Know Your Heart: A New Zealand - Tracey Alvarez Page 0,48
to subside, the pounding of her heart to slow.
“Yeah. Only I’d like to know it’s me you see while I make you come,” he added so quietly she thought she’d imagined it.
The irony that he could even consider that she wouldn’t see him pulsed hotly behind her eyes. She couldn’t see anything but him. Close her eyes—and she did so now to prove a point—and all she saw was his blue eyes, dark with emotion as he’d looked down at her in his arms earlier that night after rescuing her from the caravan.
Irony, you are a cruel, meddlesome bitch.
Because as soon as she pondered on his unexpected vulnerability, it raised one of her own. She didn’t want to be with Glen as Savannah Payne, a stroke to his ego. She just wanted to be with him. Not as an actress, not as the teenage girl she suspected he crushed on, just Savannah. Because this wasn’t Notting-bloody-Hill and she wasn’t Julia Roberts.
Light bloomed against the window drapes as lightning lit up the night sky. Muscles in his arms flexed, tightening around her waist.
“I could be anyone here with you in the dark,” she said. “Angelina Jolie. Jennifer Lopez. Cameron Diaz. Anyone.”
“You could, but you’re not. I’d know you anywhere by the way I feel when you’re close by.”
“Irritated beyond belief? Like when there’s a mosquito dive-bombing you at night.”
“There is that aspect.” He chuckled. “But it’s different from the way I used to feel around you, back in the bad old days.”
“How did you feel?” Sav tightened her fingers on the pillow’s corner.
“Invisible.”
That one word reached into her chest and clawed her heart to bloody shreds. She knew all about feeling invisible—the scars left behind when the people you loved didn’t notice you. When your best efforts to gain their attention fell short over and over. When you weren’t high in their priorities so you had to make them notice by being the best, by hogging the spotlight. And even then, sometimes the people you loved walked away, or moved to a different country with their new, improved family…
“You weren’t invisible; there was just a lot of stuff competing for my attention—exams, theatre club, auditions and rehearsals, and the rest of my teenage dramas.”
“I blended in.” A breath that could’ve been a sigh. “While you stood out in a crowd.”
“I remember some things.”
She’d thought and thought about those days since meeting Glen again. And while there were things that still teased her subconscious, what Glen-memories she’d dragged to the surface were sweet ones.
“You were quiet and kind of serious. I think I remember you watching me a few times. You were frowning, as if I were just a silly girl trying to fit in with my cousin’s older friends.”
“I was frowning because I didn’t like the way Liam treated you when Nate wasn’t keeping a close eye on him.” He paused. “I never thought you were silly.”
She said nothing, just settled into his warmth as if it were natural for the two of them to spoon. Yawning, she traced a circle on the back of his hand with a fingertip. “Do I still make you feel like you’re invisible?”
And if he said yes, she’d win the title of world’s biggest bitch.
“No.” A drawn out sigh, as if he didn’t want to think about it anymore. “Now you make me feel like I’m a steel rod at the top of a sky scraper, waiting for a strike to come out of a mid-summer storm.”
So was she the storm or the lightning bolt or the sky scraper? She crinkled her nose, let her eyelids drift shut. “Anyone ever tell you you should be a writer?”
“Yeah, once upon a time someone did. Now shut up and go to sleep.”
With a smile on her face, Savannah did.
Chapter 8
Glen woke expecting to find a warm, curvy blonde in his arms. Instead he opened his eyes to the steady downpour of rain and cool, empty sheets.
The old walk of shame in the early morning hours.
Except they hadn’t done anything to be ashamed of, though he’d let his guard down, saying things he probably shouldn’t have. Glen scrunched up his face and snatched his phone from the nightstand.
9:03 a.m.
He slid over Savannah’s fancy sheets until his ass hit the bed edge and then sat up. Hands jammed into his hair, knees on elbows, he blinked at the floorboards. He never slept in this late. And he never slept so deeply with a woman in his space.