My Kind of Wonderful(85)

Not nearly as calm as she clearly wanted him to believe, she stared at him, her eyes suspiciously bright. “Hi,” she whispered.

“Hi.” He swallowed the pizza, decided that wasn’t even close to what he was hungry for, and took it out of her hands, setting it aside. He wrapped his hands around her ankles, uncrossed her legs, and dragged her to the edge of the table, pulling her body flush with his.

Obliging with a gratifying rush of air from her lungs, she wrapped her legs around him and then her arms. “I was wrong to leave,” she whispered. “I didn’t really want to leave, not the town, not the people in it, and not you.” She stared up at him accusatorily. “How could you leave?”

“Because you were gone.” He lifted his head to give each and every one of his siblings and their significant others a hard, dark look for not taking mercy on him and calling him with her location.

Not a single one looked particularly sorry, the *s. He turned his attention back to Bailey. “I couldn’t be without you,” he said. “I couldn’t breathe here without you, I couldn’t think without you. I couldn’t… be without you. Without you, I wasn’t me.”

“True story,” Gray interjected. “You know those commercials where people turn into bitchy divas when they’re hungry? Hud here took bitchy diva to a whole new level, trust me.”

Penny elbowed him in the gut. With an oomph, Gray stopped talking.

“What were you going to do if I’d moved to New York?” Bailey asked Hud. “Or London? Or Timbuktu?”

He thought about that. “I don’t know about Timbuktu,” he finally said. “But New York has great food and Europe has some pretty cool skiing.”

“You’d have left here, moved somewhere with me?” she asked doubtfully. “You’d have left your home?”

“Don’t you know?” He set her hand onto his chest, right over his heart. “Home is wherever you are, Bay.”

“Okay, that’s a good one,” Gray whispered. “That’s going to get him laid—Ouch! Christ, woman, watch the goods.”

Bailey stared at Hud and shook her head in disbelief. “But this mountain is everything to you,” she said softly.

“You’re everything to me.”

“What took you so long?” she asked again.

Her voice killed him. Her tone suggested that she’d nearly lost faith in him.

“I was worried,” she said. “I was worried you didn’t care—”

“The thought of you leaving and staying away made me want to drop to my knees,” he said. “How’s that for someone who doesn’t care? It’s been three days, twelve hours, and six minutes without you.”

She blinked. “You kept track of the minutes?”

“No, I made that part up,” he said. “I was trying to load the evidence in my favor.”

Aidan snickered. “Rookie.”

“Shh,” Lily said. “He’s being romantic.”

Hud did his best to ignore their obnoxious audience. “I called you, told you I was crazy for you.”

She closed her eyes. “I deleted your message. I’m sorry, I shouldn’t have done that.”

“I got held up by the storm but went after you as soon as I could. You’d left this huge Bailey-size hole in my heart, but the storm—it was the only thing that could’ve stopped me.”

“Oh, good save,” Gray muttered. “Makes up for him being so slow on the uptake.”

Penny smacked Gray lightly on the chest. “Shh. And it wouldn’t hurt you to be taking notes here, Mr. Not Romantic. You might actually learn something.”

Gray sighed and reached for another piece of pizza.

Hud lowered his head and brushed his mouth over Bailey’s. “I knew my mistake instantly,” he murmured, “I don’t know why I resisted.”

“You were hoping I’d be scared off.”

“I was,” Hud admitted.

She nodded. “You about done with that?”

He pressed his forehead to hers. “Yeah.”

“Good.”

Hud couldn’t believe his luck, that she was really here looking at him like she always did, as if he was the most important thing to her. He’d never get tired of that, and how he’d thought he could live without her, he had no idea. “I love you, Bailey. So very much. I have since I first laid eyes on you.”

“On Devil’s Face,” she said softly. “When you inferred that I was a very stupid woman for being somewhere I didn’t belong.”

“If anyone was stupid that day, it was me,” he said. “But that wasn’t the first time I saw you. It was earlier that morning. You were in the parking lot, sitting on your back bumper putting on your boots. Your cap was so bright it made me need sunglasses. You were singing Ed Sheeran. Your eyes were shining with…” He closed his own eyes. “Happiness,” he said. “You were incredibly happy, and what I didn’t know then but know now is that you were just feeling lucky as hell to even be breathing.”

She inhaled, slow and deep and a little shaky. “Yes,” she whispered.

“I took one look at you and you—”

“—made you want to run in the opposite direction?”