Page 66 of Flirting With Forever
After a while, Gage pulled himself together and returned to the kitchen to find Sloane had dished the food and now sat at the table waiting for him. He leaned over her and kissed her freckled forehead, hoping against hope he was wrong, before lowering himself into the seat across from her.
“Take a bite. Tell me what you think,” she urged.
She could feed him poison right now, and he’d eat it. Do whatever it took to make the fear and pain and loss of control go away. “Looks and smells delicious.” He forked up a bite and released a soft sound, chewing. “Oh, wow. It’s even better than it looks.”
Sloane beamed at the praise, and his heart broke a little more. Why would she care so much about her family when they obviously didn’t treat her well? When she’d felt compelled to run away from them and stay away in the first place?
Why did they matter so much to her when they clearly used their hold over her to try to coerce her?
“Really? It’s been so long since I tried cooking anything. When I was little, my grandma—my mom’s mom—had a special stool made for me, so I wouldn’t fall off because it might’ve happened once or twice,” she said with a scrunch of her nose. “Anyway, she’d help me climb up, and then we’d cook all day. She passed away a few years before my mom, and I’ve really missed puttering in the kitchen. Thanks for letting me use yours.”
If this was puttering, she should have been the chef she’d wanted to be. “It’s amazing, Sloane. Your grandmother would be so proud of you.”
Something flashed across her face before she hid it and took a bite from her plate. Sloane asked about his day and if the cranky old man renting one of their properties had calmed down over the fact the tourists next door had been noisy over the weekend.
They talked about everything and nothing. And steered far away from the topic sitting right there between them, the size of an elephant.
Unlike Alec, Sloane hadn’t mentioned Noah’s visit to the rental building, which meant whatever he’d said was probably worse than when Dawson had seen the two of them talking by the pier.
Dinner over, dessert eaten, dishes done, Gage followed Sloane to the couch, and they curled up together beneath a throw blanket one of his sisters-in-law had given him for a housewarming present.
He clicked on the fireplace to combat the lowering temperature outside, and with the lights off, it made for a cozy atmosphere that belied the tension riding them both. Time passed as they stared into the flames, lost to their own thoughts and the quiet unease of things unsaid.
After a while, he tightened his arm around her and kissed the top of her head. Sloane took a breath, her chest pressing against him, before she slid her head back on his bicep, staring up at him with her beautiful eyes.
He couldn’t ignore the urge to kiss her a moment longer, to lose himself in the woman in his arms before she disappeared as though she hadn’t rocked his world the first moment he’d found her sleeping in her car outside the building.
Gage lowered his head and took her lips with all the unspoken frustration he felt. “Merida.”
She lifted her hand and touched her fingertip to the corner of his mouth, silencing his words of complaint while shifting against him to sit up. He fought off a curse, thought she was leaving the couch, but her elbow dug into his chest as she leaned over him instead.
He ignored the poke of pain, watching her, memorizing every detail of her face and her gaze and her vanilla-raspberry scent as she lowered her head and brushed her lips against his. He let her control the kiss, sensing her need to have this moment. To lead this to…wherever it might go.
She shifted again, leveraging herself to lean more fully over him and deepening the kiss. Gage slid a hand into her thick hair and gently gripped her nape, encouraging her and drawing a heady gasp from her throat that turned into a soft moan.
Kiss by kiss, touch by touch, moment by moment, they said with their bodies all the things they couldn’t say with words…
Sloane had a plan—but she couldn’t say it was a good one.
It was an awful one, in fact. But it was the only option she had, and since her back was against the wall, it had to work.
But she didn’t want to have regrets. So, she’d said goodbye to Gage last night in case everything went wrong and she couldn’t make it back to him. She couldn’t leave Carolina Cove without taking those hours for herself. To be with him and know what it was like to truly love. To feel loved.
Yeah, that would have been a huge regret. Somewhere over the course of the last two months, she’d fallen completely and wholly in love with him. From his grumpy, workaholic ways to his insanely sexy lips to the way he gazed at her when he thought she wasn’t looking.
The way he kissed her. Touched her. The way he cradled her in his arms and made her feel so safe, like the world wasn’t as crazy and messed up as it was.
That her family wasn’t blackmailing her by threatening Gage. “Remember what happened last time.”
Her hands gripped the wheel of her car as she pulled into Dawson’s driveway in the wee early hours the following morning.
She’d barely slept. Not wanting to miss a moment with Gage and watching him sleep in case it was the only chance she got with the man she loved.
Because she did love him. She wasn’t sure when or how or why it had happened now of all times, but Gage was more than a friend or a boss or a fling or any of the other ridiculous term bandied about today to describe a situationship.
No, she loved him. So much that if sacrificing her own happiness or life, should her plan backfire, was the price for keeping Gage safe, she’d do it willingly and happily.
She never wanted to have the regret in her eyes that Noah had when she’d asked how he’d become the man that he was. Never wanted to know she was to blame for Gage getting hurt on any level. And that meant ending any chance of it happening.
