Chapter 6

“You want to come—” His voice breaks. He clears his throat and then he deepens it to his radio DJesque voice. “You want to come in?”

I smile as he goes to lean casually against the sliding glass doors, but stumbles when he misses his mark.

Thank goodness I didn’t see his clumsy side before he took me flying through the sky.

“Yeah. Call me crazy, but I’m not much for the view right now.” I gesture to the stunning eagle-eye view of the ocean that makes my stomach churn painfully. I’ve never been more grateful for my first-floor apartment.

“Oh, no. Yes, of course. I’m so sorry,” he sputters. Zipping around to put himself between me and the edge of the balcony—like he’s trying to block my view so that I’ll forget it’s there—he ushers me inside into his penthouse.

And oh, what a penthouse it is.

“This is your place?” I gasp as I get to look around it a little more. Forget the multitude of very expensive paintings on the wall, the marble flooring is beautiful enough to move me to tears. The place is decorated with a subtle sophistication that really works because each piece boasts an enormous price tag. Wealth truly is the best interior designer.

Although it does nothing to showcase his personal style. This could just as easily be a picture in a magazine. Billionaires Style or something. Whatever rich people read.

The Garnet Defender shrugs, like it’s no big deal that we’re standing in a foyer that could devour my apartment and still be hungry for my parking space.

“Everyone needs a place to lay their head.”

I roll my eyes. This place could house a million heads.

Probably not the best visual when I’m looking to get frisky.

“So… where’s your bedroom?” I reach up to toy with my hair seductively. It’s a ratty mess after the flight over. I push my hair over my shoulder in a move that I hope is sexy and not clearly an attempt to hide the world’s biggest tangle.

Again, he gulps. A spectre of a smile graces my face.

“No,” he says finally, after stopping and starting a few times.

“Place like this doesn’t have a bedroom?”

He goes to answer, then frowns.

“I didn’t bring you here for that.”

“I know you didn’t,” I argue back. It’s really more of a habit at this point. I have no idea what he brought me here for. For all I know, he’s about to bust out a guitar and play ‘Wonderwall’ for me.

Or whatever it is that people do when they visit other people. Clearly, I don’t do a lot of after-work socializing.

“Unless, you actually do intend to kill me here… at this secondary location?” I add.

A look of pure exasperation crosses his face as he steps towards me.

“Don’t joke about that.” His voice is a whisper that tickles my cheeks. Somehow we’ve come even closer together as he speaks.

His face is bent down towards mine. Rising on my tiptoes, I go to kiss him.

And he pulls away.

“I really didn’t bring you here to do that,” he stutters. His face is flushed, like it’s the bloody site from the war he’s waging inside himself. “You just went through a traumatic experience. You need food and water and…” His eyes fall into mine—and I do mean into mine. It’s like we’re connected with the pull of it all. He takes a step towards me, then a second one way back. “And rest!” he practically yells.

“Is that what you do for all the girls you rescue?”

“Wouldn’t know. You’re my first. At least in the one-on-one sense. I did save that pedestrian the other day, but we didn’t get up close. Besides, she was like eighty, which isn’t to say—” He trails off and clears his throat. He speaks again in his lower, gravelly voice that makes me shiver. “You, Hailey Cox, need to be taken care of.”

“Then is that what other superheroes do? Do they all keep snacks in a fanny pack or something?”

“I told you already, I’m the only one. That I know of, at least. I’m writing the handbook as I go.”

“Then there’s really not some underground superhero coalition that’s just done a supreme job of hiding because of all the potential litigation?”

He goes to push his hand through his hair, but (once again) can’t due to his hair gel. It’s a sight I don’t think I’d ever tire of. The way his eyes widen, the brief gape of his mouth…

“I don’t think so. This is all pretty new for me though… the powers thing.”

“How did—”

He waves me off. “I don’t want to talk about it.”

I nod. Whatever it was—cockroach bite, home planet destroyed, parents killed after a Robin Hood movie premiere—origin stories are never pleasant. I won’t push.

On this.

“Besides, you need food and water.”

“Among other things,” I add suggestively.

He wags a finger at me, grinning, as he walks towards a kitchen so large it could host its own twenty-person cooking show. “Right. And walks twice a day,” he adds with a huge grin.

What a dork.I would roll my eyes, but I don’t want to miss the way he chuckles at his own joke.

I follow him into the kitchen half-entranced by the appliances that appear to be made entirely out of complicated buttons and dials, and half by the way he’s humming to himself. The island—which could double as a small tennis court—is lined with classy, but uncomfortable-looking stools. I slide into one and rest my head on my hands as I watch him move around, slightly judging him for how uncomfortable his stools are. Which is saying something, considering I’ve slept overnight in my office chair on multiple occasions.

Moseying over to a cupboard adjacent to the space-age-looking fridge, he opens it with a flourish, gesturing inside.

“Anything you’d like?”

It’s filled with appliances.

“Waffle maker?” I offer hesitantly.

He whips his head to the cupboard and then back at me. He smiles a sheepish grin.

“You seem like the type of person who appreciates a good, uh, immersion blender,” he says with a shrug.

Well, I have no idea how to take that one.

“Thank you?”

If he hears me, he doesn’t acknowledge it. Instead, he’s rummaging through cupboard after cupboard for something suitable to eat. The polite part of me wants to protest, to insist that he’s the only snack I need. But a second later, he’s throwing a bar of some sort at me and my stomach is growling its approval.

“Should I read into it that you just gave me a SuperSlim bar?” I ask, tearing the package open anyways and devouring it. It tastes like chalk. Delicious, delicious chalk.

Apparently, The Garnet Defender was right: I did need food. Even if it tastes like stale fossils. Not fresh fossils, stale ones.

He slides me another one when he brings me a glass of water.

“I’m trying to keep trim.” He nods towards the carnage of the ripped wrappers.

I eye him over. The spandex not only leaves nothing to the imagination, but it also goes one step further and reveals all the spicy details I didn’t know I needed. It clings to his abs, giving each one an outline, a picture frame to celebrate all of its lickable glory.

“Clearly,” I deadpan.

He just chuckles like I’m being adorable or something and not detesting him and his perfect physique.

“You have a kitchen with two ovens and this is what you brought me here for?” I ask with a mouthful of my third bar. “These taste like chalk.”

He wags a finger at me. “Chalk is an acquired taste.”

I cock an eyebrow.

“Mostly by toddlers,” he adds.

I can’t help it; I laugh. With a bar full of perhaps literal chalk, I let out a huge guffaw that sends tiny morsels of my bar across the island.

A glistening crumb glints up at me—a beacon to ground this memory for whenever I feel like diving into a shame spiral. I’ll forever remember the time I was trying to seduce my handsome, albeit dorky, saviour and I spewed crumbs on his expensive granite kitchen.

Before my cheeks can fully flood with embarrassment, he busts out into a deep, rich laugh that sets my very bones at ease.

“You have some—” He reaches up and swipes his thumb across the corner of my mouth.

I should be embarrassed, mortified, ashamed, humiliated, and red-faced. I’m not, though. Instead, an incredible calm radiates through me that starts at his thumb, still touching my lips, continues to the rest of his hand that he’s wrapped around my cheek, and then permeates the rest of my body. The rest of my soul.

It’s electric and entrancing. It’s the type of feeling that births endless poetry and infinite love.

It’s special.

I know he’s worried about my state of mind after what I went through tonight, but nothing has ever been so clear to me. This moment, however fleeting, was meant to be. Everything led us to this point.

It may not be in my fate to keep a man, but this is one I can have now. That I need to have now.

“I’d really like to kiss you,” I say in a voice too soft to be my own.

I don’t even realize that I’m holding my breath until his lips meet mine.

Then, I lose my breath completely to a kiss that’s too perfect for my racing heart to comprehend.