Waking Up by Amanda Carpenter Read Free Book Online Page A

he replied, absently enough, and then frowned. “Rob, about yesterday morning…”
    She moved involuntarily, jerkily, and put her back to him. She could feel his eyes on her, running down the sleek, slender lines of her silken brown back. She wondered where her usual grace had gone. “Please,” she interrupted quickly, at his slight pause. “Do we have to talk about it?”
    “I was hurt, yesterday,” he said with difficulty. It brought her back to face him.
    Her brown eyes glittered bright and wet. “I’m sorry. I didn’t mean to hurt you,” she told him, unsteadily. It seemed as if a gulf separated them, not just the tiled expanse of the kitchen floor. She couldn’t distinguish his features, his lean, long body a blur through her tears.
    “It wasn’t necessarily that you hurt me, Rob,” he whispered. For a person whom she had always considered to be a strong individual, he was showing an astonishing vulnerability. “It was just that I hurt.”
    “Me, too,” she muttered and hung her head dejectedly. To her intense chagrin, she felt her lips beginning to quiver, and quick, hot tears spilled down her cheeks, two streaking paths. Her hair swung forward, but not quickly enough. From where she was, she could hear his indrawn breath.
    His mellow voice sounded strained then, as he told her, “What you said yesterday needn’t be true, Rob. I know we’ve changed. But I value what we had. You were my best friend.”
    She put her hand to her forehead, blinking rapidly. Strange, how she never cried when she argued with anyone else. Not with her father, not with her girlfriends, nor with the restaurant manager. Only Jason brought that out. Her own voice a bare thread of sound, she whispered, “I missed you when you left. I didn’t have anyone to talk to.”
    “I love you,” he said.
    Her heart gave a great, half-frightened leap. Her head snapped up, and her brown eyes blazed.
    He didn’t see. His own gaze was directed at the floor at his feet. “I can’t say that to many people, certainly not to any of my male friends. It’s just not something you communicate that often, know what I mean? But I do, Rob. I want us to continue being friends very much. Maybe we can’t have quite the openness we had before. Maybe we can, but we have to try.”
    She was utterly stunned. He meant that he loved her as a friend. How else would he have meant it? Of course he had only meant friendship, but when he had said the words, everything inside her had gone crazy. Slowly sanity began to rein in her teeming thoughts; slowly she gained control over herself and realized the value of what he had just offered her.
    This was a man in the first flush of his maturity. This was a man who refused to view an open declaration of feelings as being unmasculine. This was a man with integrity, constant values, high goals. This was a man with a golden future ahead of him, his personality more than fulfilling a potential that she had scarcely realized as a child. This was a rare, special individual, and she would be eager to accept any friendship at all with him.
    His gray eyes lifted to her face. She smiled at him. “I love you too, Jason,” she said quietly, friend to friend, adult to adult. And somewhere in that smile, she let go of her yearnings for their childhood, accepting the changes in herself and in him.
    His answering smile lit his entire, lean face with pleasure. He set his glass down. “Come here, you,” he said, and opened his arms to her.
    She laughed and regardless of the slippery lotion all over her body or his business clothes, she walked over to him. His strong arms folded around her, his head bent over hers, and he held her tight against his chest. She could feel the warm skin of his forearms against her bare back, the slight rasp of his cheek against hers, his legs long, lean, harder than her own, and she sighed as her arms wrapped around his neck. “You’re going to have lotion all over your clothes,” she told him,