Silver (12 page)

And everything took longer than anticipated.

She spent hours at the police station.

Despite the fact that she had remote-locked her computer last night, they had to double- and triple-check everything with her. She hadn’t had any real hope of getting it back to begin with, so suffering through a few hours at the police station instead of rewriting her essay seemed fair.

Luckily for Stacia, she hadn’t been the only robbery in the neighborhood that night, which meant the police were able to track down the perpetrators. Turned out they were just some assholes who lived nearby. After mounds of paperwork and lots of wait time, her computer and pearls had been returned to her, and the police said they would contact her if they needed anything else.

She counted it as a miracle. Her purse and study guide were missing, but both were easily replaceable. She was just glad to have the two most important things back to her. Now, all she had to do was get out of her lease, and then she would be free from this six-week hellhole.

What she hadn’t intended was for it to be so fucking impossible to break her lease. She had gone straight to the main office of the apartment complex to get it all fixed, but it wasn’t that simple. After being shuffled from person to person who claimed she couldn’t break her lease for burglary, she finally had to threaten to get her LA-based lawyer involved before they let her out of the lease without her having to pay a separation fee or wait for someone else to fill her spot. As if that would even be possible here.

By the time it was all done, it was the middle of the afternoon. She hadn’t slept. She had barely eaten anything. And she was ready to drop.

“What the hell is this?” Stacia asked when she walked through her front door.

“We, uh…packed for you,” Jordan told her.

“Where’s the other half of my stuff,” she accused.

Then, a rumbling started from outside, and Derek and Pace barreled through the front door, as if they owned the place. They both stopped dead when they saw Stacia.

“What the hell is going on?” she demanded.

Pace crossed his arms and smiled wide. “Just finishing up.”

“Finishing up what?”

“Moving, of course.”

“What the fuck, Pace? Are you moving my stuff into your place without my permission?” she nearly shrieked.

Pace raised an eyebrow in question. “You said you were into it last night, and Derek said you were going to move in if you didn’t find another place today. I just cut out the middle man and got shit done while you were busy.”

Stacia walked forward and shoved her finger in his face. “I did not say that last night, you insufferable, presumptuous motherfucking—”

“Whoa there!” Derek said, interjecting between them. “This is a good idea. You’re dead on your feet right now. It’s four in the afternoon. Do you really think you’re going to find somewhere to live today? On a Saturday?”

“I don’t care. Don’t you see how wrong this is?”

“It’s a temp spot until you find something else.”

“I’m just trying to help,” Pace reminded her.

“Since when?” Stacia snapped.

“Always.”

Stacia shook her head and stepped away from them. “This is insane. This whole weekend is shot, and I have so much work to do.”

Derek placed a reassuring hand on her shoulder. “Let us take care of this for you. I know you’ve been working hard on your classes. I was honestly just trying to make this easier on you.”

Stacia sighed heavily. “Fine. Is my bed here or there? Can I sleep for a couple of hours while this is happening?”

“You can use my bed,” Pace said with a smile that said he remembered every other time she’d been in it.

“And my bed?”

“In pieces at my place.”

“I hate you all,” she murmured. “Let’s go.”

While Derek and Jordan stayed behind to finish packing up the rest of her apartment, she followed Pace back to his condo on the other side of town. He unlocked the door for her, as he had so many nights before. And, with a profound sense of déjà vu, Stacia stepped into Pace’s condo, but this time, she found boxes of her stuff all over the living room.

Pace retrieved a key for her, and she reluctantly took it from him.

“I can’t believe this is happening,” she said.

“Stop acting like this is the end of the world.”

She raised her eyebrows. She had just been robbed and moved out of her first apartment she’d had to herself, and now, she was moving in with her ex-boyfriend. Maybe not the end of the world but still pretty fucking shitty.

“Fine,” Pace said with a laugh.

He opened the door to his bedroom, and for a change, she saw that it was immaculate. He must have had a maid service come through…or he’d picked up for her.

She swallowed hard as she followed him into the bedroom. Her mind raced ahead of her. Every single part of this room brought back very vivid, very sexual, very…athletic memories. Their eyes met for the briefest of moments, and Stacia flushed all over.

“You can sleep here until we get your bed together.” He took a step toward her, and the air energized. “Or after.”

“Pace,” she warned.

He twirled a lock of her hair around his finger. “Yes?”

“Stop it.”

“It’s just a bed.”

“Don’t make this complicated.”

He shrugged. “It already is. Stop trying to make it uncomplicated.”

“You know this is temporary.”

“We’ll see,” he said.

His hand trailed from her hair to her shoulder and down her arm where he twined their fingers together. She hardly had it in her to pull back when he was acting like this, and they were in his element.

He leaned down toward her tiny frame, and just before reaching her lips, he turned his head and breathed softly into her ear, “Get some sleep, and try not to dream about me.”

Stacia let loose a stilted laugh and brushed past him. “You should be the one trying not to think about me, naked, in your bed.”

“Oh, I think about that all the time.”

“Good night, Pace,” she said, walking to the edge of the bed.

She glanced back at him just once to see how torn he was when he looked at her. Then, when he saw her looking, he exited the room and slammed his bedroom door so hard that it shook. She smiled, feeling victorious in that moment…until she looked back at his bed.

She slipped out of her jeans and bra before tugging her cheer T-shirt back over her head. She didn’t feel comfortable enough to
actually
sleep in the nude here…not anymore.

Lying back into the soft downy comforter and oversize pillows, Stacia let the bed engulf her like an embrace. When she turned onto her side and pressed her face against the pillows, she breathed in the freshly laundered sheets and the pure masculine scent that was distinctly Pace. She savored the smell she had missed for the past nine months.

She’d never admit it to herself any other time, but she had missed this…and him.

Goddamn him for ruining any chance of them being together.

Derek and Jordan were getting ready to leave the next day. It was a four-hour drive back to Los Angeles, and Derek would start training again in the morning. She hugged them both good-bye and promised to talk with them as much as she could. And, when they finally departed, she realized just how alone she was with Pace in the condo.

A few short months ago, she could have had everything she’d wanted. She would have been engaged to an NFL quarterback and on her way to living a cushy life, just like she had always dreamed. Now, she was back in college, working her ass off in school like she had never done before in her life, and she was living with her ex, someone she absolutely refused to date again. Not exactly the life she had envisioned for herself.

“So…” she began.

“So…” Pace said.

“How exactly does this work?” Stacia sat down on his couch and nudged one of her boxes to the side.

“What do you mean?”

“I mean…how can we live together and not drive each other insane?”

Pace took the seat opposite her. “I start practice tomorrow. You have school. We’ll hardly see each other.”

“I don’t think that’s true. I think we need to lay down some ground rules.”

“Rules?” he asked in disbelief. “Rules are meant to be broken.”

“Fine then, think of them more as guidelines and provisions for my sanity.”

“What exactly do you have in mind?”

“We can’t have sex,” she said.

Pace immediately started laughing boisterously.

“What?” she snapped.

“That’s your first provision for your sanity?” he asked, bewildered. “We both know you’re a hundred percent more sane when you’re getting some good dick. Preferably mine.”

“I didn’t say that I wasn’t going to be having sex,” she ground out. “I said,
we
weren’t going to be having sex. And, while we’re at it, I feel like we should be cool with us dating other people.”

“I don’t want you to date other people,” Pace said so matter-of-fact that Stacia felt like she was in an alternate universe. A world where he still cared for her and wanted a future with her.

She shook her head. They weren’t in a parallel world, and this was not doing any good to the situation. “Pace,” she groaned, “that isn’t helping.”

“Good. I don’t want it to.”

“I just need to know, if I bring someone else back with me, you’ll be cool with it,” she pushed.

“I wouldn’t be fucking cool with it. I’d beat the shit out of anyone who got in the way.”

“You can’t do this!” she shrieked, standing up and glowering down at him.

“Do what?” he asked, unperturbed.

“Be as overprotective as my father!”

“That’s low, Stacia. You know I care about you, and I’m just looking out for you.”

“That’s all the same bullshit I’ve heard before. We’re not together. You cannot control my life, and you’re going to have to get used to that.”

“No.”

“No?” she asked in exasperation.

“I’m not going to get used to it.”

He slowly rose to his feet, towering over her, but she refused to back down.
What the hell did I get myself into?

“Fine,” she spat.

“Good. Glad that’s out of the way. Any other guidelines?”

“I mean, fine, I’m moving out!”

“What?”

“My shit isn’t even out of boxes yet. I can find another place and be out of here by tomorrow. Being under my dad’s orders was bad enough. You can’t order me around just because I live here. You are not my keeper.”

“No shit.” He fisted his hands and walked away from her. “Fine.”

“Fine?”

“Have it your way. You can date other people and bring them back here. Though I think it’s a fucking horrible idea. But, if you can, so can I.”

“Of course you can,” Stacia said with a sinking pit in her stomach at the thought. “This is a two-way street.”

“Anything else?”

Stacia sighed when she looked up into his frustrated blue eyes. She softly put her hand on his arm. “I just don’t want this to be awkward. I know I’m coming off rough around all the edges, but if I don’t stand up for myself, then who is going to?”

“I am.”

“Pace…”

“Me, Stacia. I am. Like I always have been.”

She bit her lip and nodded. “All right. But…can we just try not to make this awkward?”

“It won’t be awkward. It’ll be so perfect that you’ll never want to leave,” he promised her.

She swallowed and forced herself to take a step back. Pretty words were a seduction. No more. No less. And those pretty words made her feel like she was falling slowly into a spider’s web, ready to be devoured at any moment.

“SO…YOU’RE
LIVING
WITH PACE?”
Bryna asked two weeks later when her friends had finally gotten back into town.

“Um…yes,” Stacia said.

She lounged back on the chair and sipped from her margarita to try to keep her cool. The girls had only gotten back the night before, and everyone had converged on Eric’s pool to spend time together along with the guys—Eric, Damon, and Drayton. Stacia hadn’t been looking forward to telling them about the Pace situation, but she knew they needed to hear it from her.

“What the fuck?” Maya said, sitting up in her lounger. “How the hell did that happen?”