Bury the Hatchet

Chapter Seventeen - Bury the Hatchet

TALLIE

"You're sure this is what you want?" Hunter asked. His voice had gone all rough and scratchy, like the stubble lining his jaw.

I nodded, never taking my eyes off him. It was absolutely what I wanted. Maybe my priorities were all messed up, but even though I'd believed he was in love with Carrie, the whole time he'd spent telling me about the complex relationships he had with her and his brother had left me all kinds of hot and bothered. It was a sickness. Had to be. There was something about his voice that turned me on. That was only one of many reasons I'd been keeping my vibrator in regular use lately.

He got up and came into the kitchen to join me, stopping about a foot away. Close enough to touch, but he didn't touch me. He leaned back against the bar, assuming a casual pose that was anything but casual, the hand closest to me tightly clenching the countertop. That white-knuckled grip was one of the two signs that he wasn't as composed as the rest of his body language would have me believe. The other? His dilated pupils and irises that had turned the shade of deep moss instead of their usual silvery sage.

"I need to hear you say it," he said. "I need to hear the words."

After what he'd told me about Kade and Chantel, I could easily understand that, especially since I'd been making my way through a bottle of wine. I licked my lips again. My mouth was as dry as a summer drought. "Yes," I finally croaked out. "I'm sure."

"You want to be in my bed? You want my hands on you?"

More than I wanted air. "I want to feel you inside me," I forced out, and it was the absolute truth. For weeks, I'd been waking up in the middle of the night, hot and wet, having been dreaming of his hands on my skin, his mouth on mine, his cock so deep I couldn't tell where he ended and I began. Those dreams were only coming more frequently now, seeming more real.

What happens inside that house with the doors closed is your business and yours only. Daddy's words from the day Hunter and I had first met reverberated inside my head, and I clung to them like they were the only thing tethering me to reality.

Yeah, I was in too deep now to come out of this marriage unscathed somewhere down the line. It didn't matter. I might end up with a broken heart, but if that came to pass, at least no one would be hurt but me.

Hunter's eyes bored into me. "Because it's going to change things between us. You understand that, right?"

I knew that. I was counting on it, actually. That was one of the reasons I wanted to step across the invisible line in the sand that had been separating us. Now that he'd promised me he wasn't in love with Carrie, no matter what Kade had wanted me to believe about the matter, I chose to trust Hunter. I wanted to let myself have hope that it was true. There was this crazy idea niggling at the back of my head that maybe he could fall for me the way I was falling for him.

It probably wouldn't work out the way I wanted it to. Heck, it was really just a shot in the dark. But whether Hunter's want for me was purely physical or if it went to some deeper part of him, I needed his heat melding with mine. There were still things we needed to hash out, and we would. But right now, none of that held any importance, not in the here and now. Nothing mattered except I was desperate for his touch.

"I do," I finally forced out, despite the hundreds of thousands of flutters racing through my body, like butterfly wings flapping against my insides in an attempt to get free.

He snaked out an arm, wrapping it around my waist and drawing me toward him.

"Oh." The word left my mouth of its own volition, soft and shocked-sounding. I put my hands on his biceps to steady myself, wincing slightly from the burn and hoping he didn't notice.