“Swear on your life. Swear on your life you didn’t touch her, you didn’t kiss her with the same mouth you kissed me with.”
His mouth twists into an ugly grin, a grin at his own expense. “I swear on my life I didn’t touch her. I just needed a ride to the hospital. Aly’s not for me, baby. You’re for me, and Matty. You’re it.”
My heart’s stopped beating. Blood pounds at my ears, at my temples, and my mouth is Sahara dry. God, I want to believe; I want to, I want to.
“Sera,” he continues, spearing with the look in his eyes. My breath hitches and that ache in my chest blooms wider, stronger, unfurling like the petals on a flower to encompass my entire body. My fingers flex in his, and he puts his mouth to them, kissing our combined fingers. The feel of his warm mouth brings back memories of those lips on mine, his taste, even the sounds he makes when I do something he likes. “I love you.”
I can’t breathe, I can’t breathe. Where is all the air in this fraking place?
“You- you don’t mean that.”
His mouth thins out to a grim line, and his blue eyes harden, looking at me hard.
“I love you, Sera, and I’m going to keep saying it until you fucking believe it.”
I can’t think. God, his words, they hit me in the heart and that pain, that constant pain that I’ve lived with for the past month dies a little. The pain was an all-consuming fire and his words of love are like a vacuum, starving the pain until it withers away.
“Say it again,” I order, daring to believe him. Could he really not have cheated on me? I mean, even in this tricked out body, could I ever compete with the beautiful Alysha?
“I love you.” I want to ask: how can you love me when you don’t even like yourself?“Again,” I say, pulverizing his fingers in my grip. “Say it again.” I need to hear it, over and over again so it’s a given truth, rather than a question about how he feels about me.
“I love you, baby. I bloody love you,” he says, letting me hold onto his fingers with mine. I look down at our hands, notice my knuckles have flashed white, and slowly ease up on my Hulk-like grip.
“You’re only saying that because I lost weight.” The reflex is automatic; I deflect what he says he feels for me by cheapening it with how I look in this moment. His fingers spasm in my grip this time around, like he’s unsure whether to pull away or not.
“You sure don’t look like you could haul my ass to the hospital now. Too scrawny.”
I lift my head, eyes wide. “Are you making a joke? At a time like this?”
He grins, kisses our fingers again, crushes his mouth to them with more than a hint of desperation. My heart does a fluttery thing, like the way a piece of silks floats its way down in the air to gently fall to the ground.
“I’m going to start feeding you pancakes for breakfast, lunch and dinner for the next few weeks. We’ll sort you out.”
I sputter, trying to start a conversation. “What? You can’t just expect that you tell me you love me and everything is okay?” I watch his mouth twist into something ugly, something forlorn and broken I don’t know what to do with it. “Why didn’t you come with me to the hospital?” I whisper, and it’s a miracle he even hears me.
The question was meant for him to go back into his bubble in space, not come closer into mine and smack a hard kiss on my mouth. My heart does that fluttery thing again, and the way he grins at me, I feel it between my legs.
“I was pissed. Thought I would cool off.” Now he does move back in his space and can’t meet my eyes. “I was wrong to yell at you. But fuck, you shoulda seen you, giving it right back to me. We’re going to have problems whenever you get mad at me, baby. I wanted to haul you on my bed, and let you use me. I was wrong to yell at you,I was wrong to get pissed at you wanting to take care of Matty when I didn’t want you to.”
My blush is back, except now it’s covering every single inch of my body. Every centimetre of exposed skin tingles. My nipples get hard underneath my bra, a surge of wetness coats my awesome Loki panties.
Hunter stares at me with that determination like he had in the hospital, all that time ago. “I promise for the rest of my life, I will show you how much I love you, how much I want you in my life, in my... son’s.”
Oh yeah, that. “Why did you lie to me?”
“I never lied to you. I told you I don’t lie. You forgot.” People say shit like that all the time, and they never mean it. “I never called Matty my son. That first night, when I came to get the movie – I told you he was my nephew. But I’m the only parent he’s ever known. I’m his Dad, even though I’m really his uncle.”