Be My Hero (Forbidden Men #3)(88)

He lifted his hands in a slight shrug. "I don't see why not. She's been gone this long and hasn't checked in on him once."

I stepped fully into the living room, letting my hope grow. "But what if she says no?"

"Then . . . nothing. Nothing changes at all. I have no rights to him now as it is. If social services came in here tonight, they'd take him away. I've looked it up online and read everything I could find. Being his stepparent in this state means nothing. I am illegally harboring that child. So, remaining married to Tristy isn't accomplishing anything either. That finally struck me today. The only thing it's doing is keeping me from you."

I gulped. "So you're doing this because of me?" Oh my God! Yes, yes, yes!

He surged to his feet and went back to pacing. "I'm not being fair to you, Tink. I keep thinking about what you said the first night you decided to stay on and how you were worried about us being wrong. The last thing I ever want to do is make you worry about anything. But you have it right. Kissing you, wanting you, just being here with you while I'm legally bound to another woman . . . that's not what I should be doing. I don't want to belong to her in any way when my heart is yours."

"Oh." The word puffed from my lips in a stunned gasp. "Oh my God." I pressed my palm to my chest, hoping that could help slow the thumping of my heart, but it didn't help at all. My blood raced with ecstasy.

Moving my fingers up to my mouth as tears filled my eyes, I let out a nervous, scared, thrilled laugh. But, oh my God. Pick loved me. He'd just proclaimed his love in the sweetest, most romantic way ever.

"Then we're totally asking her." I shifted toward him a step and then stopped. "It can't hurt to ask, right?"

He took a step toward me, only to stop as well. Eagerness and uncertainty filled his brown eyes. "Can't hurt at all."

"Do you know how to find her?" I moved another step closer and he countered by doing the same.

"Not physically, but I have an idea of how to get in contact with her. If she's still logged into her Facebook account on the laptop she left behind, I could message her."

Overwhelmed by the realization that we might actually end up together after all, I darted around him to the couch to sit and soak this in just as he started to reach for me. Covering my face with my hands, I focused on taking deep breaths.

"Tink?" He sat next to me, sounding worried. "Baby, what's wrong? Do you not want—?"

"Yes!" I dropped my hands to face him. "I do. I want it . . . so much."

He took my hands and rubbed his thumb over my knuckles. "Then what's wrong?"

"I just . . . " I shook my head, not sure where to start. So I blurted, "Reese was the first person I ever really loved, like, I actually care more about her than I do myself. I only want to see her happy."

"Okay." He nodded, following along with me so far and letting me know he was willing to listen.

"And then, I guess, in a lukewarm cousinly way, I love Mason too . . . because he's so good to Reese and he let me move in with them when he hated me."

That one made him scowl, so I rushed to add, "And I love Skylar. Almost as soon as I knew she existed, she wormed her way into my heart." I waved a hand. "I mean, after I was finished freaking out because I'd just found out I was going to have a baby. But yeah, I fell for her pretty much immediately. "

Pick smiled and tightened his fingers around mine.

"I love Julian too," I told him, "from, like, the first day I met him."

Drawing my hands to his mouth, Pick kissed my knuckles. "Thank you."

I nodded. "So, all this . . . love . . . it's really only happened within the last year. You'd think I'd be overwhelmed from it, right? I mean, I go from basically caring about no one but myself, and not even really about myself either, to completely loving four people. But I'm not overwhelmed. Not at all. In fact, I feel as if I have so much more room, because . . . " I looked up and met his beautiful brown gaze. "I love you, too."

His face filled with a dazed kind of shock and joy. Then he whispered, "Tinker Bell," before catching me by the back of the neck and hauling me against him.

Our mouths collided. I inhaled him as his lips crashed against mine. But even that wasn't enough. Not nearly enough. My fingers fumbled to grasp him, digging into the flesh at the back of his neck and over his shoulders, afraid to slow down because I needed to feel every inch of him before I lost my chance.

He was just as desperate, pulling me close, right up onto his lap. I straddled him and slid forward until I could feel his erection through his jeans as it ground against my core.

I'd never felt this carnal and delicious, as if my entire body had just become a vessel for pure pleasure. Or maybe that was Pick's feeling channeling into me, because I'd also never felt this connected to another human being before. He was me, and I was him, and we were just this beautiful twisted mass of all our hopes and dreams coming together and exploding into a dizzying array of euphoria.

"Please tell me I'm not dreaming," he broke away from my mouth to gasp, right before kissing his way down my throat and into the collar of my shirt.

"Stop reading my mind," I said and then bit his earlobe. "This feel like a dream to you?"