Page 16 of Reborn to Love You

Payton could only look at him helplessly, and his gaze narrowed.

“Are you alright?”

Wasn’t that what he had asked her the last time?

“I...”

Words failed her yet again, but this time her knees also buckled, and oh!

Payton might have kept herself from blushing the first time, but her cheeks were completely on fire now, with Niccolò sweeping her up in his arms and—

The marks.

With her hands trapped against his chest, she belatedly noticed that those heart-shaped marks she had noticed the first time—

There were only two of them now.

Why?

It felt significant somehow, but with Niccolò gently laying her down on the couch, Payton found herself distracted and tormented all of a sudden, the memory slithering into her mind like a serpent, and no no no—

She remembered the last time someone did this for her, it was to kill her—

Stop it, Payton!

She had to clench her fists against the urge to shove him away.

Niccolò was not Eric. He never was, never will be.

“Lie down,” he said sternly, “and rest. Do you have vertigo?”

When she tried to shake her head, pain seized her temples, and Payton stilled.

Huh.

With all the die-reborn-die time jumps she had gone through in the past hour or so, maybe she did have vertigo now?

Niccolò loomed over her, and he looked unusually on edge. “Be honest with me.” His tone was also uncharacteristically stiff. “Do you have any problems at home?”

And the reason for that became clear when she realized what he was asking.

“W-Why would you ask that?”

“Because I hear people talk.”

Right.

People as in...her coworkers.

Eric was always keen to invite them over, and while Payton could never admit this to herself in the past...

It was time she stopped pretending to be blind.

Eric had been so full of himself that he was convinced her coworkers all loved him. Not once had it occurred to him that her friends were only there because of her, and that all of them...could see through him.

All of them but her.

Payton the Idiot.