Here Comes the Rainne Again (Invertary 6)

She smiled at the husky timbre of his voice as she blinked open her eyes to look at her alarm clock. It was three a.m.

His hand smoothed back down to curve around her behind.

“You have a backside that brings a man to his knees.” There was awe in his voice.

Rainne turned her head so she could look at him. The light was still on in her hall and her bedroom door was wide open. He looked good in the soft glow. He looked even better in her bed. Her stomach clenched. He might look edible, but she wasn’t sure he should be there.

“Alastair,” she started, but he silenced her by leaning forward and kissing her gently.

She sighed as she sank deeper into the bed.

He pulled back slightly to look at her. “So, here’s the thing,” he said as he ran his thumb over her bottom lip. “I’ve decided I’m moving in.”

Her eyes went wide. “What?”

“I’m moving in. Here. With you.”

She blinked. “What?”

He smiled that devastatingly sexy smile that made her mind turn to mush. She couldn’t afford a mushy mind. She needed to think straight. She closed her eyes tight against the distraction.

“You can’t stay here.” Her stomach clenched with panic. She didn’t know what to think. He wasn’t making sense. What about his business? His future in Invertary? What about not trusting her to stay with him? Was he just going to ignore it all?

“Course I can.”

She could hear the smile in his voice. At least she couldn’t see it. That helped her resolve.

“We talked about this. You don’t trust me. The problems in our past are too big to overcome.”

“Well, to be honest, we didn’t talk. You talked and then you left. You have got to stop doing that, Rainbow. It makes it hard to have a conversation when you keep leaving.”

She opened her mouth to answer that stupidity, but he put a finger to her lips. “Here’s what I was going to say before you did my thinking for me. Three years ago I tried to push you into a commitment with me that you weren’t ready for. That we weren’t ready for. I understand that now.”

She started to protest, but he tapped her lips. She opened her eyes and frowned at him. If he did that again, she was so going to bite his finger.

“I was immature,” he said. “I was trying to tie you to me in order to ease my fears. It wasn’t realistic. It made you panic. Then when you left, it made me close up emotionally.”

“Close up emotionally?”

“I spent five days stuck in a hospital room with Mitch. When he wasn’t talking about the epiphany he had when he almost died, he was analysing me. It was hell.”

“And yet here you are, quoting the man.” It was amazing how he could make her smile even when they were in the middle of something so heavy.

“I didn’t say he was wrong, just that I didn’t need to endure all that chitchat, heart-to-heart crap.”

“Did you have to go straight out and fish and hunt something to prove you’re still a manly man?” She really wanted to giggle.

“No.” Alastair’s face sobered. “I came straight here.”

Oh. Her eyes dropped away from his penetrating stare, but it didn’t help. Instead of the emotion in his eyes, she was confronted by ab perfection and temptation of a different kind.

“Anyway,” he said. “I sorted out our problems while I was stuck in the hospital.”

She looked back up at him. “Do I want to hear this?”

“Aye, you do. Because it means we both get what we want.”

“Which is?” Her heart pounded a mile a minute at the thought of getting what she wanted. Of getting him. For real. Forever.