A knock on my door just barely pulled me from sleep. The blackout curtains that covered the floor-to-ceiling window of my ridiculously large bedroom blocked out most of the sun, but little flickers of light broke through the edges, warning me that it was only just past sunrise.
Another knock. And then another.
“It’s too early!” I called back, shoving my face into the plush, soft pillows I was absolutely never going to live without. I’d steal them when I moved back into my apartment.
The door cracked open and more light filled the room before abruptly darkening again as the door shut. “Liv.”
For fuck’s sake. Is this a nightmare?
“Liv, wake up,” Damien said, his voice soft as butter as he came closer.
I pulled the blankets down enough that I could squint through the darkness, his face just barely visible in the low light. “Why are you in my room?”
“Because I’m desperate for my son’s approval and you play a pivotal role in that,” he chuckled.
I stared at him.
“Too honest?”
“Too honest,” I agreed.
“Fine. Because you deserve a vacation, and so do I, and I want to surprise Noah. So get up.” He tapped the button on my bedside table that gently brought the lamp to life, filling the room with soft, warm light. He was in pajamas — joggers and… christ, a fucking tank top. Why do I not deserve relief from him?
His hand fisted the sheet, and all at once, I was far more awake.
“Please don’t,” I breathed, gripping as much fabric as I could in my hands, my cheeks heating. I wasn’t wearing a single bit of clothing beneath the sheets, and up until this moment, I hadn’t considered that I might need to.
The line between his brows deepened for a moment before he realized. “Oh. Oh, shit, sorry,” he fumbled, taking a step back from the bed and raising his hands. “You should, uh, get dressed. And pack a bag.”
I shook my head and pulled a single arm out of the sheets. “Pass me my shirt,” I said, pointing aimlessly in the direction of my abandoned, gigantic sleeping shirt that I’d left somewhere off the side of the bed.
Within a second it was in my hand.
I ducked beneath the covers and pulled the shirt over my head, wiggling until it was situated well enough over my body. He waited silently, his presence almost forgettable, but when I pulled back the sheets and forced myself to sit up, he was still there, still waiting, still expectant.
“Right. Okay,” I said to myself, pushing back my mop of hair from my face and feeling far too vulnerable with nothing on my lower half but the bottom of my shirt. “Explain to me exactly what you mean by a vacation.”
————
“DISNEYLAND?”
Noah’s screeching voice splintered straight through my eardrums, momentarily deafening me and filling my ears with a high-pitched ringing.
I couldn’t help but laugh at how cute it was.
“Does that sound like a good idea?” Damien asked, eyes widened at his shrieking son. When he’d pitched it to me, he seemed excited himself, but I could see the worry in his eyes that maybe this wasn’t the right choice — that perhaps he was doing what he’d done before when he’d taken Noah shopping, when he’d spoiled the kid rotten in the hopes that it would win his favor.
But this didn’t come from a need to make him feel at home, it didn’t come from a need to bond with him in unhealthy ways.
It came from a want — a want to take a vacation to somewhere he’d never been, and have a new experience with his son. And me, for some reason. But I wasn’t about to say no to a trip to Disney.
“YES!”
Noah’s chest rose and fell rapidly as he gripped the sheets on his far too large bed, his curly brown hair sticking up in all directions, his toy car abandoned beside him, his pajama top slouched at an angle. Damien sat at his feet, halfway up the bed, and from where I stood in the doorway, it was almost like a private moment. Both of their attention focused wholly on each other.
It was hard to believe it had only been two weeks.
“And if you’re okay with it,” Damien started, shifting a little on the comforter so he could glance back over his shoulder, right at me, “Olivia’s coming too.”
Noah’s bloodcurdling scream ripped through the walls of the house and he freed himself from the sheets, crawled across the short distance, and threw his arms around his dad’s neck, practically hanging from him like a baby gorilla. Damien’s arm curled around him as he tucked him into his chest, his gaze flicking between me and the boy in his arms.
He looked so… soft.
There wasn’t a better way to describe it — it was as if every fine wrinkle smoothed, as if the pressure of the world that normally showed in the way his jaw ticked or the way he stood with his shoulders high, had just… settled. As if none of it mattered.
I wasn’t sure if the swelling in my chest was from Noah’s eccentric excitement or the calm that stemmed from watching the two of them interact. But it made me feel good, for once, to be wanted in whatever form by both of them.
“We’ll take my boat down to Long Beach,” Damien said, his eyes locking on mine as he spoke to his practically vibrating son. “We should get there by morning and can spend the entire day tomorrow in the park. And as long as Olivia’s up for it, we can stay the night and go back again the next day.”
I shot Damien a soft smile and nodded once. “I might need to do some work in between, but yeah, we can do that.”
He shook his head. “You’re not working. I already contacted your manager.”
You just hired me as a full-time employee and I’ve already taken about half of that time off because of you. I wanted to say it, but I knew what he was doing — he was giving me this time as paid time off. He was giving me far more than the contract had said when I signed it.
I was appreciative, but I couldn’t help but feel it was a little unfair to everyone else who worked there who wasn’t looking after his son, and who hadn’t slept with him.
————
When Damien said boat, I’d been imagining what any normal, sane human would — an average-sized boat, maybe a speedboat if he was expecting to arrive in time for us to get a hotel and sleep before going to Disney.
I had not imagined the monstrosity in front of me on the dock.
The white and black boat had to have been at least ten times my height, towering over us and casting a shadow as my steps grew smaller, slower, until I stopped in stunned silence. I should have assumed — should have known that when he’d boat, he’d meant mega yacht.
People flitted about the two levels of the ship in stark white uniforms, some with clipboards out and others carrying coolers or cushions. One of them, disappearing into the interior, carried a set of sheets over one shoulder that looked suspiciously like they were covered in the characters from Cars.
Noah rocketed past me at the speed of fucking light, and that coupled with Damien’s frantic shouts from somewhere behind me pulled me back to reality instead of standing there speechless.
“Don’t run on the dock! Shit, Liv, can you—”
I took off toward him, his short sleeve, white button-up blowing behind him in the breeze, but before I could even reach him, one of the staff who was disembarking locked eyes with me and swooped him up in her arms.
Noah spun, his grin massive as he turned to face us in the stranger’s arms. He wasn’t even a foot from the ledge, and my fucking heart pounded in my chest, but somewhere behind me Damien was laughing, catching up more and more.
“Thank you, Sarah,” he chuckled. He stepped around me, one hand brushing across the small of my back and the other carrying both my bag and his. My breath caught in my throat.
“No problem, Mr. Blackwood. You got him?” she asked, her light brown eyes practically twinkling up at him as Noah playfully tried to escape her arms. Her white staff shirt and short black shorts clung to her body, her blonde hair up in a ponytail and flowing over her back in perfectly manicured curls. She looked about my age.
Something about her angered a piece of me that I was desperately trying to keep quiet.
“I got him,” Damien confirmed, reaching out and taking Noah’s hand in his. Sarah released him and stepped back onto the ship, disappearing around the corner. “I told you not to run on the dock.”
“Sorry, Dad. I got excited.”
“It’s okay. Just be careful.”
A man in similar clothing to Sarah collected our bags from Damien’s hand. I wasn’t sure if the ship being full of staff was a positive or a negative — at least we wouldn’t be completely secluded together, but the idea of having people wait on us hand and foot like a miniature cruise was… weird.
The yacht, reflecting the morning sun off its shiny surfaces as it floated easily in the water, must have been at least as long as Damien’s house. There was a lower deck at the back, one that was easily accessible from all sides and seemed to be the main point for boarding. The front, slick and black, had one singular balcony along the top edge, coming to a point in the middle like the front of the Titanic.
Don’t fucking think about the Titanic, Olivia.
Along the back and sides of the ship, a third balcony wrapped around it, with a large opening at one side and the other closed off. I didn’t know a thing about boating besides my short experience on a little engine-powered dinghy my friend had back in high school, and this was so entirely different.
“Do you like it?” Damien asked me, a small life jacket in his hand as he motioned for Noah to hold out his arms.
“The yacht? It’s… massive,” I breathed.
“Is that a bad thing?”
Noah did a little spin before Damien grabbed him again and started fastening the clips.
“No, I just wasn’t expecting it. You said boat,” I explained.
“I mean I’ve got a smaller one, but we can’t sleep on that, and we probably wouldn’t get there in time,” he said. He picked up Noah under his armpits, the kid’s legs dangling wildly, and plonked him onto the back lowest deck of the yacht. “Noah, go that way and follow Adam through those doors, okay? Don’t want you hanging out down here without the railing.”
Noah nodded before taking off into the interior cabins.
Damien offered a single hand to me. He wore a white button-up hung loosely over his frame, unbuttoned down to almost the center of his chest, and his slacks, the same color and made of some of the finest, nicest linen I’d seen. Both billowed effortlessly in the ocean breeze, and I almost felt silly wearing the elastic waistband black shorts and slightly too big, white t-shirt he’d loaned me. I hadn’t packed anything to bring to his house that was remotely geared for this.
But I took his hand.
“As a heads up,” he started, motioning for me to step across the small gap between the dock and the boat, the water sloshing beneath my feet, “there are only two bedrooms on board.”
I stepped easily onto the yacht and froze. “Damien—”
“You can have my room,” he said calmly. “I’ll share the smaller one with Noah. I just didn’t want you to panic when you realized.”
I blinked at him. “What? I don’t need the bigger room.”
“Trust me,” he grinned. “It’s much nicer than the spare.”
That doesn’t make sense. “Then let me have the spare and share the bigger one with Noah.”
He shook his head. “There’s plenty of space for me and Noah in the smaller room. Plus, yours has more privacy in case you just want to be on your own for a bit. Take it, Liv. It’s yours.”
I stepped backward on the lowest deck, the lack of a railing stressing me out with the rocking of the boat, and watched as Damien stepped across the divide easily. I wanted to fight back on it, wanted to ensure that he and Noah would have the best time they possibly could, but he didn’t seem like the kind to budge on something like this.
————
It was odd how little the unmatched speed of the boat affected my stability on it.
I couldn’t remember exactly how fast Damien said we were going, but the goal was to travel quickly throughout the day so we could keep the speed lower while we slept. The wind and the quickness of the water passing below us were the only real giveaway. It didn’t feel like I was being rocked around, or like I couldn’t walk from point A to point B easily.
Noah spent most of the day playing in the pool — the one I hadn’t noticed from the ground, situated at the very back of the middle deck. Damien had watched him like a hawk, nervous that he’d fling himself over the glass edge of it and inevitably fall onto the lower deck without the railing, and then into the waters below. I’d been nervous about it, too, and had found it increasingly difficult to keep my attention on the book in my lap.
Around six in the evening, one of the staff delivered a plate of chicken nuggets and a side of raw carrots for Noah’s dinner. Damien asked me to watch him, that same usual pleading look on his face despite that literally being a part of my job now, before stifling himself indoors to make some calls.
An hour later Damien returned, the crease between his brows deeper and his shoulders stiff. He picked up an exhausted, sleeping Noah from the lounger beside me. “Dinner is in thirty,” he said quietly, his eyes meeting mine. “You’re welcome to eat wherever you’d like. But I’d prefer it if you joined me.”
I closed my book. I’d finally had the chance to get to the most interesting part with Noah zonked out beside me, but when it was Damien interrupting me, when he looked the way he did in his stupid fucking linens and the breeze whipping his hair, I didn’t care. “Where are you eating?”
————
Pulling my legs up cross-legged onto the plush white cushion, I sat at the pristinely polished table at the back of the top deck, trying not to pay too much attention to the wine in the ice bucket or the setting sun beside me as I waited for Damien to get back.
Sarah, the woman who had caught Noah on the dock this morning, dropped off a plate of cocktail shrimp and various dipping sauces. I nervously picked at them, my eyes lingering on the only entrance to the secluded little space. This wouldn’t be the first time we’d eaten together since I temporarily moved in, but it wasn’t exactly a normal thing, either.
I didn’t know what to expect from him. He’d looked stressed when he’d come back after his phone calls, but now that Noah was asleep and less of a danger to himself, there had to be a bit of calm. I almost craved it — a small sense of normalcy despite the intensely abnormal thing we were doing.
Damien’s eyes were glued to the watch around his wrist as he stepped through the entryway, but quicker than he’d appeared, he looked at me instead. And he froze.
“Hey,” he said, the word so quiet it almost didn’t reach me over the sound of the wind and the engine. Glass walls connected the sides of the deck to the roof around us, and only the very back where I sat now had open walls looking over the back of the boat. My hair, tied up in a bun with little waves falling around my cheeks, blew gently in the small breeze, but he was unaffected that far in.
“Hi.”
He swallowed as he came back to life, stepping across the sleek wooden floor and stopping at the edge of the table. “You look lovely.”
I snorted as I glanced down at myself. The too-big shirt, the elastic shorts, the rattiest pair of flip-flops I owned… I did not look like I belonged on a mega yacht. I’d barely had time to put on mascara before we’d left this morning. “I look exactly the same as I did twenty minutes ago.”
“You don’t,” he said, shaking his head as he slid onto the cushions that wrapped the length of the table. He shimmied down until he was beside me, close enough to reach out and touch, but far enough that it wouldn’t feel like an imposition. He’d seemed to have mastered that. “I don’t know what it is. Maybe it’s because Noah’s down, maybe it’s because you got to the good part in your book.”
I narrowed my gaze at him.
“You think it wasn’t obvious?” he laughed. “Your legs were crossing when I came back out. Your lip was between your teeth. What’s in that thing, anyway?”
My cheeks heated as I tore my gaze from him. There was no way I was that obvious. Surely.
“I’m not judging you, for what it’s worth,” he chuckled. “It’s good to give your mind a break occasionally.”
I leaned back and pulled my knees up to my chest as I popped another cocktail shrimp into my mouth. “You say that like I’m always turned on.”
Wide blue eyes met mine so quickly that it made me pause.
Oh fuck. Oh no. Wrong word. “I—I meant switched on. Switched on. Like with work.” Even the passing breeze wasn’t enough to cool the intensity of the heat in my face.
He brushed it off as if it hadn’t even happened, clearing his throat and proceeding. “Well, you are, really. When you’ve not been focusing on Noah, you’ve been burying yourself in work. I think you needed this just as much as I did.”
I swallowed the shrimp around the lump in my throat. “Yeah. Maybe.”
Damien leaned forward and plucked the bottle of wine from the ice bucket. He fiddled with the wiring around the cork, expertly releasing each one, and I couldn’t stop myself from watching, couldn’t stop myself from taking in the way his tendons in the back of his hand flexed with each little movement, couldn’t stop myself from imagining them doing what I’d read about minutes ago.
“Are you, uh, not worried about Noah getting up?” I asked, the words far breathier than I’d intended.
His gaze flicked to mine, and God fucking dammit, I could tell by the way he looked at me that he knew exactly what was running through my head. “Not now,” he said calmly. “I’ve stationed one of the staff outside his door so he can’t just get out and fling himself off the deck. And I’ll be there to watch him overnight.”
“You seemed stressed watching him earlier.”
“So did you, Liv.”
The muscles beside my lips twitched as a smile tugged at them. “Well, yeah. I didn’t want him to get himself killed.”
Damien’s breathy chuckle filled the air between us just as the pop from the cork freed the wine — oh, that wasn’t wine. That was champagne. I stood no chance. “You’d think five year old’s were suicidal or something,” he grinned, pouring out two chutes worth for both of us. “Didn’t think I’d be as worried as I’ve been. And then the fucking phone call.”
“Do you want to talk about it?” I asked, plucking another shrimp from the tray and shoving it in my mouth. “You looked more stressed after that than I’ve seen you in days.”
His lips pressed into a thin line as he reached for a shrimp himself, picking up the glass of champagne with his free hand. “It was Ethan,” he said. “There are some issues with the lawsuits we’re filing. That’s all.”
“You say that like it isn’t something you should be allowed to stress about. You’re allowed to be stressed, Damien. Anyone would be in your shoes,” I told him, my eyes catching on Sarah as she stepped through the entryway with two hands expertly balancing trays of food.
He was quiet as she placed the food down. Whole lobster, scallops, seared rounds of steak, baked potatoes, thinly sliced sashimi, cooked broccoli, asparagus, medley after medley of grilled vegetables… It was far too much food for the two of us. But it looked fantastic. Far better than Noah’s chicken nuggets.
Sarah slid a loaf of sliced soft bread into the center of the table, a mound of seasoned butter beside it, and despite the grin she flashed us both, she lingered on Damien. Her eyes held his for longer than I expected, and when she spun, her ponytail flicked and bobbed as she walked to the door, shutting it behind her.
“I—”
“Have you had sex with her?”
Wild blue eyes collided with mine faster than lightning as he set his glass on the table. It took a moment for my brain to catch up with my mouth, and the moment it did, I wished I could go back to that blissful ignorance where I hadn’t registered what I’d said, where I hadn’t even asked it, where I hadn’t made it abundantly clear how I’d feel about that scenario.
“No,” he said curtly. “I haven’t.”
“I’m sorry,” I breathed. “I didn’t mean—”
“You did.”
“I…” I swallowed, my mouth going as dry as the Sonora Desert. He was right. I did mean what I said. “I’m sorry. I shouldn’t have said that. I shouldn’t have asked that.”
“It’s fine,” he said. But it wasn’t.
“I should, uh, I should eat in my room. Maybe this wasn’t a good idea.” I put my knees down, unable to even look him in the eyes, and shifted myself along the soft leather toward the exit of the curved, wrap-around seat.
Something warm and large wrapped around the smallest part of my wrist, stopping me in my tracks. “Don’t,” Damien said, the word just a little guttural. “I wanted you to have dinner with me. I still do.”
“You don’t,” I gulped, looking over my shoulder toward him. I expected a stern expression, something that showed his irritation and his maturity, but that’s not what I found. Instead, his gaze lingered on me softly, dragging down over my too-large shirt and back up to the messy bun atop my head, all hard lines smoothed out except the one between his brows.
“Please,” he rasped. “I don’t care about what you asked or what you think I want. I want you to stay. I want to… fuck, Liv, I just want to spend some time with you. Is that too much? Is that crossing a line?”
His fingers tightened around my wrist. The knot in my throat only grew wider. I didn’t know what to say to him, didn’t know whether to trust my gut or the screaming woman inside my head that I tried to keep locked away, the one that wanted me to stay, wanted me to seat myself on his lap, wanted me to fling myself at him like a lost puppy. I’d chained her up, but my God, she was putting up a fight.
“Liv,” he pleaded.
“Okay,” I sighed, sitting on the soft cushion again and shifting back toward him. I left a little more space than he had, but he let go of me nonetheless.
We picked at the food in silence, nothing but the scraping of knives and forks against porcelain, the rattling engine, and the whipping wind to fill the quiet, dead space. Everything tasted incredible, far better than any restaurant I’d been to, far better than what I’d cooked at his home for myself in the dead of night when I had a moment for myself. It was nicer than the spaghetti he’d made for us four nights ago at ten in the evening, but the lighthearted conversation we’d had then was everything in comparison to the sticky silence we had now.
“You asked about Marissa,” he said, cutting through the emptiness as I pushed a forkful of lobster between my teeth.
Marissa? I thought her name was Sarah.
“The other night. You said something like, I wish I knew what his mom was like so I knew what Noah was missing. I didn’t answer you.” He sipped at his champagne as he leaned back against the padded rear of the seat, one arm outstretched along the edge, his hand just an inch from my back. My mind spun — Marissa was Noah’s mom. “Do you still want to know?”
I swallowed the lump of lobster meat and turned toward him. “Only if you want to speak about her. All I know is she’s, uh, passed.”
He nodded. “Yeah, early last month. I hadn’t spoken to her in over five years,” Damien said, plucking my glass of champagne from the table and passing it to me. I hadn’t touched it yet — I’d been too worried about what it would do to me around him. But if he was going to speak about her…
I took it, gratefully.
“But before that, before we stopped speaking and before Noah existed, we were together. For two and a half years, we were serious.” His head tilted back toward the harsh oranges and pinks that littered the sky, the sun just barely visible over the horizon. He looked almost otherworldly as the colors painted him, and all I could do was watch — watch, and wait. “I wanted to marry her. Bought a ring and everything. I was convinced she was the person I’d been waiting my entire life to meet.”
I took a sip of my champagne, craving something to do, something to distract myself from the heaviness of his words. I couldn’t admit to myself that I didn’t like hearing about this — not when that was an admission to other things. I couldn’t even admit that it was a relief to hear that he was capable of an actual relationship.
“I was wrong,” he rasped, tilting his head back up, his eyes meeting mine in a flash of blue amongst the pinks and oranges. “For a lot of reasons, I was wrong, but overwhelmingly because she wasn’t… faithful. There was someone else in the picture, someone she’d met fairly recently toward the end of our relationship, and she didn’t tell me until I proposed. I’d gone through the motions of it all. I’d dropped to one knee. I’d expected an enthusiastic yes, I’d told my friends, my family. I couldn’t… I couldn’t keep it in. But I’d received a look of genuine fucking horror and a blubbered apology.”
Oh, God.
“I had a speech ready. I had everything planned. But it went to shit,” he sighed. “And I’ve had almost six years to come to terms with it and get over it, and I have, but with Noah coming into the picture and everything hitting me in the face once again, it’s felt like I’ve been reliving it. Like she deceived me again, because she did. I don’t doubt, for one second, that she was a good mom to Noah. I know exactly how she would have been with him — how she was with any child we met, how she planned to be for the kids we would have. She loved him. She wanted him to have the best possible opportunities in life, even if it meant the shit with Grace, even if it meant thrusting him upon me and owning up to her secrets.”
He downed the last of his glass of champagne before pouring himself another. I didn’t know if there was something I could say that would make it better — wasn’t even sure if there was a reason he was telling me all of this. But if he needed to speak it, I was willing to let him, even if it made my stomach churn.
“I still don’t understand why she never told me,” he breathed, the words so quiet I almost didn’t hear them. “That’s the one thing I can’t wrap my head around. Maybe she knew back then that she was sick. Maybe she wanted as much time with him as she possibly could have, alone, before she had to leave. Either way, I’ll never know, and that fucking haunts me.”
His hand slid down the cushions, coming to rest gently on the top of my knee. I stilled.
“I’m sorry. I don’t know where I was going with this,” he mumbled, pushing himself upright and leaning onto the table, one elbow carrying the weight of his face in his hand. He squeezed my knee gently, and all I could think to do was put my hand over it, hold it, and show him in the only way I could that it was okay. “You asked about Sarah. And all I could think was, shit, does she think I’d fuck anything that moves? Does she think I don’t have a single bone in my body capable of caring for anyone other than myself and Noah? And I… I don’t know. I don’t want you to think that about me. I don’t want you to think that I’m some monster that fucked you purely out of a need to perform a conquest—”
“I don’t.” I do. I don’t. I don’t fucking know anymore. “I don’t think that, Damien.”
He offered me a half-hearted smile as he released my leg, his hand coming up instead to cup the side of my face. Warmth blossomed from his touch, and I found myself heating, both in my cheeks and elsewhere. “You do, princess. And it’s okay that you do. I would too if the tables were turned.”
He tucked a stray wave behind my ear and that woman I’d chained in my mind reared her head, screaming, desperately tugging at her restraints.
“For what it’s worth,” he added, his fingers trailing along the edge of my jaw, the backs of them bushing back over it, “I care about you. In whatever weird form this is where we’re married and taking care of my child and tearing it down for good reason, I care about you.”
Oh, fuck. The snap of metal, and a single restraint broke in my mind.
“I never wanted to hurt you,” he breathed.
I was moving before I could bear to stop myself.
The second and final restraint cracked and broke and I was on him, crawling into his lap, my chest against his, my hands encasing his face in them as I pushed him back against the cushions. His champagne flute shattered against the wood floor as he grasped me in his arms, and all I could do was hold him there, watch him, our lips an inch apart and our eyes locked.
He took it that step further for me.
His mouth met mine, a flurry of sensations wracking my body from nausea to heat, and I could taste the salt air on his lips, could taste the lingering bit of champagne on his tongue. His hand fisted the too-loose fabric of my shirt, twisting it, burying his fingers against my flesh and holding me tightly.
“Fuck,” he rasped, and I took that minuscule break between our lips to kiss his jaw, his neck, the curve of his Adam’s apple. The scent of roasted almonds, vanilla, and rum invaded my nostrils, and for some reason I couldn’t comprehend, it smelled more like home than my apartment. “Liv.”
The way he said it was like a warning, and I knew what would come after. “Don’t,” I begged. “Please.”
“But you don’t want—”
“I do.” I popped open button after button on his shirt, dragging my lips along his collarbones, along the top of the muscle that ran beside them. His hand grasped the back of my neck, holding me to him, acting in opposition to his words. “If you do, I do.”
“Of course I do,” he swallowed. The strain beneath my parted thighs, pressing up against the soft linen of his slacks, confirmed that well before he’d said it. “But we put up boundaries.”
Freeing the last button, I pushed his shirt open, revealing the entirety of his heaving chest.
“You were conflicted the last time we crossed your lines,” he reminded me. But he didn’t stop me as I continued, as my hand reached between us for the button of his pants, as my other trailed along the expanse of his chest, across ribbons of muscle and the tips of his nipples. “We’re barely married, Olivia. We’re getting an annulment. Yes, things are… different, on my end. And you’re with me more than I expected. But I don’t know if I can give you what you want out of this.”
I don’t care. I did. I don’t.
I swallowed my pride. I pulled my lips from him.
I looked him dead in the eye.
“Until it’s over, then,” I breathed. “Give me that.”
The hand that held my neck rounded to the front, cupping my cheek, holding me in place as he stared directly into me. “What are you saying?”
“Until the annulment is done, you’re still my husband, and I’m still your wife.”
His thumb swiped across my cheek, his lips parted, his breathing just a little heavy. “Like an expiration date.”
I nodded as I freed the button of his pants, my fingers trailing along the top of his boxers. “Yeah.”
“Fuck,” he grunted. He pulled me to him, pressing his forehead against mine, the swelling beneath my core and between his thighs growing harder. “Yes.”
