breath, thinking she couldn’t hear him. “Once it hits the laundry, it hits the street.”
26 Camille Anthony
“What was that, oh sleeper-on-the-couch one?”
“Uh ... I said, ‘don’t get in a quandary ... you can keep it, sweet’?”
Raising a skeptical eyebrow, she flopped down on the bed. “Yeah, I thought it was something like that.”
Sobering as she gazed into his beloved face, she asked, “Do you know how much I love you?”
A half-smile stretched his well-formed lips. “Let’s see, would that be less than I love you but more than yesterday?”
“Not even close,” she murmured, eyes tearing at the devotion she read in his earnest gaze.
Damn, he was so beautiful to her. Six feet, five inches of prime male acreage, two hundred ninety-seven pounds of untamed, muscled strength, Hunter was any woman’s dream of masculinity. Every last inch and hulking pound was hers -- her personal eye-candy -- and so much more ...
Sure, there were a few gray hairs in the black mop he rarely took the time to groom.
Those glinting gray strands did not detract from his appeal; in fact, those signs of maturity heightened his attractiveness. His hazel eyes were so sexy with their swirls of green, brown, and lighter gold. That sharp blade of a nose stopped his face from being classically handsome, but given the choice, she wouldn’t change his features in any way. She loved every inch of him: his wide shoulders, slim waist, and long, muscular runner’s legs combined to make up a package that fired her lust and inspired her most erotic fantasies.
“You think you’re protecting me?”
Hunter sighed. “Only you would come up with a scenario like that after I’ve insulted you and barked at you.”
“Your bark is worse than your bite, but the thing is ... that last insulting suggestion is what gave you away.”
He came and sat beside her, hands clasped between his open knees. “I don’t understand.”
She leaned into him, keeping her hands to herself since he obviously needed her to do that. “I know you don’t, sweetie.” Taking a moment to compose and order her thoughts, Melody tried to find the right words to explain to him how she’d stumbled over his attempted deception.
“The first night we met, I wasn’t inclined to get involved with you. It took a lot of arguing on your part to convince me we could make a go of this relationship.” She turned to face Hunter, wanting him to see her eyes and know how sincere she was. “You made me believe in you. You didn’t promise nothing would ever hurt me, or I’d be safe forever. What you did promise is that you’d always be there to soothe any hurt, and you’d try to keep me Werewulf Journals 2: Trolling for Love
27
safe, even if that meant keeping me safe from you. When you said, ‘Bring yourself off!’ the pain in your eyes stole my breath away.”
Hunter groaned and hung his head. “I wanted to rip my tongue out the second the words left my damned mouth.”
She cupped his face in her hands. “I know to the depth of my being, that it hurt you more to say those words than it did for me to hear them.”
“Oh, babe!” His arms came around her, hugging hard, holding tight.
Melody hugged him back. After a while, she drew away, putting space between them so she could search his expression, but kept his hands enfolded in hers.
“Earlier, in the bathroom, you deliberately picked a fight. Being your usual leave-nothing-to-chance self, you used the one thing guaranteed to throw me off kilter, to mess with my head enough to make sure I wasn’t thinking straight. You used our sexual relationship, and it worked ... for a while.”
“What tipped my hand?” He kept his head bowed, eyes down, gazing at their entwined hands.
She looked down, too, drawn by his focused stare. As always, how well they contrasted caught Melody off guard. Like his name, Hunter McCallum’s complexion brought to mind the ancient warriors of the Scottish Heath, the rolling