Fate Actually: Moonstone Cove Book Two

by Hunter, Elizabeth

  “Toni, don’t…” Megan reached out, then pulled her hand back.

  She looked past Ron and saw Henry standing a little distance away, watching the two of them flirt with Ron Withers.

  Toni stood up, her eyes locked on Henry. “Oh. Hey.”

  Shit. Shit! She’d been leaning into Ron, nearly in the man’s lap trying to get information from him. She could only imagine how it looked.

  Henry was freshly showered and his dark hair was still damp. He wore a pair of fitted blue jeans and a crisp button-down shirt in a light grayish blue. There was a slight flush on the top of his cheekbones, and it wasn’t because of the heat. The heat didn’t bother Henry.

  He was pissed. This was Henry quietly furious, and it was somehow far more devastating than the explosive feelings she’d grown up around.

  “So…” He looked around at the party. “Guess I was a little late, huh?”

  Toni opened her mouth. Closed it. She couldn’t speak. Her heart was in her throat. She’d never understood that saying before that moment, but it suddenly made sense.

  She couldn’t speak if she tried.

  Megan rose and stood next to her. “Henry, it’s not—”

  “It’s fine.” He turned. “Whatever. I’m gonna go. I’ll see you later.”

  He walked through the mass of people, past Jackie, Katherine, and Baxter, and down the driveway where his truck was probably parked.

  And all Toni could think of was his excitement when she’d first invited him.

  “Would you like to go with me to Sunday dinner at Frank’s ranch this weekend?”

  “As your date?”

  Yes.

  Yes! She only wanted him.

  “Antonia Luciana Dusi, I would like that very much.”

  Toni started to run. “Henry!”

  Chapter 19

  She caught up with him as he reached his truck.

  “Just don’t bother, okay?” He yanked his door open.

  “Henry, it’s not what it looks like, okay? Jackie set it up. That guy’s name is Ron Withers, and he’s the accountant for—”

  “You were all over him.” Henry slammed his door shut and spun toward her. “I mean… really? I can barely get you to acknowledge I’m alive when we’re in public, much less get you to do something crazy like hold my hand, but Jackie sets you up with some friend of hers and all of a sudden—”

  “I was interrogating him, okay?” She looked around, making sure no one was in earshot. “He’s Fairfield’s accountant!”

  Henry froze midrant. “Fairfield’s accountant?”

  “Yes. Megan and I were trying to find out—”

  “That does not explain why you had your hands all over him.”

  “I was touching his arm.” Please don’t do this here. Please don’t do this here. “That’s hardly having my hands all over him.”

  Henry stood and crossed his arms over his chest. “For you, that’s practically groping.”

  “It wasn’t…” She let out a breath. Shit. “It’s just a thing that…”

  Just tell him. It’s Henry. You know you want him. If he’s going to be part of your life, he needs to know what he’s in for.

  “It’s called empathy.” She stared at the cab of his truck. “Can we go somewhere private to talk about this?”

  “I know what empathy is, Toni. And it doesn’t require you getting touchy-feely with some guy to— What are you doing?”

  Toni walked over, reached both hands up, and pressed her palms against his lightly stubbled jaw.

  Shhhhhh. She pulled the anger out of him and she did it quickly, dramatically, and thoroughly. Toni sucked Henry’s anger up like an emotional vacuum, which left her sick to her stomach and really, really pissed off.

  “Who are you to tell me that I’m groping someone?” She pointed at the party. “You come in, make one snap decision, and decide to just throw away all my feelings for you?” She stood on her toes. “Screw you, Henry!”

  Henry’s jaw was hanging open. “What the hell was that?”

  “That’s fucking empathy! And if you don’t know what that means by now—”

  “That is not…” He grabbed her arm and opened the truck door. “Okay, we’re not doing this in front of your family.”

  “Fuck you!” She tried to yank her arm away, but his grip was firm and she didn’t really want him to let go. She was just annoyed. Really, extremely annoyed.

  Henry muttered, “Like locking myself in a cardboard box with a bobcat.” He nudged her into the truck cab. “Don’t argue, Toni.”

  “Fucking men and their fucking high-handed—”

  He slammed the door shut.

  Toni watched him walk around the front of the truck, his eyes locked on her. “You think you know what’s going on? You have no idea!”

  He opened the truck door. “Stop yelling.”

  “I don’t have to!”

  “Why are you yelling?” He slammed the door closed. “What did you do to me?”

  “You were fucking furious!” She felt like hitting something. Anything. “So I grabbed that, and I haven’t ever done anything that extreme before, and now I’m fucking furious and I have no idea how to calm down!”

  “For Pete’s sake.” He started the truck. “I don’t know what the hell is going on here. Is this some kind of pregnancy symptom I’ve never read about?”

  “Oh, of course you’re reading books about pregnancy. Of course you are!” She sat back in her seat and didn’t argue when Henry reached across and buckled her in. “That is exactly something you would do.”

  “Why are you pissed off about me reading pregnancy books?”

  “Just drive me somewhere I can yell really loud, okay?” She felt like her skin was crawling over her body. “I am never doing that again.”

  Henry started driving down the hill, his face a grim mask. “What did you do, Toni?”

  “I. Have. Empathy. Okay? Not the usual kind. I can literally feel people’s feelings. And sometimes—like now!—I can even influence them. You were furious at the party, so I calmed you down.” She crossed her arms. “And I probably miscalculated just how mad you were.”

  “Apparently.” His face was grim. “At the risk of starting a massive argument, why were your hands all over that accountant?”

  “Because I was questioning him!” She felt a headache coming on, a gripping tension headache that was building at the back of her scalp. “It’s the same way I got Marissa to talk to me. If I kept skin contact with him, I could make him calm. I didn’t grab his emotions; I let him feel mine. Or what I wanted him to feel—I’m still learning how all this works, okay!”

  “Okay.” Henry’s voice was tuned low. “That is… very weird. If you make them calm, they’ll answer your questions?”

  “Exactly.”

  “Have you done that to me before?”

  “No! The most I’ve done is absorb your mellow. If I’m upset or stressed, you’re like a living fucking meditation aid. All I have to do is touch you and I chill out.”

  Why was she so angry? Toni felt like she was having an out-of-body experience. Purposely absorbing all of Henry’s anger had been an absolutely idiotic thing to do.

  “Huh.” His face was oddly blank. “Is that why you like me? Because I’m calm?”

  “I fucking liked you before all this shit happened to me at the gym, okay? Don’t make this about that. I already knew you were fucking sexy as hell and our chemistry was off the fucking charts, Henry! I fell in love with you when I could literally feel how honest and genuinely good you are, okay? I am not going to apologize for that.”

  Toni, what the hell are you doing—you just told Henry you love him!

  His smile was luminous. “You love me, huh?”

  Take it back. Tell him you were in an altered state.

  “Of course I fucking love you!”

  Ahhhhhh! This was a disaster! She was so angry she’d turned into a truth-spewing harpy!

  Henry chuckled. “I thi
nk I like this.”

  “Don’t ask me anything else, okay? Just take me somewhere that I can punch something!”

  “We’re going back to my place.”

  “Fucking hell, Henry, take me home!”

  “I have a punching bag in my garage.” He turned north on the highway and headed into town. “You can work out your mad on that.”

  “Good! And for the record” —she pointed at herself— “this is your mad, not mine!”

  For the love of red wine, this was far longer lasting than anything she’d experienced before. Which was probably good to know. When Henry got really angry, he held on to it. Probably a useful reference for the future.

  “So tell me more about how you fell in love with me,” Henry said. “I’m really curious about this. Was it before or after you got pregnant?”

  Shut up. Just shut up and— “It was after you pulled that really nasty redwood splinter out of my hand.”

  Henry blinked and turned toward his house. “That was six months ago.”

  “I’ve been in denial a long time, okay? Not all of us are emotional geniuses or whatever.”

  “Hey.” He rubbed her thigh. “Look at that. You didn’t yell. I think you’re calming down.”

  “Don’t touch me!”

  “Or maybe not.”

  * * *

  Toni woke with a head full of cobwebs and hands that ached. She sat up and realized she was in a strange bed and a familiar jowly dog stood next to her, his head resting on the edge of the mattress.

  “Earl.” She reached out to pet him and let out a low groan. “What the hell happened to my hands?”

  Just then she heard footsteps coming down the hall. Henry opened the door, holding a tray of tea and two towels. “There you are. I thought I heard your voice.”

  He was shirtless, wearing only a pair of grey sweatpants, and Toni saw four long scratches on his left shoulder.

  She wanted to die. “Did I do that?”

  Henry set down the tray, glanced at his shoulder, and reached for the towel. “Uh, yeah. You did. I didn’t really realize at the time. That was… pretty intense.”

  Memories came flooding back, and Toni covered her face with both hands and fell back on the pillows. “Oh my God.”

  He reached over, took her right hand, and folded it into a cotton towel filled with ice. “So the punching bag kind of worked for a while, but then you lost interest in that and got very interested in something else.”

  “Oh my God.” She wanted to literally be absorbed into Henry’s too-small bed and disappear.

  He let out a small laugh and pulled her left hand from her face. “Do you hear me complaining? Come here. Do you need some aspirin? You were complaining about a headache earlier.”

  “I want aspirin, but I also don’t want to move.”

  He kept her right hand wrapped in the ice-filled towel and pulled her over his bare chest, draping her left arm across him as he reached over and rubbed her temple. “So the thing at the gym, huh? You told me as little as possible about that whole thing. That’s what triggered all this?”

  The rhythmic touch soothed her. “Yes. Katherine tackled the man with the gun, and then I jumped on him, held him down and… I just knew that more than anything in the world, he needed to calm down. So I made him calm. I don’t know how it happened.”

  “And after that is when you got to be good friends with Megan and Katherine, right?”

  “Yeah.” Her eyes drifted closed. What the hell? They wouldn’t mind. It was Henry. “Katherine is a seer. I think that’s what they call it. She has visions, but they usually only happen minutes before the event. Makes it hard to do much about them, but it is an early-warning system.”

  “And Megan?”

  Her ear was against his heart, and she felt the slow steady thump through her whole body. “She has telekinesis. She doesn’t always find it very useful, but she’s trying to work on it. Focus her energy better, maybe? I don’t know. We know a few other psychics up in Glimmer Lake, but other than that, it’s hard to tell what’s good information and what’s bullshit, you know?”

  “Uh-huh.”

  “You can’t believe everything you read online.”

  “I’ve heard that.”

  “And there’s a lot we don’t know. Like, I’ve never tried to purposely absorb someone’s emotions before like I did with you.”

  “That was weird. I’m not going to lie about that. Very weird experience.”

  “But I was just trying to get info about the Fairfield estate. For the record, I was really pissed at Jackie for setting it up like that. I don’t think she knew I invited you.”

  “As your boyfriend?”

  “Yeah.” Her eyes were closing again. “Why am I so tired?”

  “Probably because it’s nearly midnight.”

  “This day has been really strange.”

  “I don’t disagree with that.”

  She felt unfinished somehow, like there was something hanging over her head. Flashes of the afternoon started coming back to her.

  I fell in love with you when I could literally feel how honest and genuinely good you are, okay?

  Oh. Right. Kill me now.

  “Henry?”

  “Yes?”

  “I told you I was in love with you earlier, didn’t I?”

  “Yes, you did.” The hand stroking her temple moved down to stroke her back. “Don’t try to take it back. I know you weren’t lying.”

  “Right.” That was it? That was all she was getting. She’d bared her soul in an anger-induced bout of emotional clarity and all she got was “don’t take it back”?

  “I love you too,” he said. “And since you can feel my emotions, you don’t have to wonder if it’s true.”

  Toni’s heart raced in wild panic until Henry’s hand stroked down her back again. She took a deep breath, listened to the steady thump of his heart, and settled into the warm glow.

  Because now that he’d named it, she knew it was what she’d been feeling for months. Not infatuation. Not sexual compatibility. Far more than affection.

  Love. She’d been feeling love.

  Chapter 20

  “So you spilled the beans, huh?” Megan sipped her coffee as they sat on her porch Monday morning.

  Katherine had called to check on Toni after she drove off with Henry, and Megan had gone to her house. She placated both of them by taking the day off work and chilling out at the house since she was emotionally exhausted.

  Katherine had to work, but Megan came to check on her and steal her sweet, sweet caffeine.

  “Yeah, I kind of told him everything,” Toni said. “He was so pissed and I didn’t know how to explain anything, so I thought I’d show him. Remember your stupid pistachio trick with Baxter?”

  “So you figuratively floated a pistachio in front of Henry’s face?”

  “More accurately, I sucked all his anger out and absorbed it, which turned me into a pissed-off psychic with more emotions than brains.”

  Megan cackled. “I so wish I could have seen that.”

  “I was frighteningly honest,” Toni said. “I told him about me, about you and Katherine, about what I was doing to Ron Withers. Then I told him I was in love with him. So that happened.” She stared at her barn. Did it need paint? Probably it needed paint. And a new door.

  “Back up—you told Henry you love him?”

  “I did.” She stared at the barn. Yep, it definitely needed a new door. “I did do that.”

  “Okay.” Megan stared at her. “And how was that?”

  “Very awkward. And then very not awkward because he told me he loved me too. And it was very nice. Very… reassuring. I’m ninety percent sure these feelings have nothing to do with the pregnancy.”

  “Okay.”

  “But now I’m questioning everything,” she said. “Also, I need a new barn door.”

  “You need a new…? Toni!” Megan shook her head. “Don’t. Don’t question it, okay? It’s been obvious
to both me and Katherine that you love him for weeks now. Honestly, I think you’ve probably loved him for a while and you were just getting caught up in all the reasons that you shouldn’t love him or it wouldn’t work for your life. Just go with it. Don’t make it so complicated.”

  “That’s the problem though. It is complicated. It doesn’t work for my life. What do you think is going to happen? Henry’s going to move in here with his giant dog and shack up with me and we’re going to be some happy little nuclear family with a dog and a cat and a baby and… stuff?”

  Megan shrugged. “That sounds perfectly reasonable. You have all the things you like about your life, just with a wonderful guy and a kid added to it.”

  “I never wanted a dog.”

  “You love dogs. Don’t be weird.”

  The problem, as Toni saw it, was that she was getting all the things she didn’t realize she wanted, and it just seemed… way too easy. “Life just doesn’t fall into place like this, Atlanta. Haven’t you learned that? Nothing is this easy.”

  Megan turned to her with a frown settled between her eyes. “Listen. I did all the things in the order I was supposed to, exactly when the world told me I was supposed to. Went to college, had a profession I loved. Married a man with a solid job and a nice family. Had three kids. Did all the things a working mom is supposed to do with a healthy bank account and a team of support staff. Then I moved out here and it all fell apart.” She threw up fingers as she counted. “No husband. No business. No support system. All gone.”

  “Are you thinking of moving back to Atlanta?”

  “No.” She shook her head firmly. “I’m starting over. And for some reason, I have this ridiculous confidence that everything is going to work out. Fate just had something completely unexpected set up for me, and I’m determined that it’s going to be great.”

  “So you’re saying that fate has something equally unexpected for me, and I just need to go with it?”

  “What’s not to go with?” Megan spread her arms. “You’re living in your own home that you bought and are fixing up. You’re taking a day off from the business you’ve dedicated your life to for over twenty years. And you know you can do that because you’re a kick-ass businesswoman who knows how to delegate. You’re going to have a baby.” Megan smiled. “How ridiculously beautiful and crazy is that? A baby. And you have this wonderful man who loves you and wants it all. You. The baby. The life in the country. The whole plate.”