Page 88 of Delivery After Dark
“For making me talk about it. I’m famous for running and hiding when things go sideways.”
“You can run, but I’ll always come looking for you—for as long as you want me to, that is, not in a weird stalker kind of way.”
Monique laughed and then let him help her down and onto his lap. “Thank you for clarifying.”
He wrapped his arms around her and held her tightly to his chest. “I don’t want you to worry about anything. Let’s just be together and have all the fun for as long as we can. Like four or five decades maybe.”
“That’s an awfully long time,” she said as she looked up at him.
He kissed her sweetly. “Won’t be long enough for me.”
* * *
Sierra woke before Morgan, cocooned in his arms with her head on his chest and their legs intertwined, as if they’d been sleeping together for years rather than one night. She who normally preferred her own space in bed had never slept better than she had snuggled up to him after three sizzling rounds of life-altering sex.
After being burned in every previous relationship, a girl would normally be thinking about self-preservation at a moment like this, but oddly, that was the last thing on her mind this morning after. A slight adjustment in position gave her a view of his handsome face, relaxed in sleep with morning whiskers covering his jaw.
Except for the scruff, he looked almost boyish, as if he had not a problem in the world. She wished that were true. When she thought about all he’d lost, she ached for him. She’d never had siblings but had grown up close to her cousins. Losing any one of them was unthinkable, as was the thought of life without her dad. They were her essential people since her mom and grandparents had died. He’d lost all his essential people and was forced to go forward alone.
That idea of him completely alone in the world made her feel fiercely protective of a man she barely knew. Although… after last night, she knew him better than she’d ever known any other guy she’d dated.
This whole thing should’ve been terrifying, but for some reason, it wasn’t, which was unsettling. Her normal MO after a hookup—not that she had a lot of them or anything— would be to get the hell out of there and try not to run into the guy anywhere until he forgot about her.
Sometimes they tried to track her down, but she’d become a master at dodging guys she never wanted to see again, which was most of them.
This one, however…
She wasn’t thinking about how to get away from him. Nope, quite the opposite, in fact.
“What’re you thinking about so hard first thing in the morning?” he asked in a raspy voice that made her tingle with awareness of him.
From his voice, for fuck’s sake.
“Nothing much.”
“You gonna start lying to me right out of the gate? Usually, it takes a while for the lying to start.”
“Has that been your experience?”
“Every time. Easier to stay single than to put up with the drama.”
“God, isn’t that the truth?”
“You’ve had your share of it, too?”
“That’s all it is. Nonstop drama and picking fights for the sake of fighting so we can make up and start the whole stupid cycle over again. It’s exhausting.”
“That sounds very familiar. I dated this woman Cheri a couple of years ago. Things were going really well until she got mad when I couldn’t go to her mother’s birthday party because I had Patriots tickets with some of the guys from work. That’d been planned for months, before I ever met her.”
“What did you do?”
“I went to the game, and I never saw her again. Whatever.”
“Don’t you just want to say please be so for real right now?”
“Yes. A thousand times yes.”
“I dated a local guy, Kyle, for six months a while ago. He works on the ferries and isn’t exactly on fire with ambition, but he’s a nice enough guy.”
