Break My Fall by Chloe Walsh Read Free Book Online

only so much will power.
    Gemma stuck her tongue down my throat and I felt like gagging.
    I heard the sound of a chair scraping and pulled my face away.
    Lee was leaving.
    I moved to go after her but stopped myself.
    This was the way it had to be, it was better in the long run.
    She needed to hate me.

 
     
     
    Chapter Five  
     
    LEE
     
    I settled into a comfortable living routine at the house.
    On weekdays I got up, went to work, came home and went to bed.
    On weekends I did pretty much the same thing, except I replaced work with hanging out with Cam, and more often than not Derek joined us.
    We took turns with the cleaning and cooking dinner, with Derek usually ending up taking over the kitchen, and smothering out whoever’s turn it was to cook.
    He was working in a kitchen for the summer, and had decided he was the new Gordon Ramsey.
    He was the best cook out of the four of us though, so I didn’t tease him about it.
    The man made a mean spaghetti bolognaise.
    I had even started to enjoy Derek’s witty retorts and jokes, and Cam was fun to live with.
    We had fallen back into our old friendship easily.
    But Kyle was a jerk.
    The man flaunted himself around the place like king of the hill, prancing around the kitchen in his just his jeans, or worse his boxer shorts.
    I dutifully ignored him every time he was around, or at least I pretended to.
    Cam said Kyle’s job required him to travel a lot, which explained the hours of the day and night he showed up at the house.
    However, when he was here he was distracting and a smart-mouth, and the boy had no modesty.
    So much for the truce…
    He also had no filter on his tongue.
    He had a real bad potty mouth.
    I decided Kyle was tormenting me on purpose.
    He had to be doing it on purpose.
    If he wasn’t banging on the bathroom door when I was showering, hollering at me to hurry up, he was blocking my way to the kettle, giving me one his ‘you want it come and get it looks’.
    I had gone without coffee most mornings this week, because avoiding Kyle’s half-naked body was much safer than pressing past him.
    He would love that, to know that he was getting to me.
    The sad fact of the matter was that he was getting to me, in a big way.
    I had to pull my thoughts out of the gutter whenever I saw him in his boxer shorts.
    Never in a million years would I have dreamt he had a job that required a suit and tie.
    It just didn’t seem like the usual attire one wore for a college summer job.
    He looked beautiful in a suit, but there was the element of a caged animal when he wore one.
    I had thought up a dozen different potential jobs he might do, all of which involved physical work.
    He didn’t have the body of a man stuck in an office.
    He had the hard toned build of an athlete.
    He was all broad shoulders, ribbed muscles, and narrow hips.
    Another thing I realized about Kyle, was that he was guarded.
    He chatted openly about mundane things like college and his parties, and I’d learned he was finishing his degree in Business Management in the fall.
    But he closed up the minute anything more personal was brought up.
    I didn’t understand why, but was too intimidated by him to ask.
    He had even started showing up at the hotel.
    There was a restaurant on the ground floor, and in the past three weeks I had seen him in there on no less than three occasions.
    Thankfully, he hadn’t noticed me.
    I always managed to hide behind the pillar in the lobby before he saw me.
    He was usually having lunch with Rachel, which also made it easier for me to escape unnoticed.
    I had started to skip eating in the restaurant and ate outside at the picnic tables, rather than face the obnoxious jerk and his evil companion.
    It drove me crazy that he ate at the hotel.
    There were dozens of places he could go to eat, but no he had to choose the building I worked in.
    On a positive note, I had actually made a couple of friends at work; Linda being one.
    She was fabulous and hilarious at times.