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can’t continue to sleep in your bed night after night.”
    I watched as he swallowed hard and took a huge step closer to me. He was only a foot away now, and his eyes darkened even more before they became expressionless, as if he were hiding what he was feeling from me. “Why?” he breathed.
    I clenched my jaw, not wanting to lay my feelings bare to him, but unable to lie to him. “Because it is slowly killing me…” I stopped and shook my head. “No, that’s a lie. It’s quickly killing me.” Taking a deep breath I rushed on, knowing if I didn’t say this now, I probably never would. “I sleep in your bed, and some nights you come home from work and wrap me up in your arms. It makes me feel so safe and so cherished, Hawk. It makes me so damn confused because there are other nights when you come home and I smell them on you. I can smell their perfume mixed with your sweat and all those other smells you carry home from the bar.” My hands clenched around the bottle of water, trying to keep them from trembling as I met his gaze boldly. “And those are the nights that I can’t breathe for the pain and the jealousy that eat up my insides like cancer.”
    Tears filled my eyes and I blinked them back, making it hard to see him for a moment. “If I don’t leave soon there will be nothing left of me. My heart will be just a crushed-up stone in my chest. I c-care about you, Hawk. But I know that we are just friends. I’m okay with that because I know you can’t help that you don’t feel what I feel.”
    “Gracie—” He started to take a step toward me, his face twisting with some emotion I couldn’t identify through my tear-flooded eyes. I raised my hands, stopping his words and, thankfully, his approach.
    “No,” I dashed at a stupid tear as it spilled from my eyes and ran down my face. “No. I don’t want to hear. All I’m asking is that you let me continue working without giving me a hard time about it.”

Chapter 4
    Hawk
    “I c-care about you, Hawk.”
    Gracie’s tear-filled voice came back to haunt me as I tossed a dirty bar rag into the sink. “I care about you, Hawk.” It was like a mantra in my head, bouncing off the walls of my brain and vibrating throughout my body like an electrical shock. Over and over again. I’d had no peace from it all night.
    “I care about you,” her voice whispered through me this time and I froze. Clenching the edges of the bar top and lowering my head as I closed my eyes and waited for my heart to stop racing, my body to stop throbbing.
    It had been hours since I’d dropped Gracie off at the house, hours since she had told me that she cared about me, but that she knew I didn’t feel the same. That she knew I just wanted to be friends…
    A snort left me without my even realizing it. ‘Friends’ my ass. I wanted more than just friendship from that sweet little redhead. I wanted so much more that it was all I could do to go home every night and just hold her. It was an act of God that I was able to restrain myself, keeping my hands from touching her the way I really wanted to touch her. Keeping my lips from tasting every single inch of her incredible body.
    I wanted Gracie Morgan more than I had ever wanted anything in my life. I could tell you that I wanted her more than I wanted air to breathe, but air was in abundance. It wasn’t something I worried about, because it was something I knew I would always have. No, I wanted her more than air. I wanted Gracie more than I wanted my bike to start each day so that I could feel the wind on my face as I did the one thing that had ever truly made me happy—feel the wind on my face and the power of my hog between my legs.
    I wanted her. So. Damn. Much.
    Yet it was more than the wanting. It was this need to protect and cherish her. Gracie was special. Not because of her sweetness, or her beauty, or even that huge-ass brain of hers. It was because she touched something inside of me by doing nothing more than existing.