“Why?”
She met his eyes. “It would have stifled your spirit. I watched you on the set for days. You belong in the ocean. I kept going back to the set to find a way to tell you apart and talk to you, but I stayed for hours to watch you surf.” Her fingers floated through his hair again, and warmth coiled deep in Zach’s chest. “The way you weave your way through those huge walls of water is…fascinating, mesmerizing. I couldn’t help but think of David and Goliath or Jack and the Beanstalk. Probably too many hours reading kids’ books, but still, I can’t imagine how you do it. Or how you do it with such…pure…” She searched for the right word. “Elegance.”
“Elegance,” he said with a grin. “I’ve had a lot of people say a lot of things about me, but I’m pretty sure no one’s ever called me elegant.”
She sighed and smile. “Well, I am quite the wordsmith, you know.”
“Evidently.” His mind turned, and he took a minute to figure out how to approach the subject they’d have to figure out very soon. “Tell me more about your job. What kind of vacation do you get?”
Her laugh jostled his head on her belly. “Vacation is a bad word. Unspoken but frowned upon.”
“At your firm?”
“In my field. For most attorneys in Washington, there’s too much work and not enough time. If you find yourself with time on your hands, you’re either missing something or haven’t done enough research. Every attorney I know is either working or sleeping.”
Zach had several regular jobs before his surfing took off. He’d even interned at a hospital, shadowing doctors specializing in different areas of medicine to see what he might want to practice. He’d also worked as a Renegades stuntman often enough to know all about long days and deadlines. But he’d also seen how much his family had given up over the years to climb to the level of achievement Tessa was on the verge of attaining.
But it wasn’t his life to judge.
“Sounds ambitious,” was all he could come up with in the moment.
“It is,” she sighed, as if the reality weighed on her shoulders.
“When will you know if you get the partnership?”
“Well, that depends.” She chuckled. “I feel like that phrase will be carved into my tombstone, I say it so often. There are a lot of variables involved. To save you a long-drawn-out, boring narrative on all the possibilities, I’d say…” Her gaze rolled toward the ceiling, and she hemmed and hawed a little. “Three months.”
He laughed. “Did you just pick that out of the air?”
“Sort of, not really. I’m basing it on the bill’s length, its complexity, the support on the Hill lobbyists have already generated, the track record of other bills I’ve had passed successfully through the house, and a handful of other factors. But I can tell you the next several weeks are critical, which is—one reason—this is a working vacation.”
“Wow, months?”
She grinned. “Washington curbs a lot like a loaded freighter.”
He rested his cheek against her warm belly again. His mind traveled over his calendar for the upcoming months, and the joy she’d infused him with faded.
As if she read his thoughts, she said, “I’m going to be tied to DC until this is done.” Her fingers stroked the nape of his neck. “What’s your schedule like? You could come back east, see where we live, visit Sophia’s preschool, meet her teachers and friends…” Before he could respond, he felt her tense. “And I totally get that this thing between us isn’t, you know, a thing, so I wouldn’t expect…I mean, no strings on the invitation.”
There was something in her voice that made him look at her again, and he found uncertainty in her expression. Planting his hands in the cushions, he hoisted himself up her body until they were face-to-face again. That also brought his hardening cock dangerously close to her heat. Propped on his elbows, he rested his head against a sofa pillow and stroked the backs of his fingers over her jaw.
“What if…” I was interested in strings? The words wouldn’t come out of his mouth. They just stuck there.
“What if…what?” she asked.
“I was thinking if you brought Sophia to the shoot tomorrow, I could take her in the water when filming was over. Does she like the water?”
A shadow of disappointment flickered through her eyes. “I have to take Abby to the airport, but after. Sophia loves the water. She’s been swimming since she was a baby. Guess she got the water bug from you. What would be a good time?”
His brain had taken an abrupt turn after the word “airport,” and his sex radar went full tilt. “Abby’s leaving?”
In the next instant, he remembered Sophia. And in the next, decided they’d have to figure out how to work sex around Sophia, because he wasn’t going to let two good hotel rooms go to waste. In fact, he was going to do everything he could to get as much of this woman as possible before she left him for DC.
“Yeah,” Tessa said. “She has a visit planned to see her family. That’s why I sat in the restaurant waiting for…well, you…for hours. I had a limited window to talk to you.”
He couldn’t keep the smile from filling his face. “Huh.” He rocked his hips deeper between her legs and lowered his mouth to hers for a slow, sexy kiss. “I sure hope we can use that time wisely.”
A little smile turned her lips. “Wisely…” She opened the V of her thighs and shifted her hips until his shaft slid across her wet heat. Sensation blasted through his cock, and he groaned. “Sounds like there might be some learning involved.”