Rachel Gibson - I’m In No Mood For Love

He threw on a pair of sweat pants and worked out on the weight machine in his spare bedroom. He burned off some of the angry energy but couldn’t exercise Clare out of his head. After taking a shower, he went into his office and turned on his computer in an attempt to fill his mind with work. Instead he recalled the time she’d come into his office wearing that blue nightgown.

After an hour of futile typing, Sebastian called a few buddies and met them at a bar not far from his condo. They drank beer, shot pool, and talked baseball. Several women in the bar flirted with him, but he wasn’t interested. He was pissed off at all women in general, and smart, attractive women on principle.

He’d been shitty company, had a shitty time, and had behaved like an overall shithead. His life was shit, and it was all the fault of a certain romance writer who believed in love and heroes and happily ever after.

Over the course of the next week, Sebastian went out very little. Just to the grocery store to buy some bread, sandwich meat, and beer. When his father called, they talked about everything but Clare. By tacit agreement, they avoided the subject of his employer’s daughter. But that did not mean he wasn’t thinking of her every waking moment.

Nine days after he’d jumped in his SUV and driven-insane and angry-from Boise to Seattle, he stood in his living room looking out at the ships and ferries in Elliott Bay. He didn’t like personal change. Especially when he didn’t see it coming and couldn’t seem to do anything about it. Change felt helpless. It meant starting over.

He thought of Clare and the night he’d found her on a bar stool in a pink fluffy dress. That night he’d put her to bed, and in the morning his life had been changed. He hadn’t known it at the time, but she’d come into his life and changed it forever.

Regardless of what he liked or disliked, wanted or didn’t want, his life had changed. He was changed. He felt it in the hollow place in his chest and in the hunger in his stomach that had nothing to do with food. He felt it in the way he looked out at the city he loved, yet wanted to be somewhere else.

He loved Seattle. Except for the few first years of his life, he’d always lived in Washington. His mother was buried here. He loved the water and drama and pulse of the city. He loved taking in a Mariners or Seahawks game if he felt like it, and he loved the view of Mount Rainier from the windows of his condo. He’d worked his ass off for that view.

He had friends in Washington. Good friends he’d made over a lifetime. This was where he lived, but it no longer felt like home. He belonged four hundred miles away, with the woman who loved him. The woman he liked to spend all his free time with, who was his favorite person to talk to.

Sebastian lowered his gaze to the street below. He more than liked Clare. There was no use fighting it. It was futile, and he recognized the truth of something when it hit him over the head enough times. He loved the way she laughed and the color she painted her toenails. He didn’t love all that girly girl lace she had around her house, but he loved that she was a girly girl. He loved her, and she loved him. For once in his life a woman’s love didn’t feel like something he needed to run from any longer.

He turned and pressed his back against the window. He loved her. He loved her, and he’d hurt her. He remembered the look on her face as she’d turned away, and he didn’t think he could just pick up the phone and say, “Hey, Clare. I’ve been thinking about it, and I love you.”

Instead he picked up the phone and called his dad. Not that Leo was an expert when it came to women and love, but he might know what to do.

Clare rummaged around in her mother’s attic for a bed canopy. She’d been all over town in search of one she liked, but she hadn’t found it. There had to be something suitable in the stacks of bed linens in the Wingate attic.

The day after she told Sebastian that she couldn’t see him any longer, she’d taken down her Battenberg lace. He’d hated it, and it reminded her too much of him. She just couldn’t look up at it every night when she went to bed.

It had been three weeks since that day in the mall when she’d run into Lonny and realized that she had once again fallen in love with a man who was incapable of loving her back. And this time she couldn’t even say it was because she’d been lied to. Sebastian had never loved her, and she’d known that going in. She just hadn’t known she would fall in love with him.

After the fallout in her mother’s backyard, she’d gone home and crawled into bed for three days, overdosing on John Hughes and Merchant-Ivory flicks until her friends had staged an intervention.

The good news was, she hadn’t reached for a bottle or a warm body to make herself feel better. She hadn’t even wanted to. The bad news was that she didn’t think she was ever going to get over the heartache of loving Sebastian Vaughan. It went too deep in her soul. Was too tangled around her heart.

Clare opened an old wardrobe and searched through her ancestor’s linens. It was all very lacy and girly, and after an hour of looking and finding nothing, she moved out of the attic and down the old curving staircase. A voice from the kitchen stopped her at the bottom of the steps. Stopped her and shattered her all at once.

“Where’s Clare?”

“Sebastian? When did you get here?” Joyce asked.

“Clare’s car’s outside. Where is she?”

“Goodness! She’s in the attic looking at lace.”

Heavy footfalls moved across the tile and the hardwood floors and Clare’s hand shook. She’d been told he wasn’t expected. As she turned, he walked into the entry and her grasp tightened on the banister. Her chest got that imploding feeling again, just as strong as the day she’d stood in Brookstone dying inside.

Sebastian walked across the foyer as if the devil were on his heels, and before she could even think to move, he was in front of her, his green gaze intense as he stared down into her face. He was so close, the open edges of her black cardigan touched the front of his blue dress shirt.

“Clare,” he said. One word that sounded a lot like a caress, then he lowered his mouth and kissed her.

For several stunned seconds she let him. Let her soul remember. Let it pour through her and warm up the lonely places only he could touch. Her heart seemed to weep and rejoice at the same time, but before he could take any more from her, she lifted her hands and pushed him away.

“You look so good to me,” he whispered as he ran his gaze across her face. “I feel alive for the first time in weeks.”

And he was killing her. All over again. She looked away before her love for him swamped her and she started to cry. “What are you doing?” she asked.

“The last time I saw you, I told you that if you walked away, I wouldn’t come after you. But here I am.” With the warm fingers of one hand, he brought her gaze back to his. “I’m going to turn thirty-six in two months, and I’m in love for the first time in my life. Since you’re the woman I love, I thought you should know.”

She felt everything inside her go real still. “What?”

“I’m in love with you.”

She shook her head. He had to be teasing her.

“It’s true. The heart-pounding, steal-your-breath, crazy-for-one-woman kind of love.”

She didn’t trust him. “Maybe you just think you’re in love and you’ll get over it.”

Now it was his turn to shake his head. “I’ve spent my life waiting to feel something bigger and stronger than myself. Something I couldn’t fight or walk away from or control. I’ve waited all my life…” His voice shook, and he paused to take a breath. “I’ve been waiting my whole life for you, Clare. I love you, and don’t tell me I don’t.”