Page 138 of Wicked Sexy (Wicked Games 2)
“Well, before you do, I have a question. It’s something I’ve been dying to ask.”
Slowly she pulls away, gazing at me with enormous eyes. The heart monitor skips a few beeps, and then starts back up even more furiously. With a little hitch in her voice she asks, “What is it?”
“How did you signal your location?”
She blinks, looking confused. “My…what?”
“Your location. In Alaska. You know, how we knew where to look for you. Did you gain access to Søren’s computer, or—”
“Hello Kitty.”
The answer alone is enough to confuse me, but the flat, embarrassed tone of her voice does too. I’m missing something, and I think it might be important. My brows climb. I wait patiently for more of an explanation.
She shakes her head, lets out this wry little laugh, and looks away, her cheeks flaming. “My watch. I installed a GPS chip in it, made some mods to the Google Earth software installed on my machine so they’d talk.”
“Wow. I’m impressed.”
She shrugs, still avoiding my eyes.
I gently take her chin in my hand. “Tabitha. Why aren’t you looking at m
e?”
“Nothing. It’s nothing.” She looks down at the thin blue blanket covering her legs and starts to pick at it.
Looks like I’m going on a fishing trip. “Did you think I was gonna ask a different question?”
When she bites her lower lip, it comes to me in a flash that takes my breath away. “Wait. Did you think I was gonna pop a question? Like, the question?”
When she says, “No!” all flustered and embarrassed, I know the real answer is yes.
I take her face in my hands and get so close our noses are touching. Looking into her eyes, I say gruffly, “Do you want me to ask the question?”
She sniffs. “I want you to want to ask the question.”
My heart is doing this gymnastic thing under my sternum, like cartwheels and backflips and all kinds of strenuous athletic shit. I can hardly catch my breath. “And I want you to want to say yes to the question. But…”
She stops breathing and blinks up at me. “But?”
I stroke her cheeks with my thumbs and lean in even closer so my lips brush hers when I speak. “But there’s this little forbidden four-letter word I’m wanting to hear you say first.”
Beep! Beep! Beep! Beep! Beep! screeches the heart monitor.
Her voice shaking, she says, “Glove?”
I chuckle, shake my head. “You know very well that’s five letters. And to make it official you also need the word ‘I’ before and the word ‘you’ after. Proceed.”
“Um…I slove you?”
“Also five letters. And weird.”
“This is all weird.”
I’m trying to keep a straight face. “You’re telling me. Go on, I’m waiting. I haven’t got a lot of time you know. I’m elderly. Could kick the bucket any minute.”
She searches my face, stares deep into my eyes, inhales a slow, deep breath. Then she places her hands on both of my cheeks, and very solemnly says, “Connor Hughes, I loathe your sense of humor almost as much as I loathe your face. In fact, I loathe everything about you.”
My heart soars. “God, I love it when you talk in code,” I say gruffly, and crush my lips to hers.
