Falling for Fitz Read Online Free Page B

for
you.
    The words hung between them, thick and
heavy, as the world around them slipped away.
    Daisy stared, her mouth and eyes soft,
her heart thumping with longing.
    If it was possible, he was more
beautiful than he’d been that summer. He’d been super-hot at
twenty, but at thirty, he was a man. Tall and blond with those
amazing blue eyes and crazy beautiful cheekbones. His chest was
broader, but his waist was trim, and she remembered what his hips
looked like underneath his tux—a mouth-watering V of contoured
muscle pointing the way to heaven. And she still remembered what it
felt like to feel that hot, hard part of his body inside of
hers.
    For years, Daisy had waited
for him to come to her—waited to hear from him again, for him to
tell her that it didn’t matter if she hated him, it didn’t even
matter that she didn’t want him—he still wanted her, and the strength of his love
was enough for both of them. But, the years had passed, and he
hadn’t come. And he’d certainly never told her that he loved
her.
    After what had happened, her parents
insisted she needed a fresh start, and she’d been whisked out to
San Francisco to live with her mother and finish the rest of high
school there. After which she’d attended a culinary school in Napa
Valley. Following her tall, blond-haired, blue-eyed boyfriend,
Glenn, to Oregon, she’d started baking cookies to help pay the
rent. By the time Glenn skipped town with a friend from Daisy’s
acting group, saying he was finished playing the part of “stand in”
for whomever it was Daisy couldn’t get over, she was making a
decent income with the cookies. She kept baking, her only real
extracurricular pleasure the theater group that allowed her the
relief of being someone else for a few nights every year. It was a
balm to the loneliness of who she actually was.
    When Emily called two
months ago with the news that she and Barrett English had finally
gotten together, Daisy’s brain had been flooded with memories of
the summer she’d spent at Haverford Park with her aunt, uncle, and
cousin as her parents worked out the details of their divorce. But
mostly her memories were of Fitz, and with those memories came the
realization that Glenn was right. In all of her fantasies, Fitz
English was still the leading man. Pathetically, despite Fitz’s
apparent disinterest in her, despite the years that had passed, she
wasn’t over him and she would never be over him unless she deliberately
took steps to get him out of her system. She just couldn’t figure
out how to do that from three thousand miles away.
    When Daisy’s aging father had called
her a few weeks later to share that he was moving from New Jersey
to Haverford, PA to be closer to his brother Felix, he’d also
swallowed his pride and asked if Daisy had any plans to return
east. She’d decided then and there: it was time to go home. It was
time to stop running, to deal with her useless feelings of love for
a man who’d never loved her back. And hopefully, once she’d let go
of Fitz English once and for all, her heart would be free to find
someone else to fill the loneliness in her life. Because that was
what Daisy wanted most of all—to be loved and love someone in
return.
    I’d do anything for
you...
    She looked at his austere face that
showed no trace of affection for her, and she finished the sentence
for him in her head:
    … because I still feel so
damn guilty about my part in what happened.
    Suddenly the spell was broken and she
heard the low buzz of the room again—conversations and laughter and
the tinkling of silverware and glasses.
    She cleared her throat,
looking across the table at Josh, who licked his lips at her and
narrowed his eyes at Fitz. Daisy grimaced. He was taking this
Stanley Kowalski thing a little too seriously. Still, it was better
than “hale-thee-fair-fellow” dentist shtick. At least this way she
looked desirable to someon e on the face of the
earth.
    “ When’s the happy