Page 39 of Hunter

It isn’t your fault.

And then I cried. I cried with all my will, blubbering and sobbing and shaking with such a force that the walls that kept the pain trapped inside, kept the guilt from escaping me, making sure it remained and reminded me of what I had done, came crumbling down.

My tears turned into sobs, and my heart poured out onto Hunter’s shirt. I probably smeared snot all over it, but I figured he had the same plain black shirt filling his wardrobe, and I couldn’t bring myself to care at all.

* * *

Iwasn’t fixed.

When I woke up the next morning, my guilt was still there, the pain was still chained down inside of me. I wasn’t ready to let it go, and I probably never would. Somehow, though, even in the wake of everything, I felt a little bit lighter. It made looking back at yesterday’s events, at the mistake I had made, thinking I had seen Noble, not quite so despairing.

My other reflections on last night consisted of mostly embarrassment and shame, and a little pissed off at Hunter’s bitch speech. There was also a little bit of something else.

Hunter no longer held all the labels I had stamped on him over the course of the last two weeks. I had seen a glimpse inside of him last night, and I saw his own guilt, the one he kept locked up deep inside himself, and all the pain that came along with it. There was something much deeper than the scratch on the surface I had seen. Something far more painful.

The bitch speech I could understand. It was his way of trying to understand my actions. Not that I forgave him for it. Nope, the pissed-off feeling I carried around was dedicated to him, and I made full use of it by ignoring him, which I knew annoyed him more than any argument I could have with him.

That was only a fraction of all the thoughts related to Hunter that had taken residence in about, I don’t know, forty-nine-point-nine percent of my brain. And with Adair taking up the other fifty percent, that left me with naught-point-one percent to think about me.

And that precious naught-point-one was used to think about the fuel of the world.

Money. Or more like, my lack of it.

My clothes were worn through; my best pair of jeans having ripped in the crotch yesterday after picking something up off the floor and making me hightail out of the kitchen. Hunter had been watching me with Adair propped up on his lap as they watched some bike program on the television, his gaze lingering far too long on the T-shirt that was a little too small, with the slim line of waist it exposed when I lifted my arms.

He had taken every moment to remind me that I needed some new clothes when he would “accidentally” brush past me, his fingers grazing my skin through the rips in my jeans. Or the way his eyes would stare at the waist of my loose pajama pants as if he might develop telekinesis if he looked at them hard enough in the hopes they might fall or reveal more than they should.

I admitted that I’d had the same pajamas for a while, but the money I’d had in my savings account when I had left had gone into buying Adair whatever he needed when he was born. I bought what I could from charity shops for myself. I didn’t need luxury so long as I had Adair.

Having a live-in pervert watching me every two seconds was beyond annoying. I wasn’t sure what had happened, but our attempt to hide the attraction we shared had gone out the window for Hunter. Something had changed for him, and for some reason, he made it loud and clear he wanted me.

Not that I wanted him. Nope. I was more than happy to stay on my side of the line, where I had drawn a boundary between me and my son’s uncle. That was all he was. That and the object of my fantasies I shared with the detachable shower head in his bathroom. But that was still on the safe side of the line so long as nothing like the icing incident ever happened again.

I sat with my sewing kit at the breakfast bar, my torn jeans splayed across the white marble surface. I was trying to put the thread through the eye of the needle for the umpteenth time when a hot burst of heat burned against my hip.

I jumped at least six feet in the air as I turned to face Hunter, who was looking at me with that dark amusement in his eyes. I swear he enjoyed the way he made me jump.

“You look like you’re having a bit of trouble,” he murmured beside my ear, the vibrations going straight to my core.

“You should leave me be, then,” I hissed, trying and failing once again to get the thread through. “For Pete’s sake!” I threw the needle and thread onto the counter, and if looks could kill, that needle would be the first to go.

Hunter chuckled, and if I wasn’t so pissed off, I would revel in the feel of his chest reverberating against my spine.

I had made a good attempt at not using my nose until Hunter wrapped his whole body around mine. Then I gasped as his jeans and you-know-what pressed into my ass.

“There you go.”

Distracted by the feel of his body, I hadn’t noticed Hunter had weaved the thread through the tiny eye of the needle with expert swiftness and had handed it back to me.

“How did you—”

“You know what they say about big hands.” Hunter winked and stepped back, and my body protested at the absence of his heat. My brain seemed to combust.

Hunter turned and went back to Adair, who couldn’t take his eyes of the Harleys roaring across the screen.

I turned back to look down at the needle with a glare. “Traitor.” Then I moved to sew up the break when the thread slipped loose and fell against the marble top.

I stared down at it for what felt like the most trying moment in my life.

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