Page 7 of Bad At Love

Finding Chaaru half-naked and waiting for him. Stripping in front of her while she ate him up with those bold bedroom eyes. And then crawling into bed to show her she had everything she needed in him. Hadn’t he dreamed of this exact scenario?

“Ha ha,” he said, pulling his sweater over his head. Shifting to the side, he pulled the ends of his shirt from his trousers, hoping she didn’t spot the action happening downtown.

“The jerk turned on the AC, just to torment me.” She covered her breasts with her palms and shivered. “My nipples are turning into ice crystals.”

DP barely suppressed a groan. He had to rifle through a couple of drawers before he found the key to the cuffs. The keychain was a black frilly thing he wanted to crush in his palm, like an angsty teenager who’d discovered the girl he had a crush on was seeing someone else.

Walking across the room to her, he wondered if this was how the rest of his life would play out—daydreaming about Chaaru while she ‘dated’ other men.

This close, she looked even more gorgeous. Real in a way he could never put into words.

Wide brown eyes, a round-tipped long nose and a thick-lipped mouth that he could write poems to, and he didn’t have an artistic bone in his body. Thick curves he wanted to kiss and touch and worship…she was all of his fantasies spun into reality.

Or was it that his fantasies had simply taken her form over the years?

Even twenty years ago, when he’d first met her, she had possessed that brazen, in-your-face kind of sexuality that turned men’s’ heads. Layer her sunny temperament and naturally exuberant nature on top, she attracted people like bees to honey.

It was the very quality that had made her ex-husband obsessively suspicious of every man who looked in her direction, and of her.

Now, her beauty was more than skin-deep. No inward bowing of her shoulders because she’d been called big-boned. No minimizing her statuesque build, her megawatt smile, her innate sexuality, or her intelligent, thought-out opinions.

She put it all out there as if daring the world to tell her to make herself small. He’d seen her go from scared and shrunken to beaten down by divorce and abandoned by family. And then discovering her strength, not only for herself but for her son. Finally, settling into her own skin.

Having been present through it all, DP could appreciate everything she’d become a thousand times over.

Fingers slipping, it took him three tries to get the key into the cuffs. Exhaling, she rotated her wrist.

“Hurry, before he gets back,” she said, reaching for the buttons on his untucked shirt. “I don’t want to deal with his whiny-ness.”

When the tips of her fingers brushed his bared stomach, DP jumped back like a scalded cat. Closing his eyes, he cursed himself. The last thing Chaaru needed after that asshole’s tantrum was to deal with her best friend coming onto her, even unintentionally.

Her gaze grew wide with confusion at his weird sidestep. “I didn’t mean to jump on you-”

“Don’t be stupid,” he said, fighting to keep his words steady. “Your fingers are icy, and you know what a baby I’m when it comes to cold.”

“Right,” she said with a forced laugh, shaking her fingers at him threateningly. Her gaze tracked his features like some laser pointer before colliding with his.

A sudden, near-tangible electricity filled the large bedroom.

DP undid button after button, his breath hovering outside of his body, unable to look away. He was a forty-year-old man, for fuck’s sake, twisting himself inside out because the woman he loved wanted to drape herself in his shirt.

Either make a move or get over her. Pooja’s words were like dunking himself in an ice-bath.

He didn’t want to spend the rest of his life wondering who Chaaru was with, what kind of fun escapades she was getting into, or the worst of all, when she might meet the one guy who’d tempt her into breaking her own cardinal rule.

She might not realize it, but Chaaru was born to love, made to be loved. Eventually, she’d see that whatever shadow her ex cast on her, she’d long ago rid herself of it. That beneath her pursuit of fuck-bois and one-night-stands and fun flings…she was a woman who would thrive in a relationship with a man who knew her worth.

A man who would worship her.Like him.

Not that he thought her casual attitude about sex was wrong. Only that she’d been so intent on being her own person, to crawl out from the influence of all the people who would mold and minimize her, she’d gone striking hard to the other end.

One day, she’d find the right man. The thought made his chest feel like a twenty-pound dumbbell was sitting on it.

No, he couldn’t spend his entire life circling her like some abandoned puppy.

And yet, if he were to make a move, how would she react? Did he dare cross the line between them? Could he bear losing her if she hated him for it?

Thoughts unraveled in his head as he reached the last button. His nape prickled, and a loose, lazy heat unspooled in his limbs. He looked up to find Chaaru’s gaze sweeping down his torso, air puffing out from between her parted lips.

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