Page 657 of Hell Hath No Fury
At this, her pretty eyes widen a little more as she realizes that I know. Her brows draw together and she swallows again.
She steps closer and grabs hold of my t-shirt.
“I did,” she whispers guiltily.
She’s not helping the case by touching me with her small, soft fingers. It’s doing nothing to calm me down. In fact, my gut tightens even more and it comes out in my clenched, strangled words. “You said you were meeting your study group.”
Her fingers tighten, become urgent, and so does her tone. “I know. But Arrow –”
“But it wasn’t a study group, was it?”
“No.”
“Where did you go?”
She digs her toes in the sand, fidgets with my t-shirt as she watches me with bright, wide eyes. I know I’m scaring her.
And I know I should stop.
That’s why I needed to establish some control over my emotions before she got to me.
As it is, this is one of those rare moments when I don’t want to stop. When I want to give her a real reason to be afraid, like tearing that dress off her tiny frame.
And falling on her like a desperate, barely-alive man.
The man who doesn’t know how to fucking function without her even for a second. And she put me through her absence for two whole hours.
“I went to see Sarah,” she says at last.
At the mention of the biggest mistake of my life, my aggressive arousal dims down a bit. But only for a second.
Then the arousal, the fury, all come charging back.
The fear.
The goddamn fear that had subsided for a little bit at the sight of her.
It comes back and paralyzes me for a few moments.
Like it did back when I’d come home to find her gone. Then for the next two hours, that fear kept poking my chest, telling me that this was it.
That I was living my worst nightmare.
The one that plagues me at the oddest times. The one that says that she could leave me.
That one day there will come a time when Salem will wake up and realize that I don’t deserve her. That I’d already fucked up before I even got to know her, and she would leave then.
She would leave me.
And perhaps that’s why my words come out guttural and weak. “Did she tell you to do this?”
“What?”
You know what, fuck stopping myself. Fuck controlling myself.
I’m not doing a great job of it anyway.
I take a step toward her then, a menacing step, and it’s reflected in the golden pool of her eyes. The threat of it.
