“I know,” he said, his voice a low rumble.
I asked the obvious. “Where have you been, Devon?”
“Prison.”
I felt the breath go out of me. I put my hands to my temples. Prison. I’d suspected it, but I hadn’t been sure. I’d worried that he was on the run, that he’d left the country, that he was dead, that he didn’t want me after all. I felt all of that swirl around my brain and then disappear. Prison. Two years.
“The TV thing?” I asked.
“Yes.”
“Are you okay?”
Okay, stupid question. But they were the only words I could summon to say what I really meant. Was it awful? Were you hurt? Will you heal?
The question seemed to surprise him. His green eyes—in the half-light I could still see their color, their utter focus on my face, my hair, my neck—flickered as something passed behind them that I couldn’t read. But he didn’t laugh. “I suppose I’m okay,” he answered.
“I’m sorry,” I said. “I’m a little flustered.”
That brought a ghost of a smile to his mouth. “My fault. I was going to wait to see you until you were done work.”
“You were going to wait. And then?”
He shrugged. “And then I didn’t.”
And there it was. That flutter, deep in my stomach and flittering across my skin. Pulsing quietly between my legs. The smile had left his mouth, and I watched him watch me, thinking of that last night together, his big body flexing above mine, his mouth between my legs. The last two years fell away like a dry and dusty dream.
In sci fi movies, there is always that portal in the spaceship, the hatch that sucks everything out into space when it’s opened. That was what Devon Wilder was to my life. The hatch. I was so totally, totally screwed.
“How did you know I was here?” I managed.
Devon exhaled a breath, and he put his hands on his hips. He was relaxing slowly, realizing that I wasn’t going to kick him out. “I went to Shady Oaks first, but you weren’t home,” he said. “I had to look you up on the internet.”
“Oh.” My name was on the Gratchen website, I remembered—listed on the “Meet the Team” page.
“So you’re still a designer,” he said. “That’s good.”
“I guess.” But that felt wrong, telling Devon that. So I said, “I hate it.”
His eyebrows went up.
“I get treated like shit,” I elaborated. “Everyone thinks that’s part of it, that you have to get treated like shit in this business. But it’s starting to sound like a lie.” I shook my head. “Sorry. You just got out of prison, and I’m whining about my career problems. Do you need anything? Do you have somewhere to stay? There’s some other guy in your apartment at Shady Oaks.”
He looked at me for a long time. “You’re really doing that, aren’t you?” he said quietly. “You’re offering to put me up.”
I felt my face heat. “Is that rude? I just thought—I wasn’t talking about sex or anything.”
He scratched his jaw. “The guy in my apartment is my friend Max. I gave him the place. I’m letting him keep it. I have… somewhere else to stay.”
My face got even hotter. Did he mean he had a place with a woman somewhere? I’d thought I knew what Devon was saying, even when he wasn’t saying much. But maybe that was wishful thinking on my part, backed up by luck. I was second-guessing everything. I didn’t know what he was saying anymore. I took a step back and crossed my arms.
“You think I’m talking about a woman, don’t you?” he said, reading my mind. “Fuck. There’s no woman. Let’s start over.”
“I don’t—”
He stepped forward, took my face in his hands, and kissed me, and I stopped talking. His mouth felt familiar—I’d been remembering it for two years, the way he tasted, the way he kissed me. It was a bold kiss, confident, a kiss that told me everything he hadn’t said. I opened my mouth and kissed him back, my hands curled over his wrists, the silence a living thing around us in the deserted meeting room as we had our conversation.
He broke the kiss and leaned in, kissing the spot below my ear, his beard rasping against my skin. “Two years,” he said.