Guarding Grayson by Cathryn Cade Read Free Book Online

his hair and skin, his skull was hard. She sent energy deeper, opened a conduit between Brynne and herself, and then Grayson.
    She couldn't convince him by speaking, so she would show him.

 
    CHAPTER FIVE
    Brynne’s memories were like finding himself in a garden made of Chihuly glass formations—beautiful, fanciful and glittering with dangerous, breakable shards.
    Through her eyes, Gray stared at himself. Is that really how she saw him?
    He stood in the open front door of his house, lamplight pouring out behind him, gilding him with light until he looked like that dude who played Thor, all master of his castle. He wore dark jeans, boots and a gray dress shirt, the sleeves pushed up over his forearms. His hair was shoved behind his ears, and he wore the gray diamond ear stud he’d bought with his first commission.
    His arms were crossed over his chest, and he was … hell, he was sneering at her, his eyes glittering with displeasure. ‘Not a good look, dude’, Gray wanted to tell himself, except that Brynne’s emotions were battering at him.
    She was a tumult of anger and despair, swelling until she could no longer contain them. Tears were flowing, along with words she normally never allowed herself to say.
    “I’m done, Gray,” she screamed at him from her stance in the middle of the sweep of pavement in front of his garage. “I am through, do you hear me? Through trying to please you. I’ve done everything to make us work, and you … you’ve done nothing. The great Grayson Stark, a law unto himself. Living alone because no one else is good enough to share his exalted world. You don’t need a woman, you need a—a robot.”
    “Is that what you were trying to be?” Gray’s old self said. “Gotta say, you’re well on the road to success, babe. Which is why we don’t work, and never will. Christ, Brynne—no real man wants a woman who twists herself into a knot trying to be what he wants. Learn to be yourself, and then find a man who wants the real you. Maybe I would’ve liked her, if I’d ever had the chance to meet her and not a plastic facade.”
    His words slashed deep, tearing like blades through the thin veneer of her self-worth, until she was reduced to the old Brynne—shy, chubby and tongue-tied. Brynne shook her head, and retreated, bumping against the side of her little Toyota sedan.
    “Oh, I hope you meet your real woman,” she said, her voice thick with tears. “I hope you do. And I hope she treats you exactly the way you’ve treated me—like you’re not good enough. Like you’ll never be enough man for her. And then you’ll really be alone, Grayson Stark.”
    He said something else, but she didn’t hear him through the cacophony in her head—sobbing breaths, old voices and over them all the words he’d said to her earlier that evening, after they said goodbye to the other two couples who’d been there for the dinner she’d prepared.
    “Brynne, we need to talk. I can’t keep doing this with you. It’s not working for me.” That's what he'd said to her—her dream man. Her one and only.
    She flung herself into her car, pressed the ignition, backed around in a screech of tires and protesting motor, and then hit the gas pedal, barreling away down his dark driveway, racing down through the trees, skidding around the twists and turns in his disgusting excuse for a driveway. Not caring for once that the pretty little Camry she’d worked so hard to buy was going to be scraped on the rocks, bumps and the tree she scraped when she hit the paved road at the bottom of the hill and accelerated out onto without even looking for other cars.
    Gray’s deep voice blended with the wine she’d drunk and the other voices from her past that were always reminding her she had to be better, slimmer, prettier, happier. Her father, Gray, and too many others in between.
    ‘You’re not good enough, Brynne … not good enough for me to stay with you and your mom … not good enough to be my date for