Chapter Twenty-Nine Grant
Chapter Twenty-Nine
Grant
There was no calming the hot rush of anticipation that she wasn’t leaving. That I had more time. I slid the hotel key from my pocket and allowed her to precede me into the room, trying to ignore that frantic thump, thump, thump of my heart.
Her eyes took in everything quickly, from the navy walls and perfectly made bed to the stacks of my folded clothes on the bureau, the half-eaten room service tray still sitting next to the armchair, only stopping when she landed on the framed photo on the nightstand.
Mercy perched on the side of my bed and picked up the frame.
She’d unburdened a great weight already, but she was still here for a reason, and I would not be the one to rush her out the door. I’d let her stay forever.
“What do we fight about?” she asked quietly, gaze still locked on the photo.
I tilted my head to the side. “Sorry?”
Mercy looked up. The tears were gone from her eyes, only the redness surrounding them leaving any hint of the heaviness in the hallway.
“What do we argue about? What do I do that drives you crazy?” When my mouth quirked, she held up a hand. “Not I want to have sex with you crazy, but I’m going to go scream into my pillow if you do that again crazy.”
“You want me to . . . complain about you,” I said slowly.
“Yes.”
My eyebrows shot up. “All right. Um . . . you always leave one bite of food on your plate, even if you love the thing you’re eating.”
“I do no—”
“Yes,” I interrupted. “You do. Trust me, I’ve paid attention.” I set my hands on my hips and stared into her face. “You hate using captions when we watch a show or a movie. We argue about it every bloody time.”
“Because captions are annoying. I get distracted.”
“Yes, well, I’m older than you, and old people like having captions on. It makes it easier to watch.”
She rolled her eyes. “You’re thirty-five. You’re not old.”
“And your hair.” My gaze tracked over the messy knot at the top of her head. “Let’s talk about your hair.”
Mercy shifted uncomfortably on the bed. “What about it?”
“If I find one more wadded-up nest of hair stuck to the shower tiles, I’m liable to go mental.”
She was off the bed, eyes flashing as she poked her finger in my chest. “You have no idea what it’s like to have thick hair, and it’s perfectly normal to shed up to a hundred strands a day.”
“I could make an entire bedding set from what you leave in the shower during a week’s time.”
Her mouth fell open. “Would you rather have it go down the drain? It’ll get clogged, and I can’t imagine you’ll be happy then either.”
I leaned in and dropped my voice. “Then throw it away when you leave the shower, it’s not that bloody hard.
” I groaned. “And don’t even get me started on the way you hog the covers.
I used to wake up every fucking morning, dreaming of a day when my wife would deign to share the blankets with me.
It’s a miracle I haven’t come down with hypothermia. ”
Her jaw was set at a stubborn tilt. “Okay, you came up with that list really easily.”
I held her gaze. “Do you want more?”
“No,” she answered mulishly.
“Did it help?”
God, she better say yes. I felt the slightest crackle of electricity coursing under my skin, sending my pulse sky-high.
Mercy’s eyes didn’t drop. “No.”
“Excellent. How about a list of what bothers you about me?”
She blinked. Blinked again. “You know that off the top of your head?”
“You hate that I make the bed immediately after waking. Sometimes I start tidying the blankets when you’re in it, which is no small feat, since they’re wrapped around you like a bloody burrito.” I licked my bottom lip. “You’ve threatened my life more than once for that.”
Mercy pushed her tongue into the side of her cheek. “Yes, this helps. Keep going.”
“That I put my laundry away as soon as I’ve pulled it from the dryer.”
“You do not.”
I held my arms out. “Why would I wait? What’s the point?”
“Because everyone lets their clean clothes have a settling day,” she said, expression incredulous. “It has to sit in the basket for at least twenty-four hours before I’m mentally prepared to fold it.”
“Trust me, I’m aware, because I trip over that basket every fucking week.” I touched the end of her nose and she smacked my hand away. “Add that to my list as well.”
Mercy crossed her arms, color high in her cheeks. “What else?”
“You want more?”
“As much as you’ve got, Hastings.”
I grinned, smug and just on the edge of feral, and her eyes snagged on my lips and froze as her throat worked in a swallow. “You hate that I always drive the speed limit.”
Her mouth fell open, eyes snapping back up to mine, wide with horror. “You do what? That’s a suggestion.”
“It’s the law, Kincaid. Which you know, because you’ve talked your way out of twelve speeding tickets since you turned eighteen.” I adopted an innocent expression. “Do you know who’s never had to do that? Me.”
“I haven’t talked myself out of anything—I just happened to get really nice cops every time.”
“Of course.” The sarcasm, thick and heavy in the way I dragged out the second word, made her eyes narrow, her fingers curled up into a fist at her side. “Thinking about hitting me, darling?”
“You have no idea.”
I dipped my chin. “Try it. The last time we said something similar—during an argument much like this one—I had you flat on your back before you could blink. Everything happened rather quickly after that, but I promise you weren’t angry for much longer. Not with my mouth between your legs.”
She sucked in a sharp breath, dropping her gaze from my eyes to my mouth, then back again. “I didn’t come here to have sex with you.”
“I know.” I canted my head, watching as she rolled her lips in and took a step back.
The distance allowed me to clear my thoughts.
I couldn’t find it in me to be ashamed by how quickly we’d turned this conversation on its head, because that was us.
Had always been us. We teetered on a constantly fraying tightrope where my composure was tested beyond belief.
She almost always snapped first, and that was the fun of it.
When I knew she was trying to drag me into the heat with her while it licked at her skin.
“We quarrel over utter nonsense on a regular basis. Is that what you wanted to hear?”
“Maybe.”
I sighed, allowing my expression to show her just how thoroughly I adored her. I didn’t want to hide that any longer. It was too much work. I wanted her to see just how completely I was hers.
“We don’t have a perfect relationship, Mercy.
We never have. And I’m not trying to capture exactly what we were before.
” I spread my arms out and let them fall by my sides.
“The flowers and the phone calls and this stupid hotel room, it’s my incredibly imperfect way of trying to show you how much I love you.
You, Mercy. You. In every universe. In every lifetime. ”
She inhaled shakily, her eyes glimmering again as she searched my face. “Before, who said ‘I love you’ first?”
Hope struck me like a lightning bolt, dead center and spreading out to my fingertips. “You did.” I exhaled a laugh. “You were quite annoyed by it, actually. Yelled it. Like I’d done something wrong.”
A tear slipped down her cheek. “I guess it’s fair, then, that you said it first this time.”
“I suppose.”
She took a step closer, and I held my body perfectly still while she reached up to touch my face. Her fingertips were soft and cool as she traced the line of my jaw. My entire body shook from the effort it took not to crush her against my chest and take her mouth in a ferocious kiss.
“Damn you, Grant Hastings,” she whispered. “You have made it impossible not to fall in love with you again. And if you ever think about leaving me before we’re old and wrinkled, I will never forgive—”
I kissed her before she said another word.
I kissed her before she could take it back.
I kissed her as tears, hers and mine, mingled between our lips.
I kissed her.
And my wife kissed me right back.
Mercy flung her arms around my shoulders and sighed. I could hardly hear it over the thunderous beat of my heart roaring in my ears. The hair on my arms lifted in goose bumps when her cool, soft tongue swept against mine.
I wasn’t dreaming. I was awake and it was real and she was mine and I had her in my arms. I’d never let her go.
I love you.
You came back.
You came back.
Don’t ever leave me.
I pulled back, hardly able to see her through the tears in my eyes. “Are you sure?”
It was her turn to brush the tears off my cheeks. She smiled, and my entire bloody soul shook, like a key turned in the lock, and I could breathe again.
“I want you to come home,” she said, leaning up onto the balls of her feet to give me another lingering kiss. “I don’t want to spend another night without you next to me.”
I kissed the tip of her nose first. Her cheeks and the arch of her brow and the bridge of her nose.
Her lips. Her perfect, lush lips. She opened her mouth, and I swept in my tongue, groaning at the taste of her.
I gripped her close, our bodies tightly pressed as we stumbled toward the general direction of the bed.
Mercy slid her fingers underneath my T-shirt and sighed as she splayed them wide over my stomach. I kissed down the line of her jaw and sucked on the skin of her neck, fingers digging into the curve of her hips.
“Wait,” she said in a halting voice, though her fingers didn’t stop moving, tickling along the line of hair that disappeared into the waistband of my trousers. “You said you’d be good. I don’t want to make you . . . make you . . .”
“Make me what?” I sucked her earlobe between my lips and tugged with the edge of my teeth.
She moaned, and that sound, bloody hell, that sound was like tipping a can of gasoline over an open fire. There was nothing but heat. Flames. I’d let the world burn to ash before I stopped what was happening here.