Page 71 of 10 Rings I Hate About You
Twenty years of knowing exactly who Marc Kingsley was and exactly how I felt about him.
And here I was, sitting outside his grandmother’s house with my heart beating irregularly in my chest, thinking about a man who opened car doors like it was just what you did and said quietly devastating things while wearing sexy tortoiseshell glasses.
I was absolutely, catastrophically screwed.
Chapter Twelve
MARC
Delaney laughed and rolled her eyes at me. Her hands rested loosely on my waist. Everything about this moment felt right. Like we’d been leading up to this all along.
I cupped her face and stared into her piercing, green eyes. I said nothing, wanting this moment to last just a little bit longer as I cataloged the features that had been imprinted on my brain for so long: the tiny scar just above her right eyebrow, the flecks of brown and gold within her irises, and how her eyes crinkled when she chuckled.
I couldn’t find the words, so I tried to communicate without them that I didn’t want our time to end just yet.
“Stay,” Delaney whispered.
Her invitation echoed in my head.
I wanted to, but something told me we didn’t have long.
She leaned forward and licked a path along the side of my face, nudging against me hard enough to make me stumble. Thisaggressive side to Delaney seemed off somehow. Strange in a way I couldn’t put my finger on it.
Her cold, wet tongue dipped into my ear next.
What the hell?
My eyes flew open, and I screamed.
A high-pitched, undignified scream, that if it made the rounds online, it would absolutely become a meme.
A shaggy face and wet nose was only inches from my own. Two unblinking hazel-brown eyes with dark, vertical pupils focused solely on me with profound indifference.
He gave off the vibe that he had places to be, and I was merely in his way.
“Seriously?!” I sat up and grabbed the furry menace by the collar I’d barely wrestled onto him yesterday. I almost lost a shinbone in the process—a fact I had chosen not to disclose to anyone because it would require explaining, and explaining would admithewas winning this battle of wills.
This was the third time this goat had broken into my house. I still hadn’t figured out how he got in or how he escaped the barn.
“Chaos! Get off my bed!”
He stared at me, then turned to nibble on my comforter, clearly unperturbed by my distress. I’d strong-armed him into a bath yesterday morning before work. Grace had somehow managed to trim the remaining matted areas of fur when she and Wyatt stopped by to babysit my newest roommate. More than likely, she only showed up because she’d been getting play-by-play texts from Glamma, and Wyatt wanted his gossip in real time. They’d both stayed until I got home from her house like some kind of intervention committee.
“You can’t keep breaking in,” I told him, because apparently, I now tried to reason with stubborn goats.
He looked away as if I bored him.
Pale morning light streamed through my windows, letting me know it was after 6:00 a.m. I stood, shut the bedroom door to at least contain the destruction to one room, and walked into my en suite. I’d already relocated all the chewable and breakable items to the guest room the last time he Houdini’ed his way in here.
I started the shower, stripped, and stepped under water hot enough to scald me.
Faint memories of my dream were tangled up with everything from the dinner at Glamma’s two days ago. Twenty years. Twenty years of a perfectly functional antagonistic relationship, and now things were different in a way I didn’t know how to categorize. Delaney Hart, who had hated me with the consistency and dedication of a professional, was now someone I was making eye contact with at the end of the evening, sharing camaraderie, and feeling …
I ran a hand through my curly hair.
I liked control. That part wouldn’t shock anyone. What most people didn’t know was the other side of that. And last night, for just a moment, I’d let it show. Let the certainty surface. Hadn’t taken back what I said.
And the way she responded?
