“She’s still not a fan of me, huh?” He laughs into the curve of my neck and rubs my back soothingly.
“She’s not exactly a fan of me right now either, but she’ll come around.”
“I hope she does, but if she doesn’t, we’re still happening.” His expression sobers. “Too many people, too many times, have come between us. Not again.”
This man, this beautiful, unattainable man is mine. And he loves me like a Mack truck—the huge ones that just keep coming and don’t stop for anything in their path. Being the object of such singular focus can be overwhelming, but it’s also the best feeling in the world.
“Are you saying you want this for good?” I ask, more confident than I’ve ever been.
“For good?” He frowns and gives a quick shake of his head. “For good is too sanitized. I want your dirt and your pain and your darkness. Your weakness and your flaws.”
He sprinkles kisses over my cheeks and nose, leaving adoration everywhere he touches me.
“I don’t want you for good, Banner,” he says. “I want you forever.”
I gasp at hearing the future in his words, of the picture he’s painting.
“I love you,” he tells me again. “I didn’t even think I was capable of saying that, much less feeling it, but I feel it for you.”
He shifts to look down at me.
“I couldn’t say that word even to myself for a long time because I thought I had to be absolutely sure of you.”
“And are you?” I slip my arms around his waist. “Sure of me, I mean.”
“Yes, but mostly I’m sure of myself. I love you, and even if you didn’t love me back, I would still want what’s best for you.” He flicks a look over my shoulder at the closed hospital door. ”I think that’s the way he loves you. He loves you enough to let you go.”
“And could you let me go?” I ask, mischief and hope twined around the question. “If I tried to get away?”
He looks down at me, those glacially blue eyes glinting with the possessiveness that I never thought I would want but from him turns me on.
“Why don’t you try to get away from me again and we’ll find out?”
We both laugh into a tender kiss because we know how much he enjoys the chase.
And that I’d let him catch me.
39
Banner
Girl, you better wake up! The world is watching and waiting!
Before I can grab my phone and silence the app, a muscled forearm reaches across me, plucks it off the bedside table, and hurls it into the wall.
“Uh . . . maybe not the best way to silence my phone,” I mutter into my pillow.
“I thought it was quite effective.” Jared’s deep, sleep-roughened voice rumbles from his chest into my back. “Every morning with that damn app.”
Shout out to shatterproof cases.
“You’re sleeping in,” he says. Under the duvet, he pulls my back into his chest, anchoring us together.
“I need to get up.” My protest is relatively weak because I’m exhausted and have worked out early every morning and worked late every night this week. Spending a Saturday morning in bed with Jared does hold some appeal.
“I think you should stay in bed,” he says, his whisper finding its way through my hair into my ear.
An impish smile sprouts on my face, and I say the words that started it all for us more than ten years ago between spin cycles in a deserted laundromat.