Page 30 of I Almost Do

I need her.

And as soon as I think those words, I hear my father’s voice screaming at my mother. “You don’t get to leave me. I need you. I love you.”

He’s in prison now. He’ll die there.

And I cannot be that man.

I have to stay the hell away from her. Just until I get these feelings under control. Until I can stop thinking about her and wanting her every damn minute of every damn day.

We still swim every morning. And we have dinner together most evenings unless I have something I have to do for work. But I keep my time with her to a strict schedule, and I’ve attempted to interject a level of formality back into our interactions.

Clarissa’s not having it. She simply refuses to be cowed by my reserve. It’s as though she sees me, acting stiff and polite, and is determined to be more affectionate. She just calls me her grump and says she’ll be my sunshine—whatever the hell that means.

She trusts me, when what she needs is to be on her guard with me.

She thinks the way I goaded her into telling me to fuck off was some kind of game. It wasn’t. She has no boundaries with me. It’s not just that I want to own her—it’s that I could, and she wouldn’t even put up a token resistance.

She has a customized spendthrift trust fund that I control until she’s twenty-one. At that point, certain parts of her trust fund will become available in increments until she’s twenty-five. I’m not miserly about her money. Marcus’s goal wasn’t to keep her on some kind of budget. It was to protect her from con artists.

But it’s a disgusting level of power over her. One no spouse should have over another. If I refused to allow her to leave me, she would be trapped.

Which is why I started funneling money every week into a “spending account” that’s only in her name, plus a savings account for the same purpose. If she ever needs to run from me, I don’t want her to be stuck with no way out.

So I keep my distance from her for now. After dinner with Clarissa most nights, I work alone in the downstairs den I’ve taken over as a home office. I could easily use Marcus’s study, but his death is too fresh. Someday I’ll sit at that desk and think of him with nostalgia. For now, it simply picks at the scab of my grief.

And every night, when I’ve finally worked myself to the point of exhaustion, I sneak up to the third floor like some kind of stalker. I can’t sleep until I’ve done it.

The first time I eased open her bedroom door without knocking, I caught her reading her Kindle in bed. She should have told me to get lost and reminded me to knock next time. She should have started locking her door.

She didn’t. She patted the bed beside her, smiled, and invited me in.

I didn’t go in, of course. I told her I was stopping by to tell her good night and remind her I wouldn’t be home for dinner the next night.

But when she’s asleep? I’m an absolute weird-ass creep. I don’t stand in the doorway. Instead, I sit down beside her on the bed and just let the sight of her bring me peace.

I imagine a future where she’s sleeping inourbed, and I can climb in beside her and pull her into my arms.

Sometimes I even kick off my shoes and lie beside her, fully dressed on top of the blankets. Never close enough to touch. Sometimes I’ll even drift off that way. And when I wake, I find she’s rolled toward me in her sleep and put her head on my shoulder and her hand on my chest, right over my beating heart.

She’s asleep tonight. I guess she’s overheated, because she’s pushed her new sage-green comforter off her body. And instead of her usual fuzzy pajama bottoms and T-shirt, she’s in a silky black thong and the undershirt I gave her on our wedding night. She’s asleep on her stomach, one leg bent up in a way that means I could pull that strip of fabric aside and slide right inside her.

She’s left her bathroom door partially open with the light on, so I can see everything. And a good man would turn the hell around and leave.

Instead, I ease her bedroom door shut behind me and move closer. I won’t touch. I never, ever touch her. But when I sit beside her on the bed, she shivers, and goose bumps pop up all over her.

Damn it.

“Clarissa,” I murmur.

She doesn’t move or make a sound, so I reach across and drag the comforter over her. “I know you’re awake.”

She rolls over and lifts her sooty lashes to peer up at me from her pillow. “How’d you know?”

I lift an eyebrow. “For one, I heard you tell one of your friends that you hate thongs. You call them ‘butt floss.’ I’m finding it hard to imagine you’d enjoy sleeping in one. How long have you known?”

“That you’ve been coming in here to check on me?”

That’s a very gracious way to put it, but we’ll go with that. “Yes.”

---