His Favorite Mistake (Baby Its Cold Out) (12 page)

             
His next words made her realize he was reading her silence completely wrong. He thought she was rejecting him and she wanted to cry out against the sheer irony of his statement. “Reyna, please. Don’t be afraid of me. I’m sorry. I never meant to hurt you. I promise it won't happen again."

             
She turned and went easily into his arms. She leaned against him, her arms going around his waist. She could hear his heart racing. His own tension matched hers, but he didn’t pull away from her. She’d surprised him. She didn’t care. She couldn’t help it. She wanted to be near him. To let him know she wasn’t frightened of him.

             
“Reyna.” She could hear the roughness in his voice. Some womanly intuition told her that he wasn’t as immune to her as he would have liked her to believe. His arms tightened around her and he held her close for a moment longer before putting her away from him. Brody looked down at her with pain and something akin to self-hate in his blue eyes.

             
“Reyna, I’m sorry I hurt you last night. For what I said to you at work before you left as well. It was unforgivable. You have to understand, the last thing I want from you is to have you set me up with someone. That’s the very last thing I want from you. Do you understand what I mean?”

             
She didn’t, but she was happy he was still willing to be her friend. She hadn’t lost his precious friendship.

             
“I’m sorry too. I never meant to interfere with your life like that. Please say you forgive me. I don’t want to lose you. You’re far too important to me.” She looked up at him, pleading, unaware of the brightness of her eyes. Never realizing she was showing him so much more than she had wanted to reveal by the expression on her troubled face.

             
He smiled down at her before bending to kiss her gently.

             
“Baby, when you look at me like that, I would do anything for you. Anything at all.” His hands reached up to frame her face pulling her hair away as he brushed a kiss across her forehead then let her go. “Come on—we should leave before traffic gets bad.”

              He still held her hand as they rode the elevator down to the parking garage in silence.

             
It had snowed again during the night. A fresh blanket of white powder clung to the streets and sidewalks making the city seem like a winter wonderland. It muffled the normally noisy morning commute making it seem almost surreal.

             
Brody switched on the truck’s radio. Music filled the car. She sat next to him thankful she hadn’t lost his friendship. Even if friendship was all he could ever offer her.

             
She couldn’t help but feel that something was different about him. It was there in the way he looked at her. He seemed almost cautious now. Why would he feel he needed to be cautious with her?

             
She glanced at him and saw the tenseness in him. It was all there, in the way he sat stiffly next to her, the way he gripped the car’s steering wheel. The way he hadn’t spoken to her since leaving. Reyna tried to tell herself it was just her imagination playing tricks on her. That she had been so worried about losing him, that she was analyzing every little thing about him far too closely. As they walked inside the building together, Reyna couldn’t quite shake the sadness that settled over her.

             
Brody was so close. Close enough to reach out and touch his face and yet he seemed miles away emotionally.

             
She watched his retreating figure and a dark cloud of despair swallowed her up. She sat down at her desk and tried to concentrate on work.

Chapter Eleven

Reyna just finished reading the last e-mail, when she noticed the time. Almost
eight o’clock in the evening and she was too sick and exhausted to think clearly anymore.

             
Throughout the long day as she worked alone in the office, what had started out that morning as just a slight soreness in her throat, had continued to progress into aching muscles, a throbbing pain in her head that made her so nauseous, it was almost impossible to concentrate.

             
She hadn’t been able to get warm, even after turning up the thermostat up as high as she dared and switching on the fireplace in Brody’s office, where she spent the afternoon working on her laptop.

             
The office itself was closed for the entire week in observance of the Thanksgiving holiday, but Brody had been unable to postpone his trip to New York for a meeting with one of his oldest and most loyal clients.

             
He would be traveling alone this time, meeting and presenting the new advertising campaign to the corporate CEO without the help of his usual team. He’d told Reyna he didn’t want to interrupt any of his employees holiday plans and he wouldn’t allow her to go with him either as she’d wanted.

             
Reyna hadn’t told him of her plans to go into the office, not that it mattered. Brody wouldn’t be checking in with her at home. Over the past few days, the distance politeness in which he treated her had increased so much that she really wasn’t expecting to hear from him at all.

             
The extension to her direct line rang several times during the afternoon, but she couldn’t bring herself to answer it. She was afraid it might be her cousin and she didn’t want to hear Jenna talk about Brody. From the numerous cleverly implied comments her cousin had made, it was clear that she and Brody had gone out for dinner that night and Jenna was just dying to tell Reyna everything about it.

             
Reyna ended the conversation as soon as Jenna brought Brody up, making up some excuse to cut it short before Jenna could get into the intimate details of her night with Brody.

             
When Reyna dropped Brody off at the airport that morning for his flight to New York, she didn’t dare mention that she wasn’t feeling well. The cautious way in which he treated her lately whenever they were alone together, had left her all the more unsure of what he felt for her. She couldn’t open herself up to the pain of being rejected by him again. Reyna could no longer talk to him about anything.

             
So she’d sat alone in the office trying to ignore the pain in her head and throat and the fever that had started almost immediately upon her arrival at her desk.

             
For weeks now, Brody had promised her that he would be home in time for the Thanksgiving Day parade. They were planning to leave the city soon after to spend the remainder of the weekend at Brody’s house in Aspen. Reyna had been looking forward to it for weeks. That was until recently, when this strained silence had come between them.

             
Lately, when he spoke to her at all, it was almost as if he were afraid she was so fragile emotionally, that she would break right down, or fall apart each time he looked at her. If she were being honest, it was exactly what she wished she could do. The thought of being alone with Brody was the very last thing on earth Reyna wanted.

             
She looked out at the heavy Denver traffic and dreaded the commute back to the empty house. What would be the point after all? The thought of spending three long days and nights there was almost more than she could bear. Feeling the way she did at this moment, she wasn’t sure she would even make it safely home.

             
Reyna had been to the office apartment only once. She knew it to be well stocked and the thought of taking the elevator up one floor and being able to climb into the warmth of the king-size bed was much more appealing to her than fighting the commute home.

             
She locked the office up and took the extra apartment key from her desk, gathering her coat and purse as the throbbing in her head made the room around her swim. Her stomach did an uneasy flip. She was burning up with fever. It took all the energy she had just to concentrate on unlocking the apartment door.

             
Reyna dumped her things on the floor next to the door and ran into the bathroom just in time to become ill. She hadn’t eaten all day. She couldn’t stop shivering as she leaned back against the cold tile floor of the bathroom, unsure if she even had the strength to move. She needed to rest. If she didn’t reach the bedroom soon, she would most likely pass out right here on the bathroom floor.

             
Reyna forced herself to stand but even the tiniest effort of walking became too much for her. She was dangerously close to losing consciousness.

             
She found one of Brody’s tee shirts and she slowly undressed then took a blanket and pillow from his bed back to the living room. She couldn’t sleep in his bed. She switched on the TV and adjusted the thermostat up before collapsing on the sofa. She drifted in and out of consciousness, her body alternating between shivering and burning up as the fever ran its course.

             
She should try to search for some medicine to help bring her fever down. It was too high, but every time she tried to sit up, the room began to spin out of focus. She would rest for a moment longer just until the world around her stopped spinning. She drifted back into unconsciousness, unaware those minutes had turned into hours and evening into another cold, lonely Denver night.

* * * *

              “Can’t you go any faster?” Brody asked the taxi driver urgently.

             
Somehow, he’d managed to catch the one flight out of New York that hadn’t been rerouted from landing in Denver, due to an early winter storm that was quickly covering the city with snow and ice and grounding most air traffic.

             
Now, five hours later, he sat inside a taxi being driven through the slick Denver streets at a snail’s pace by someone who looked at him as if they didn’t understand Brody’s urgency. “Can’t you go any faster?” he asked again only to see the blank stare the man gave him in the rearview mirror. No doubt, the man had long ago schooled himself against showing any emotion to the countless angry customers who entered his taxi each day.

             
As Brody looked out the window at the heavy traffic in frustration, he wondered once more, what he was doing running after her like this anyway.

             
That was simple enough to answer. All rational and reasonable behavior had left him the moment he tried to reach her at the house without luck, no less than twenty times. The second he was able to use his cell phone again he’d called his colleague Parker Martin. Parker immediately volunteered to drive over to the house only to discover she wasn’t home. Parker checked the local hospitals as well as the police station to make sure she had not been in an accident. Brody couldn’t bring himself to think about that.

             
The meeting had been sheer torture. His mind was thousands of miles away in Denver. Thankfully, the client was also one of his oldest and most loyal, as well as a good friend. He didn’t seem to mind that Brody was constantly having to regroup and recapture his train of thought, all the while listening for his cell phone. He’d left the number with Martin and asked him to call the moment Reyna returned.