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in his bedroom again with my face cradled in my hands.
    “Please Roan, please. Just let me go. I need to leave. I can’t stay here,” I said, my voice breathless and insistent. I was on the verge of hyperventilating with panic.  
    I could feel hot tears pricking at the corners of my eyelids and couldn’t even look at Roan for fear of weeping like a blubbering idiot.  
    No, don’t cry! Don’t you DARE cry in front of him! Suck it up, you big sissy girl!
    “Is this how worked up you were, little girl, the night you trashed my room? Remember that night? I remember it very well. It was the last night we saw one another before I left Spruce Hollow. I remember how you didn’t really know or understand the facts, yet you still flipped out like a lunatic, destroyed my room and then tried to run away. Remember that night, Aspen?” he said as he calmly took in my manic pacing back and forth across his bedroom.  
    Roan irritated the hell out of me.  
    How come I felt like a hamster on a wheel, with my heart nearly pounding out of my chest and he looked so calm and collected, his face an impassive mask of tightly controlled emotions?
    “You’re not going anywhere, Aspen. You can’t drive your car anyway,” he said suddenly as he uncrossed his arms and stalked into the room, effectively unblocking the door.
    “What?? Why not? Omg, what did you do to my car, Roan?” I screeched at him.
    “Let’s just say that I had a look at it while you were sleeping, ” he said as he walked past me and stopped at his dresser, “and don’t think of leaving the house and trying to hitchhike back to Springbay or something equally stupid like that. I’ll hear you leaving and will drag you back here by the hair if I have to. You’re not going anywhere, Aspen, not until we have a nice long talk about everything that’s happened between us in the past few years,” he said as he casually pulled his shirt up over his head, threw it in the clothes hamper and rifled through his top drawer.
    I was furious at him, but my eyes couldn’t help but roam over his perfectly chiseled body. I followed the corded muscles in his abdomen until they disappeared down into the waist of his jeans. I even found myself briefly wondering what he would look like completely naked? Oh my god, Aspen, pull yourself together!
    Lord, why did Roan have to be so damn attractive? It was distracting and very unfair, given the circumstances.
    Shaking my head to clear the confusion that Roan had a tendency to inspire, I pulled my gaze away from his half naked body and tried to hone in on my anger instead.  
    “What the hell is wrong with you, Roan? What did you do to my car, cut the brake line? You won’t be satisfied until I’m dead, will you? You want to force me to live here with you and torture me to death until I’m insane, is that it? What, tell me? What the hell do you want from me? I just want to go back home. Please Roan, let me go. I don’t want to be here with you. I just want to leave!”  
    That did it.  
    That little speech was enough to push me over the edge and make me lose what tenuous control I had over my emotions and I started to cry.  
    It was too much for me to handle. My mother was dead and Roan was living in her house! It was literally my worst nightmare, come to life and there was no way that I could stay here in the same house with him. He couldn’t make me. I was an adult now and he couldn’t boss me around anymore!  
    With that thought on the fringes of my psyche, I turned and bolted from the room and ran down the hall as fast as my feet could carry me.  
    Unfortunately, I didn’t get very far.
    Roan took off after me and tackled me before I even reached the living room. We landed in a heap on the floor with me laid out flat on my stomach and him, bare-chested and on top of me with one arm around my torso. Shrieking, I tried to push myself up from the floor and get away but he reached around and yanked both my arms back towards