Without the distraction of Dragos’s intense, vital presence, the ache welled up again. There was no one to watch or question what she did next. Burying her face in her hands, she let the tears come.

After that, time sped up and felt inexorable. Thoughts like, this is the second to last time I’ll be eating toast at this kitchen counter or that’s the last episode of The Bachelor I’ll be watching for a while kept floating through her mind, and she felt close to tears more often than not.

Late in the afternoon the next day, she walked around the corner of the downstairs hallway to find Dragos leaning one shoulder against the doorway to his office. He was dressed simply in a black T-shirt that stretched across his powerful broad chest and faded jeans that had seen better days, one booted foot kicked over the other. His arms were folded, the massive muscles in forearms and biceps delineated under the deep bronze skin.

He looked grim, but when he spoke, his voice was gentle. “When are you going to tell me what’s bothering you?”

She stopped in her tracks, feeling flat-footed. So much for thinking that she had kept her inner upheaval private. She opened and closed her mouth a couple of times before she could say, “I promise I will when I’ve figured out the right words to say.”

His hard, sexy mouth tightened. He didn’t like that—but then, he never liked anything that refused to give him whatever he wanted the moment he demanded it. “Tell me now. I don’t care if you use the wrong words.”

She gave him a wry look. “Only someone who hasn’t heard the wrong words could say that.” At the baffled frustration in his expression, she said more softly, by way of apology, “I thought I was doing a better job of hiding things.”

His frustration melted into anger. “You’re not supposed to hide anything from me,” he growled. Moving away from the doorway, he advanced on her, clamping both hands on her shoulders.

“I wasn’t intentionally hiding things from you,” she said as she looked up into his narrowed gold gaze. Anger sparked. “I’m not deceitful with you, ever. Period.”

The tension in his hands eased. “I know.”

Okay then. That was better.

“I’m working things out in my head,” she told him. “I get to do that, you know. I get to sort through my thoughts and feelings to figure out what I should say, what I want to say, and what is even true about what I’m feeling. And that means I need to understand what I’m feeling before I can talk about it.”

He scrutinized her features, then said grimly, “That sounds like a lot of bullshit and prevarication to me.”