Page 60 of Little Nightmare

Or maybe I did.

Maybe I wanted the torture.

Or maybe the idea of being anywhere but by her side was more painful than being by her side knowing she wished it were someone else.

“Okay.”

I lay down on the bed next to her. “Promise me.”

“What?”

“You’ll protect me and the baby. My life is yours, so is this baby’s.”

“As mine is yours.”

“Will I be a good mom, you think?”

I smiled up at the ceiling. “The baby will probably know how to talk before it can walk, so yeah?—”

She rolled toward me. “Mean.” She flicked my nose. “Sorry I fell asleep on our wedding night.”

“You’re tired, sad, and pregnant. What else would you do?” I shot her a quick glance and looked back up at the ceiling.

Her hand slid around my neck, slowly tilting my head toward hers. “I’ll be loyal. I swear it.”

“I know.” That was the problem. She was too damn loyal, to his memory, to my choice to take the brunt of everything.

Loyalty be damned, I just wanted to kiss the word out of her body and purge it from her soul.

Her eyes locked in on my mouth. “Remember when you rejected me?”

“Vividly. Why?”

“Do you have the will power now?”

“Absolutely,” I lied. “Why?”

“Because you’ve been trying really hard not to look down,” she teased.

I cracked a smile. “I’m not perfect, and your body is mine. It’s not wrong to stare at what belongs to me, right?”

“Then can I stare at what belongs to me?”

Yeah, because that was a good idea, to show her a fully erect man in bed with her just waiting to pounce. “If you want, but I highly doubt it’s a good idea.”

“Why?”

“You scare easily.”

She wrinkled her nose. “Do not.”

“You slept with the lights on for five years after watching the entire Scream series and then blamed me for turning it on in the first place—which I didn’t.”

“You were older. It was more believable,” she pointed out.

I rolled my eyes. “You scream when you see horseflies.”

“They bite.”

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