Total pages in book: 120
Estimated words: 121755 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 609(@200wpm)___ 487(@250wpm)___ 406(@300wpm)
Estimated words: 121755 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 609(@200wpm)___ 487(@250wpm)___ 406(@300wpm)
“Not about yesterday morning.” Gabe, being all that was Gabe, didn’t delay with his reply. “But I will tell you I’ve been in love twice. One didn’t work out because it couldn’t. And the other didn’t work out because she was a cunt.”
My head jerked back.
Ummmm…
“A cunt?” I asked.
His hold tightened on me, and he soothed, “I know you women don’t like that word, but—”
“How was she a cunt?” I demanded.
“How?” he asked, watching me not only close-up, but closely.
With a hefty tug, I pulled from his arms only to sit up and frown down at him.
“What did she do to you?” I asked.
“Babe—” he started to curl up.
I slapped a hand in his magnificent, furred chest and held him down.
“Talk, Gabriel Stark.”
He pressed his lips together, but his eyes danced, and he settled on his back.
The view was marvelous.
But the fact he found this amusing was ticking me off.
“Don’t you annoy me,” I snapped. “Give it up.”
That smirk returned, but he talked through it this time.
“She wasn’t happy when I had to work on my thesis and not kiss her ass. She wasn’t happy when her friend got a DUI, and I didn’t ‘fix it,’ and the bitch was so over the limit, not only was she looking at jailtime, she’d committed felony property damage by jumping a curb and running into someone’s porch. When my ex got wasted, she got belligerent and often got into fights with women, and men, then she’d say shit like, ‘My man is a cop and he’ll bust your ass,’ and pull me right into her shit. And she was a bitch to servers. Like, always.”
I saw red.
Thus, it was a near on shriek when I asked, “She was a bitch to servers?”
“She’s long gone, cupcake.”
“If she was all of that, how did you fall in love with her?”
“Well, she wasn’t all that all at once. It took me a while to piece it together. In the end, it was about the fact we were young, but I was the only one in our relationship who was getting any older.”
Ah.
That made sense.
He grinned. “And she gave great head.”
I rolled my eyes.
He surged up, caught me, twisted both of us, and I landed on my back with his delicious weight on top.
Nice move, Dreamer drawled.
I feel my control slipping every second, Logic groused.
As it always does, Dreamer returned. You never stay long. We’re too strong for that, Pessimism. You have your times when we need you, but when it’s time for you to go, we always win.
I went completely still.
“Willow?” Gabe called.
Hold up.
That wasn’t my Logic.
It was my Pessimism.
Holy shit.
Gabe cupped my cheek and ran a calloused thumb over my lips.
“Baby,” he said uneasily.
I focused on him. “It’s Pessimism.”
“Say again?”
“Not Logic,” I went on.
“Sorry, cupcake, you aren’t making any sense.”
“I…I need to think on this.”
“On what?”
God, was I going to give this to him?
Guess I was.
“I just realized I’ve mistaken pessimism for logic. I thought I was being smart. Protective. But I was being cynical.”
“And protective,” he added.
“Sorry?”
“Maybe you veered into the cynicism arena, but mostly it wasn’t pessimism. It was an overabundance of caution.”
Well then.
That sounded better.
I decided to go with that.
I smiled at him.
His eyes dropped to my smile, and he murmured, “There it is. Growth.”
Seriously?
How was that the nicest thing a guy ever said to me?
I was about to share that I was cognitively, decisively inching closer to very ready to share some very private things with him, and we might want to try out some of the preliminaries to see how they fit, when my phone buzzed with a call.
We both twisted our heads to my nightstand.
My cell had a picture of Tex behind the barista counter in the coffee cubby. He was smiling like the scary, lovable lunatic he was.
And over the picture it said, Tex Calling.
“Shit, Tex never calls me,” I muttered.
Gabe reached for my phone and gave it to me.
I took the call.
“Hey, Tex. Is everything all right?”
“Have you and Stark…” There was an alarming gurgle like he was literally vomiting, and then he finished, “Sealed the deal yet?”
“Oh my God, Tex!” I snapped. “No! And stay out of my sex life.”
“Fuck, I’m out. Lucia’s out. And Luke’s out,” he mumbled. “And I don’t feel warm fuzzies about telling Luke Stark he lost that kinda bread.”
With that he hung up on me.
Yeesh.
How much was a buy-in on that bet, anyway?
“The pool?” Gabe asked.
“The pool,” I grumbled.
Gabe chuckled.
Feeling it as well as seeing it and hearing it, I wondered if it, along with his smiles and grins, were so hard to come by because of whatever was behind what happened yesterday morning.
I’d barely come to terms with the fact my Pessimism/Cynicism/Caution was seriously messing with my Will the Real Willow Knightley Please Stand Up Mojo, I was in no place to tell Gabe I was there with him yet so I could find out if it was true.