Fate Actually (Moonstone Cove #2) - Elizabeth Hunter Page 0,59
this was far longer lasting than anything she’d experienced before. Which was probably good to know. When Henry got really angry, he held on to it. Probably a useful reference for the future.
“So tell me more about how you fell in love with me,” Henry said. “I’m really curious about this. Was it before or after you got pregnant?”
Shut up. Just shut up and— “It was after you pulled that really nasty redwood splinter out of my hand.”
Henry blinked and turned toward his house. “That was six months ago.”
“I’ve been in denial a long time, okay? Not all of us are emotional geniuses or whatever.”
“Hey.” He rubbed her thigh. “Look at that. You didn’t yell. I think you’re calming down.”
“Don’t touch me!”
“Or maybe not.”
Toni woke with a head full of cobwebs and hands that ached. She sat up and realized she was in a strange bed and a familiar jowly dog stood next to her, his head resting on the edge of the mattress.
“Earl.” She reached out to pet him and let out a low groan. “What the hell happened to my hands?”
Just then she heard footsteps coming down the hall. Henry opened the door, holding a tray of tea and two towels. “There you are. I thought I heard your voice.”
He was shirtless, wearing only a pair of grey sweatpants, and Toni saw four long scratches on his left shoulder.
She wanted to die. “Did I do that?”
Henry set down the tray, glanced at his shoulder, and reached for the towel. “Uh, yeah. You did. I didn’t really realize at the time. That was… pretty intense.”
Memories came flooding back, and Toni covered her face with both hands and fell back on the pillows. “Oh my God.”
He reached over, took her right hand, and folded it into a cotton towel filled with ice. “So the punching bag kind of worked for a while, but then you lost interest in that and got very interested in something else.”
“Oh my God.” She wanted to literally be absorbed into Henry’s too-small bed and disappear.
He let out a small laugh and pulled her left hand from her face. “Do you hear me complaining? Come here. Do you need some aspirin? You were complaining about a headache earlier.”
“I want aspirin, but I also don’t want to move.”
He kept her right hand wrapped in the ice-filled towel and pulled her over his bare chest, draping her left arm across him as he reached over and rubbed her temple. “So the thing at the gym, huh? You told me as little as possible about that whole thing. That’s what triggered all this?”
The rhythmic touch soothed her. “Yes. Katherine tackled the man with the gun, and then I jumped on him, held him down and… I just knew that more than anything in the world, he needed to calm down. So I made him calm. I don’t know how it happened.”
“And after that is when you got to be good friends with Megan and Katherine, right?”
“Yeah.” Her eyes drifted closed. What the hell? They wouldn’t mind. It was Henry. “Katherine is a seer. I think that’s what they call it. She has visions, but they usually only happen minutes before the event. Makes it hard to do much about them, but it is an early-warning system.”
“And Megan?”
Her ear was against his heart, and she felt the slow steady thump through her whole body. “She has telekinesis. She doesn’t always find it very useful, but she’s trying to work on it. Focus her energy better, maybe? I don’t know. We know a few other psychics up in Glimmer Lake, but other than that, it’s hard to tell what’s good information and what’s bullshit, you know?”
“Uh-huh.”
“You can’t believe everything you read online.”
“I’ve heard that.”
“And there’s a lot we don’t know. Like, I’ve never tried to purposely absorb someone’s emotions before like I did with you.”
“That was weird. I’m not going to lie about that. Very weird experience.”
“But I was just trying to get info about the Fairfield estate. For the record, I was really pissed at Jackie for setting it up like that. I don’t think she knew I invited you.”
“As your boyfriend?”
“Yeah.” Her eyes were closing again. “Why am I so tired?”
“Probably because it’s nearly midnight.”
“This day has been really strange.”
“I don’t disagree with that.”
She felt unfinished somehow, like there was something hanging over her head. Flashes of the afternoon started coming back to her.
I fell in love with you when I could literally feel how honest and genuinely good