Like a lost little kitten, Willow cried into Jasper’s arms.
Her tears soaked into his shirt, warm and wet, causing the fabric to adhere to his lean muscular chest, and searing his heart with the heat of her emotions.
He hesitated just a moment longer, but then wrapped his arms securely around her, and let her cry.
Time went by. Moments became minutes.
Having cried for a good long while, Willow felt better now, and some of her strength had returned.
Realizing that this might not be an appropriate situation to be in with her own boss, Willow pulled away and straightened up, blinking at him with red, raw eyes. “Sorry! I’ve dirtied your shirt! I’ll clean it for you!” Her voice was hoarse now, and also kind of choked.
Hearing those words from her stung Jasper’s heart.
With everything that she’d just gone through, she was still worried about his shirt?
She deserved better than this.
He untied the rope from her wrists. “What exactly happened, here?”
Here he’d assumed that she was hooking up with Dale White. The personal affairs of his employees were none of his business. He’d never been one to get involved in such sordid matters. He would have just forgotten all about seeing them together…
Except… when he thought about the scent of Willow’s body… the soft, tender texture of her skin… exactly the same as that woman who’d saved him, five years ago…
To allow another man to taste her sweet, sensual pleasures…!
The very idea of it plunged his heart into a roiling storm of chaos.
And so he’d turned back, and rushed to the hotel himself.
There, he discovered that he’d been mistaken: Willow hadn’t come with Dale willingly; she’d been kidnapped by him… and he’d very nearly managed to do something awful to her.
Willow struggled with his question. Trying to remember the events of the evening meant that those terrifying moments came back to her one after another…
Once again, her tears began to fall anew.
She could barely speak to answer, “I hailed a cab to get home, but the driver turned out to be Dale White. It took me a moment to realize something was wrong, and then I pleaded with him to stop the car, but he wouldn’t stop… he brought me here, into this parking lot… he tied me up, blamed me for his wife leaving him, said I’d have to take her place…”
In the silence between them, there was perhaps a special little something, which couldn’t quite be described.
Before long, they arrived outside Willow’s apartment. Jasper drove all the way up to the building she stayed in.
Willow got out of the car, then turned back around. “Mr Hughes… thank you so much…”
Jasper remembered her biting him. His gaze dipped slightly, and in a gentle voice, he asked, “Five years ago… where were you? What were you doing with your life?”
“Five years ago…?” This question caught her off-guard. Why would Jasper suddenly be inquiring about her past?
It took her a moment’s thought before she could answer: “I was in Buscen City, studying in university.”
Five years ago, she was a student in a university… if not for that tragedy, she would be a designer now.
“You went to university? Then why are you working as a janitor?”
Being a janitor was basically a minimum-wage, dead-end career. Surely a university graduate should have been able to land a desk job, at the very least?
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