveted bachelors.
As she reflected on what he had said earlier, his comments about Kiely’s motivations, Annie wondered whether he realized how appealing he was or whether he was completely oblivious. “Somehow, I think it’s the latter. I never would have guessed that.”
In all the months they’d been spending time together, she’d been careful to hide how strong her attraction to him was becoming. She was afraid to damage their friendship by letting her feelings show. Now that she knew he was attracted to her, she wondered how her attitude had come across to him, especially in light of his revelations about Kiely.
“You don’t have anything to offer him other than friendship,” she told her reflection. “You know that.”
The mirror over the bathroom sink didn’t respond, not that she had expected it to. She stepped back from the counter and, turning this way and that, examined her body. The panties and bra she wore were serviceable, no frills, more for comfort and support than appearance. She’d not had time to replace her nice things yet, but she planned to soon. The body underneath was curvy, and she knew she appealed to men—she’d learned that when she’d developed breasts in the seventh grade.
Annie wasn’t a nun, but she was selective about who she let into her bed. She didn’t have a problem with sex if she was in a deep relationship with someone or if she shared mutual attraction and respect with a man who was just a friend. There’d been a handful of times when she’d thought she might be in love and once when she’d known she was. That man, Rafe Lewis, had left her with the deepest scars, both physically and emotionally.
She had met Rafe when she was nineteen, and soon after, everything changed. The other men… well, she had felt affection for them, but those relationships had been more about loneliness than any lasting togetherness.
Chase stood out. Even though she told herself she didn’t need to keep falling deeper into a relationship with him, she couldn’t resist spending time with him every chance she got. It was an exquisite kind of torture, being near him and knowing it would never go anywhere.
As she touched the faded scars on her pelvis, she worried that if she ever let their friendship turn into something else, it would destroy her. She’d rather be friends with him forever than risk losing him.
“That isn’t exactly true, now is it? You’d give your eye teeth to be with him. That’s what scares you so much—that he’s the one for you but doesn’t feel the same way. That, and when he finds out the truth, he’ll reject you completely.”
With her somewhat colorful past, some of which Chase knew—like her true parentage—and some of which he didn’t, she had to consider that she probably wasn’t the greatest match for him. It wasn’t that she thought she was beneath him, but she had a bit too much common sense to think their different upbringings wouldn’t pose a problem at some point. That wasn’t even taking into account her deepest secret, something not even Beth and Lauren knew.
“You’re being ridiculous, Annie Tucker, and you know it.”
After one last look in the mirror, she stripped down and turned on the shower. Not waiting for the water to get hot, she ducked under the spray and let her tears fall. There was so much sadness inside her tonight she couldn’t decide what hurt the most. The shop she’d worked so hard to build was gone. The man she cared for deeply was being hurt by ghosts from his past, enduring his own personal hell. And somewhere out there in the darkness, a monster lurked, waiting to pounce.
On top of that, she longed for something she had no right to want. Her hunger to approach Chase and become more than friends alarmed her, and she didn’t know if she was strong enough to resist its pull. As she turned off the water and reached for a towel, she wondered, not for the first time, if she should even try resisting any longer.
“Let the chips fall where they may and get it over with. So what if you lose everything? At least you’ll know and this damnable dithering will be over.” The problem was she didn’t know whether or not she was strong enough to take that chance.