Fate Actually (Moonstone Cove #2) - Elizabeth Hunter Page 0,58
tell me that I’m groping someone?” She pointed at the party. “You come in, make one snap decision, and decide to just throw away all my feelings for you?” She stood on her toes. “Screw you, Henry!”
Henry’s jaw was hanging open. “What the hell was that?”
“That’s fucking empathy! And if you don’t know what that means by now—”
“That is not…” He grabbed her arm and opened the truck door. “Okay, we’re not doing this in front of your family.”
“Fuck you!” She tried to yank her arm away, but his grip was firm and she didn’t really want him to let go. She was just annoyed. Really, extremely annoyed.
Henry muttered, “Like locking myself in a cardboard box with a bobcat.” He nudged her into the truck cab. “Don’t argue, Toni.”
“Fucking men and their fucking high-handed—”
He slammed the door shut.
Toni watched him walk around the front of the truck, his eyes locked on her. “You think you know what’s going on? You have no idea!”
He opened the truck door. “Stop yelling.”
“I don’t have to!”
“Why are you yelling?” He slammed the door closed. “What did you do to me?”
“You were fucking furious!” She felt like hitting something. Anything. “So I grabbed that, and I haven’t ever done anything that extreme before, and now I’m fucking furious and I have no idea how to calm down!”
“For Pete’s sake.” He started the truck. “I don’t know what the hell is going on here. Is this some kind of pregnancy symptom I’ve never read about?”
“Oh, of course you’re reading books about pregnancy. Of course you are!” She sat back in her seat and didn’t argue when Henry reached across and buckled her in. “That is exactly something you would do.”
“Why are you pissed off about me reading pregnancy books?”
“Just drive me somewhere I can yell really loud, okay?” She felt like her skin was crawling over her body. “I am never doing that again.”
Henry started driving down the hill, his face a grim mask. “What did you do, Toni?”
“I. Have. Empathy. Okay? Not the usual kind. I can literally feel people’s feelings. And sometimes—like now!—I can even influence them. You were furious at the party, so I calmed you down.” She crossed her arms. “And I probably miscalculated just how mad you were.”
“Apparently.” His face was grim. “At the risk of starting a massive argument, why were your hands all over that accountant?”
“Because I was questioning him!” She felt a headache coming on, a gripping tension headache that was building at the back of her scalp. “It’s the same way I got Marissa to talk to me. If I kept skin contact with him, I could make him calm. I didn’t grab his emotions; I let him feel mine. Or what I wanted him to feel—I’m still learning how all this works, okay!”
“Okay.” Henry’s voice was tuned low. “That is… very weird. If you make them calm, they’ll answer your questions?”
“Exactly.”
“Have you done that to me before?”
“No! The most I’ve done is absorb your mellow. If I’m upset or stressed, you’re like a living fucking meditation aid. All I have to do is touch you and I chill out.”
Why was she so angry? Toni felt like she was having an out-of-body experience. Purposely absorbing all of Henry’s anger had been an absolutely idiotic thing to do.
“Huh.” His face was oddly blank. “Is that why you like me? Because I’m calm?”
“I fucking liked you before all this shit happened to me at the gym, okay? Don’t make this about that. I already knew you were fucking sexy as hell and our chemistry was off the fucking charts, Henry! I fell in love with you when I could literally feel how honest and genuinely good you are, okay? I am not going to apologize for that.”
Toni, what the hell are you doing—you just told Henry you love him!
His smile was luminous. “You love me, huh?”
Take it back. Tell him you were in an altered state.
“Of course I fucking love you!”
Ahhhhhh! This was a disaster! She was so angry she’d turned into a truth-spewing harpy!
Henry chuckled. “I think I like this.”
“Don’t ask me anything else, okay? Just take me somewhere that I can punch something!”
“We’re going back to my place.”
“Fucking hell, Henry, take me home!”
“I have a punching bag in my garage.” He turned north on the highway and headed into town. “You can work out your mad on that.”
“Good! And for the record” —she pointed at herself— “this is your mad, not mine!”