The Love Experiment (Stubborn Hearts 1)

He was coming unstuck here in front of the Whiskas and the Fancy Feast. “Derelie.”

She turned to face him and stepped closer. “I’m the woman you love.”

“I’m desperately sorry that got said here, now, like that.” He was a writer, a broadcaster, and he’d fumbled the most important declaration of his life.

“I’m not.”

He put his fingers under his glasses to rub the bridge of his nose. “It should’ve been said when we were alone and I was holding you and looking into your spooky eyes and you’d know I meant it.”

“Instead I get the cat food special backdrop, two for one deal.”

He was mortified. “You came to bail me out.” You could slice him, dice him, puree him into cat food.

“Shucks. It was nothing.”

He’d never known how much he needed rescuing until Derelie and her questions opened up his life, until he thought about the meaning behind the Oscar Mayer jingle and why it had stuck around in his earworm collection all this time. Christ, he couldn’t be this lucky to be loved by her.

He picked up the basket, added the cat food. “Let’s get out of here.”

They held hands on the way home, like they’d done all weekend. It was childish, like the jingle, like being a grown man but aching to be loved. No one had held his hand for a very long time; he’d never wanted to hold anyone’s hand. He didn’t want to let Derelie’s go. He held it while he pressed her up against his apartment door, with Martha yowling and pawing the door on the other side. He held it while he kissed her, whispered into her mouth words that’d sounded so bumbled, so loudly wrongly declared and so right at the same time.

“I love you.”

“It’s a cliché, and Jackson Haley doesn’t do clichés.”

She had the edge here. The power to make him bleed. “It’s a fact and I’m the defender of truth.”

There was a loud thump from inside the apartment. Derelie’s eyes were stars and planets and all their mysteries and logic, but maybe too distant for him to reach, until she said, “I love you too.”

Chapter Twenty-One

Jack said he loved her in a million ways to go with the words whispered into her skin, and Derelie said it back, thrilled and terrified, her insides twirling about like an excited puppy discovering its tail for the first time. She’d been the cool one in the pet food section, but now she might wet herself with excitement if she wasn’t careful.

This was real. There was no way to misinterpret the way Jack looked at her, touched her, found a way for her to practice yoga under the stars.

“I want you to meet my parents.” She said it before she’d thought that through. It was a big deal. He might not be into that. She had no desire to meet his. “If you want, and I mean on the phone.” Home was a day’s travel away and they hadn’t made it inside his apartment.

“Only if we get in before Martha punches a way out.”

Judging from the complaints, Martha was one pissed pussycat. As soon as Jack cracked the door she tried to push her way out. He used the grocery bag as a shin level shield and scooped her up with one hand so Derelie could get in without the cat getting out.

“You know how to spoil a moment,” Jack said, holding a purring Martha dangling in outstretched arms. “Drama queen. How am I supposed to convince Derelie to move in if you’re going to carry on like you’re possessed?”

“Did you just ask me to move in with you?”

“Technically, I asked Martha to quit being a hellcat so you don’t run a mile when I ask you to move in.” He stooped to put Martha to the floor. “How do you feel about moving in?”

“You mean more than a few hangers in your closet?”

“I mean half the closet.”

His place was bigger than her shoebox and in a better neighborhood and it had Martha. This was a bigger deal than waving to her parents on FaceTime.

“My hellcat and I would love to have you here, if you can put up with us.”

The hellcat had knocked over the bag of groceries and was head and front paws inside it, butt up, shaggy britches to the fore and tail waving a question mark.

“I get that it might be too soon and it might not be what you want, but you’re here nearly every night, so I thought it made sense.”