Melting the Ice Queen ✔️

~10~

Having thus dismissed her,

Scott sat, picked up his stupid little red pen and flipped to the next page of whatever he'd been working on.

She, meanwhile, stared at the top of his bent head and started to get pissed off. The normal cool disdain with which she chopped people down to size deserted her for once. Something bubbled inside her, churning its way to the top. And it felt so scorching hot that she could almost hear the tips of her ears sizzle.

That was when she, Alicia Carroll, who always remained calm, always kept an iron lid on her emotions, and always one-upped the other guy, both in the courtroom and in life, lost her freaking mind.

Lunging to her feet, she snatched the paper from under Scott's hand, resulting in a slashing line down the middle of all his big and expensive legal words. Oh, well. Too bad.

"Are you kicking me out again?"

He deigned to look up, all polite puzzlement at her unnecessary and unprecedented rudeness. "I'm not kicking you out, no. I prefer to think of it as encouraging you to leave at your earliest possible convenience."

"Because I can't tell you I love you on your schedule?"

Wrong word choice. Those eyes sharpened down to the intent brightness of the North Star. "Do you love me? Why not just go ahead and admit it and get it over with?"

The question all but choked her.

Tossing his pen down again, he stilled, managing to radiate both bored indifference and seething anger. Or maybe it was frustration. A crooked smile twisted one side of his mouth, making him into someone she'd never really seen before, and had certainly never understood.

"You see the irony here? I tell you I love you and I'll bet you can't even say you've missed me these past couple of weeks. That kind of makes me look foolish, eh? You've got yourself so locked down in protective mode, I can't get anywhere near you."

"Can't get anywhere near me? You've had me!"

He shrugged as though their two years as lovers was as meaningless as a used paper towel. "I've had your body, yeah. I want your heart."

"Since when?" she cried.

"The day I met you."

This was too much. It was like a pet cat had unzipped his furry suit to reveal he'd been a dog all along. Clamping a hand on her head, she tried to stop its relentless spin. "You never—"

He snorted. "Of course I never. Why would I do that and chase you away?"

"Then why now?"

"Because I'm tired of waiting for you to wake up and see what's right in front of you. I'm tired of pretending it doesn't matter that I only see you a couple nights a week, when really I count the seconds until I see you again—"

"Don't say things like—"

"You see?" He flapped a hand at her, as though she'd just proved his point beyond any doubt. "I'm tired of you shutting me down. I'm tired of pretending it doesn't hurt. I give up."

Dread slithered to life and wrapped around her, tightening her in its coiled grip. "You...give up?" The words shouldn't devastate her, but they did. No doubt it was her painful history of her father walking out on her that did it. "What does that mean?"

"It means—" he said, calmly lobbing that cannonball right between her eyes "—that since you can't be the kind of woman I need, I'm going to find someone who can."

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