Free Hooked #2 (The Hooked Romance Series - Book 2) by Claire Adams

store. A health food store.” Drew shrugged
before me. “I didn’t know it was yours.”
    I started breathing heavily, wanting to crawl into a
shell and hide. I could feel the eyes of all the construction workers behind
me. “This was my home,” I told him simply. I shrugged, feeling tears wafting
down my cheeks.
    But Drew just shook his head. “I have a business
plan. This is where it’s happening.” He licked his lips subtly, feeling the
tension in my eyes. “I’m sorry.”
    I backed away from him, feeling the ultimate
betrayal. I walked back out of the alley, touching my hand to the glass on the
exterior of my beautiful studio. I remembered the hundreds of times I had
entered and exited the door, the way the bell had jangled. I remembered, then,
that I hadn’t grabbed the bell.
    I turned toward Drew, almost ominously. I grabbed my
keys from my key ring and deposited the key in the lock, opening the door. Sure
enough, on the other side, jangled the small bell I had bought at a local craft
store—a store that had since gone out of business. It had been my first
decoration for the goddamned place.
    I jangled it in the air as if it meant everything to
me. I frowned at Drew as I did it, as if everything in the world that was wrong
was his fault.
    And with that, I turned on my heel and walked
sternly back to my apartment. I knew, in my heart, that I couldn’t watch the
place get torn down. I couldn’t watch the place fall. I couldn’t watch each
beautiful brick become unattached from one another. I couldn’t watch my very
heart, my very soul rupture before me.
    Jangling all the way home I walked slowly, serenely,
feeling at one with the spinning earth. Everything bad that had happened in the
past couldn’t affect me anymore. Once, I had been a dancer, the finest at
Butler University—and one of the finest in the country. I remembered the way my
arms had pivoted through the air, the way my face had looked upwards toward my
slender hand during the final pose. I remembered the way they had risen in Clowes Hall, the auditorium, and cheered for me with
resounding applause. I remembered my mother, finally proud, spewing over and
over again that I—and I alone—was her daughter.
    But it all couldn’t go on. A busted knee had
happened; a bad audition had happened. Nobody had wanted me, after all those
years of continual pirouettes, days of starving myself. Nobody had wanted
me—not even myself.
    And yet in these past few weeks, I had thought
things were starting to look up. This brilliant man—this Drew—had wanted me. He
had taken me bungee jumping, and I had been able to feel the serene power of
flying, of jumping to a sure death and coming up strong and energized. I had
been able to enjoy a beautiful dinner with my best friend, her husband, and
this new man—Drew—who seemed to fit in the equation perfectly. Never had
anything come together so perfectly before. Never had my heart beat so
perfectly in tune with another’s.
    Finally, I arrived at my apartment building. It had
started to rain in the cold October air, and I felt the ice-like pellets along
my cheek as I opened the great apartment door. I stomped up the steps, two at a
time, feeling the anger fuel me all the way to the top. I tore into my
apartment, feeling the tears already brimming.
    Boomer was stationed at the coffee table, blinking
up at me. He meowed in that way; like he knew something was wrong, like he knew
the world was ending. I collapsed next to him, allowing him to bounce up on my
lap and nuzzle my cheek.
    “It’s just you and me, Boomer,” I whispered to him.
“It’s just you and me.”
    That night, I spent a long and heavy sob-session
with myself. I poured wine glass after wine glass; I ate ice cream from the
carton. I cried with Meg Ryan as she lost her own, privatized bookshop in New
York City because of Tom Hanks’s dumb, large, Fox Books. I hated Tom Hanks,
American hero, more in that moment than I hated Drew. Why were the