“What have I said about apologizing for being you? You can ask a hundred questions, a thousand if you want.”
“So?” I murmur, reaching up to touch his hand and press it firmly against me. “Do you?”
He thinks for a moment. I love – there’s that word again – that he doesn’t answer me right away, but gives it some serious thought. It’s like he really cares about telling me the truth.
“Yes,” he says. “Not often, but sometimes. Like I told you earlier—”
“Earlier?” I banter. “It feels like a hundred years ago.”
He chuckles, lighting me up inside. “I can’t argue with that.”
“You were saying? Sorry, I interrupted you.”
“If you apologize one more damn time,” he says, “I might have to bend you over this table and spank you into submission. I mean it, princess.”
I squeeze my legs tighter, my sex giving a possessive pulse at his words, my clit rubbing against my panties. I don’t know how to respond to him, so I’m glad when he goes on, saving me from having to think of a sassy reply.
Sometimes he makes it so difficult to talk, my tongue twitching with the need to do other things, to sink into the moment but in different steamy ways.
“I was going to fight for the belt,” he says. “I don’t think about what would’ve happened if I’d won. I don’t think about the money. I’ve got plenty of that. I don’t think about the fame, because who the fuck wants to be so famous they can’t walk down the streets without being accosted? No, I think about the fight, what it would’ve felt like to walk into the ring and know everything’s on the line. But now I don’t have to wonder.”
“What do you mean?” I ask, my voice a faint whisper as I drink in the passion of his words.
“Everything’s on the line with us,” he snarls. “Being with you, protecting what we have, it means so much more to me than a world championship ever could. I’ve spent my life wondering what it would be like to risk everything, to win everything… and now I have.”
I try to blink back the tears which sting my eyes, but it’s freaking impossible as they gather in my eyes.
I love you so much.
I force the words away.
If I blurted those words out he’d probably laugh in my face, or tilt his head at me like I’ve gone insane, asking me what the hell I’m talking about. He’d probably call me deluded.
But surely, surely…
I can hardly let myself think it.
But surely if we’re going to be together forever, that means love is on the table?
Surely it means it has to be?
“You mean so much to me, Rider,” I say, settling for a toned-down version.
“You mean the world to me, princess,” he says, his voice husky and brimming with meaning. “I can’t imagine a world without you. But eat your pizza before you get tears all over it.”
I giggle at his joking tone, at the playfulness in his eyes. I can tell my emotion mean something to him too.
I just don’t know if it’s L-word big.
Chapter Twenty
Rider
I hold my woman closer to me, wrapping my arms firmly around her and cradling her like I’m getting ready to snap into feral action if anybody tries to interfere with what we have. I can’t stand the idea of somebody stealing this closeness, this – fuck it – this love.
We’re in the garden on a lounge chair, lounging beneath a tree, the sky clear and showing us a few smatterings of stars. The sounds of the city seem far away over the tall walls of the enclosed safe house, and even if there are guards out front, it feels like we’re completely alone.
Not just alone in the house.
It’s like we’re the only two people left in the world.
I know how crazy that would have seemed to me only a short while ago, but it feels undeniably true were my woman is concerned.
“Did you always want to be a writer, princess?” I whisper, shifting against her.
We’re lying side by side on the lounger, her body pushed up against mine, my manhood twitching every so often as though demanding attention. I fight the urge, enjoying our sweet romantic intimacy for the time being, but there’s no denying how hungrily my body is commanding me to claim her.
“Yes,” she says softly. “For as long as I can remember. I guess it’s like you with boxing.”
“Your father wrote?”
“Well… no, not in that way. I meant that you doing it since you were a little kid. I don’t even remember why I wanted to do it, or what prompted it. It must’ve had something to do with our library though. We had this huge library, full of books. My mom used to read a lot, Dad told me, before… before she passed.”