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He would have been embarrassed by the quiver of vulnerability in his voice. But hell, this was a delusion. And it was his delusion. So what did it matter what it thought of him? Real Halle had already dumped him for the last time, so why not let Dream Halle pick through the pieces?
She shook her head, the movement making a curl of hair escape her updo and bob down to bounce on her shoulder. He resisted the urge to capture it and let the gossamer silk wind itself round his finger. He didn’t want to shatter the illusion. Not yet.
‘I didn’t hate it,’ she said, her smile spreading across her full lips and making the heat and the gratitude throb harder in his crotch. ‘I loved it. Almost as much as I love you.’
He did a mental fist pump, his heart galloping at the seductive sincerity in her words.
Way. To. Go. Best hallucination EVAH.
But then her smile quirked, the twinkle of ironic amusement in those golden eyes dimming his euphoria.
‘But I’ve been in agony for two weeks,’ the illusion said. ‘Why the hell didn’t you contact me sooner, you stupid snot-bag?’
He frowned, watching the tear slip along her lid and hang in her lashes to sparkle in the corner of her eye like crystal.
Hang on a minute. Why was his dream delusion calling him a snot-bag? Couldn’t he even go insane properly?
He reached out to lift the tear off her lashes, deciding it was probably time to make Dream Halle vanish before he got towed off to a mental hospital … and the tip of his forefinger connected with warm, soft, solid flesh.
He shot out of the booth, slamming his knee into the tabletop with a resounding thud. Pain ricocheted up his thigh as he swore viciously and his cup went flying. Coffee sprayed over the tablet, his laptop and his notebook as he gaped at the woman in front of him. The woman who had come to mean everything to him. And who he had always believed, deep down, he had never ever truly deserved—but who was sitting in front of him now in all her three-dimensional glory and telling him she loved him.
And he said the first thing that came into his head.
‘What the ever-loving fuck? You’re actually real?’
‘Last time I checked.’ Halle laughed at the look of utter shock on Luke’s face. Luke’s gorgeous, handsome, deliciously scruffed and completely astonished face. She grabbed a couple of napkins from the table dispenser and blotted the flow of spilled coffee before it could drip onto the floor. ‘You might want to rescue your laptop,’ she remarked, hearing the sizzle of firing circuits as she wiped the splatter off her iPad.
He glanced at the expensive MacBook Air, which had taken the brunt of the spillage. ‘Sod that.’ He grasped her arm and hauled her out of the booth. ‘I can replace a laptop. I can’t replace you.’
He folded his arms around her, apparently not caring about the coffee-soaked napkin in her fist that dripped down his shirt. Cradling her cheek, his gaze lifted to her chignon, then focused on her lips. ‘It’s really you? You’re really here?’ he said, the catch in his voice, the quiver of uncertainty even more beautiful than the adoration reflected in those pale blue eyes.
‘Yes, I’m really here,’ she murmured, finding it hard to get the words out round her elation. ‘By the way, I wanted to ask you, what happened to the exposé you were going to write on Monroe’s retreat?’ she teased, knowing that he’d used the article to speak to her directly, in the only way he knew how.
Lizzie had been right. He was an amazing writer. His article had ripped her apart and then put her back together again. Foolishly he’d taken all the blame for their bust-up, done far too much grovelling and generally proved how much he wanted to make this work. And made her realise that they were equals now, that whatever happened next, they would be going into this together. As adults who knew each other’s flaws, each other’s weaknesses, but loved each other more because of them.
His mouth tipped up in a lopsided grin. ‘It’s kind of tough to write an exposé on a method that actually worked.’
‘Ah, yes, fair point.’ She grinned back at him, her heart swelling until it closed off her air supply.
‘I guess I’m going to have to write that bloody puff piece I promised him, after all,’ he said, the mock regret making her heartbeat race up to warp speed. ‘Even though it goes against every one of my journalistic instincts.’
Dropping the sopping tissue, she curled her wet fingers round the back of his neck and drew him closer, until their lips were millimetres apart and she could taste the coffee and the desire on his breath. ‘I may know a way to make your journalistic instincts feel better about that.’
‘Oh, yeah?’
‘Uh-huh. But it may require some additional research.’
She dug her fingers into his hair, caressing his scalp as his arms wrapped around her hips, dragging her against the hard planes of his body. The very hard planes of his body.
And then she opened her mouth and captured his thrusting tongue in a soul-stirring, super-hot piece of very important journalistic research.
Epilogue
Christmas Eve, five months later
‘Aldo Best, get your butt down here and clean up this crap now,’ Luke shouted up the stairs. ‘Or there will be consequences.’
He marched back into Halle’s basement kitchen and whipped the tea towel off his shoulder to take the roast out, feeling harassed.
