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“Like you want to eat me?”
“I don’t know. I’ve never felt this way before. Did you slip me something at lunch?”
Silas immediately gets pissed and prepares to furiously defend himself. His mouth literally opens, ready to give me shit. When he notices my smile, his expression goes soft.
“I don’t let people tease me.”
“Should I stop?”
Silas studies me before shaking his head. I take his hand and rest the palm against my cheek.
“You’re acting weird now,” he insists yet doesn’t remove his hand.
“I find you appealing. Not only as a person but very distinctly as a man.”
“What?”
“I think you’re hot,” I say, stressing each word.
Silas offers a cocky smirk. “Well, that makes sense. Finding women who want to fuck me has never been a problem.”
His response deflates all the heat whirling around my body. I scoot off the couch, gaining a frown for my efforts.
“I have to use the bathroom,” I tell him and rub my belly.
As Silas’s grumpy glare turns off, he spreads his long arms across the back of the couch. I feel him watching me leave the room. Logically, I know he’s seen me look like crap before. The man’s been stalking me for months. It’s far too late to sex up my appearance.
However, once I’m in the bathroom, I don’t want to leave. I finally force myself to look in the mirror.
For years, I haven’t cared about my appearance. Neal cheated with other women. He kept me for the wife stuff and used those women for the sexy activities. I wasn’t winning any beauty contests even before I hit thirty and ended up pregnant for the fourth time.
Now, I stare in the mirror and hate the woman I see looking back.
“What are you doing?” I whisper to myself. “Flirting like that? Who do you think you are?”
For years, my mom drilled into my head how I wasn’t special. “You’re at most average. Never fool yourself into believing differently,” she would say and sigh. “I was a beauty in my youth, but it wore off. You don’t even have that much.”
My mother was once a delicate woman. She used to be a dancer and not the stripping kind. She had class and grace, but marriage and motherhood ruined her body and left her rough around the edges. I used to look at photos of her youth. She seemed so dainty like Audrey Hepburn from “Breakfast at Tiffany’s.”
That was never me. I took after my father’s side of the family.
“We’re Swedes,” he once told me. “We’re not supposed to be showy. Our people are athletic and built for the snow.”
Of course, I grew up in Mississippi. Not a lot of fucking snow to traipse through there. I was also never very athletic, only playing soccer in elementary school.
By the time I hit puberty, I realized I’d never be Audrey Hepburn. These days, I’m not even as hot as the woman at Neal’s cousin’s birthday party.
Yet, I’m flirting like a sex goddess rather than a heavily pregnant woman wearing a ridiculous beach ball shirt and shorts that show off my ugly knees.
“You’re nothing special,” I whisper and wipe my wet cheeks.
I need to pull my head out of my ass and stop acting like a flirty twenty-year-old at a club. Instead, I should be nice to Silas, do whatever he wants, and keep him happy. That’s the smart move.
Returning to the family room, I ignore Silas’s good looks. Instead, I see a broken, lonely man who needs a family to fill a hole in his heart. If I do right by him, he might do right by me and my kids. With his money, they’ll have what I never provided them.
“What’s wrong with your face?” Silas grumbles when I return to the couch and check the security from the guest room. “Why are you upset?”
“It’s complicated. Some things don’t have explanations that make sense.”
