Page 85 of Wait for Him

“I've always loved you, Rosalie. You'll never be alone. Not while I've got breath in me."

Her face crumples.

I cup her jaw and make her look at me. “Do you hear me?”

She nods.

“Use your words, baby.”

Her eyes finally focus on mine. Really focus.

“I hear you, Jackson.”

There she is.

Relief hits me so hard my knees almost fucking give out.

“There you are,” I whisper. I press my mouth to her forehead and hold it there for a second before kissing her temple, her cheek, anything that lets me touch her without asking her for one goddamn thing in return. “There you are.” I kiss her lips softly. Her top lip, then her bottom. “Don’t leave. Stay with me, Rose.”

Rose

I wake up in Jackson's arms.

It takes me a few seconds to understand what I'm feeling. His chest is pressed along my back, one heavy arm draped around my waist with his hand resting low on my stomach, and his face is buried somewhere in my hair. He's warm. So fucking warm. Every slow breath he takes brushes against the back of my neck, and that's all my body needs to start its engines.

A low warmth unfurls in my stomach before I'm even fully awake, spreading lower as I become increasingly aware of just how much of him is pressed against how much of me. I shift slightly, trying to discreetly move my ass away from the very hard and oh-so-fucking-thick situation happening behind me, and immediately regret the decision when his arm tightens in his sleep and pulls me closer with an unconscious slide of his hips into mine.

Well.

Good fucking morning to me.

I go perfectly still.

This is fine. Completely normal friend behavior. Plenty of married men spend the night mostly naked in bed wrapped around their female best friends like human weighted blankets. I'm sure there's data.

I very carefully lift the covers just enough to conduct an inventory. Jackson is wearing boxers. I am wearing pajamas I have absolutely no memory of putting on, which means he handled that too.

My eyes close again for half a second as another warm breath moves over my neck and his hand shifts against my stomach.

Nope.

We are not doing this.

I set to work forcing last night and the current unauthorized activity happening below my waist into the never happened box.

Truth be told, I'm embarrassed.

I pride myself on holding it together. At this point, it's practically the whole of my personality. I am the woman people call when things go wrong, not the woman sobbing so hard in someone's office that she has to be carried home. Even if I grant myself a little leeway where Jackson is concerned, even if he's the one person alive I've ever consistently allowed past that particular gate, I have never once let him see me like that.

Whatever that was.

I don't have a tidy word for it, and I'm a lawyer. I've got words for everything.

Seeing James up close hit me so fucking hard. I have no right to expect anything from him, and I don't. It was just something about him standing there, talking to me like I was any other person in that restaurant. I think some stupid part of me expected some cosmic-level recognition or something. A pause. A feeling. Some biological little hey, I know you that makes absolutely no sense outside of movies and books written specifically to make women cry.

But I'm a stranger to him.

I chose that.