Page 114 of The Beekeeper

“It’s been a long day. I’m heading to bed,” she said and backed away from me. “Good night, Blaze.”

I rose, almost losing all my restraint and reaching for her, but then she turned and walked away without waiting for my reply. Any other woman, any other contract, and I would’ve considered the breakup a success. No tears. No blubbering. No begging me not to end things.

What a fucked-up kind of irony it was that the one time I didn’t want it to end was the one time it had to. And that the girl who’d once been obsessed with me was now the woman I’d foolishly gone and fallen in love with.

Chapter 27

Blaze

After one week living with Harper and having to keep my distance, I was on borrowed time. I wanted her—ached for her in ways that were beyond physical and went down to the marrow of my soul. I fucking yearned, God help me—yearned. A word I’d laughed at the first time I’d read it in a script—I’d played a Marquess in a period romance. The word felt like a fiction. An emotion that was good for acting because it didn’t exist in reality. But it did.

Every moment I was around her. Every word we spoke. Every look we shared. Every time we unintentionally touched. We were like two objects in the same orbit and fighting the pull of gravity.

A weaker Blaze—a selfish Blaze would’ve gone crawling back and begged for her. But I couldn’t. Not when the distance was necessary. The fallout from that photo was what I was afraid of. Harper’s rival, Adam, and his little band of online bullies had taken the headline and run with it, more or less accusing her of prostituting herself to give her business a leg up.

Wade did what he could, but he couldn’t force Harper to move forward with the defamation case if she didn’t want to. I did what I could, which was to cast as much doubt as I could that the photo was real. After a week, the photo’s news cycle was decaying and most people were split 50-50 whether or not it was AI; but if any of them caught wind that we were living together, that would be the end of it, and I couldn’t let that happen.

Harper, on the other hand, seemed like ending our fling was as simple as turning a page. There was no sadness in her eyes when she looked at me. No attempt to get close to me. It was like the worst kind of switch had been flipped—the kind that toggled off something that could only be felt.

Maybe I was the one who’d misread all the signs, thinking she felt something when she didn’t. Thinking she wanted more when she didn’t. Maybe she had just wanted a fling. Like the contract outlined. What should’ve been a relief felt like a noose around my neck, the pressure growing tighter every day spent at her house, in her presence, but separate from her.

I’d signed Pais up for another local summer camp this week, so for the few hours she was there in the morning, I escaped the house and Harper and either holed up at Wade’s or drove around looking for the elusive For Sale signs.

That was what I’d been doing this morning when I got Aria’s text like a message from fate; she had a house that I might be interested in seeing that wasn’t on the market yet.

I’d almost forgotten about our conversation at the cookout. I’d told her what I was looking for, but had only been half-focused on the conversation. Less-than-half. Most of my attention had been consumed with watching Harper and Marc…and holding myself back from doing something stupid in front of her family and my daughter.

And afterward, I hadn’t followed up with Aria on anything because of the lawsuit and Harper and…now, I didn’t have an excuse. I needed a new place. A permanent place for Pais and me, and the house in front of me ticked every one of my requirements.

Set back from all roads with acreage for privacy. Check.

Close to Friendship and my family. Check.

Enough space for Pais and me, but not too much that it would be a bitch to take care of. Check.

Space for beehives. Fuck.

The word came back to me before I could stop it: solitary. And with it, a memory…Harper crouched in the sand with a shell in her palm, explaining it to Pais like it was nothing—that most bees don’t live in hives at all. That a queen will find something hollow and make a home in it, alone, and raise her babies there.

Then she’d added that honeybees were the special ones. How they lived. How they worked together. Their happiness in a hive.

I blinked and came back to the middle of a stranger’s empty living room, about to buy a hollow thing to move my daughter into, and I told myself it was the right call.

“Everything’s in tip-top shape. The owners were very particular with their maintenance,” Aria said as we walked through the home. “They just retired and decided to move to Florida, so they want to get all their affairs in order and move before worrying about selling this place. However, as soon as they reached out to me, I immediately thought of you—of what you were looking for.”

I nodded, letting my eyes scan over the immaculate, if dated, interior. “It does seem to fit the bill.”

She went on about a bunch of shit I really didn’t care about, and even though I knew it was a dick move to not pay attention, I was trying to get my head back on straight.

Was this really what I wanted? What I should be doing?

Yes, I argued firmly. I had to. Paisley had taken moving in with Harper way too far. Even if Harper and I…hadn’t ended things, I wouldn’t just casually decide to permanently move in with her. That was insane and way too fucking fast. I hadn’t had a serious relationship basically ever. My first attempt at one shouldn’t start by moving in together—but this wasn’t an attempt because we were over, and I needed to get the hell out of the same house as the woman I couldn’t stop thinking about.

“There’s a small gardening shed outside, too⁠—”

“I’ll take it,” I interrupted her.

“Okay, what about the basement⁠—”