She brushed her lips over his. “Face-to-face. Always. And thank you for giving me wiggle room to screw up and then get it right again.” Even if Trent didn’t feel like she’d messed up as badly as she thought she had, she felt a lot better knowing she’d taken responsibility for the way she’d slighted his offer—and even more secure in their relationship, knowing that they could talk things through. In owning the bad and the good, they were building an even stronger foundation.
“Wiggle room. I like the sound of that...especially the wiggle part,” he said before sealing his lips over hers.
It felt so good, so right, to be in his arms again. She melted against him as he deepened the kiss, and she gathered the back of his shirt in her hands, pulling it up so she could feel his skin. A moan escaped his lungs as he cupped her rear.
“Shelley might—” she managed before kissing him again.
“—walk in,” Trent agreed, taking her in another toe-curling kiss.
“Good thing my gallery is right across the street, isn’t it?”
She laughed with surprise as he lifted her up into his arms. “I can walk.”
He silenced her protests with a kiss. And the truth was that it was incredibly romantic to be carried out beneath the stars…and then over the threshold of her gallery.
“Trent,” she said softly once they were inside. “This reminds me of…”
Her heart got caught in her throat, and she couldn’t finish. But she could see from looking into his eyes that he was remembering the same thing. “You’re even more beautiful now than you were on our wedding night.”
“So are you.”
For a long moment, they simply held on to each other as memories slowly transformed into a love that was new and fresh and wonderful.
And then she smiled at him and said, “I have a couch in the back room.”
His answering grin was so full of sensuality that it made her heart pound with renewed heat. He moved quickly through her gallery, and the next thing she knew, she was naked and lying beneath him, his fingers threaded through hers, his wonderfully heavy body pressing hers into the leather cushions.
“I love you,” she said again.
There wasn’t just intense heat in his eyes as he moved into her, but there was emotion, too. So much emotion that she felt his love in every thrust of his body into hers. In every brush of his lips over her skin. In the tightening of his fingers over hers.
And, most of all, in the beating of his heart against hers as they found pleasure unlike any other in each other’s arms.
Chapter Twenty-One
BY NOON THE next day, Trent still couldn’t stop wishing he was back in Reese’s bed, holding her in his arms. Last night, they’d made love in her gallery and then gone back to the mural to pick up and clean her painting supplies, she’d invited him back to her house again. They’d tumbled into bed as hungry for each other as ever, and when they’d woken up this morning, Reese was so inspired to paint that after seducing him yet again, she’d leapt out of bed and taken off to chase her muse.
He slid the vase of heliotrope he’d picked for Reese while he was out running closer on his desk and inhaled the scent of the flowers, anxious to give the pretty purple blooms to her. Heliotrope symbolized eternal love, and when he and Reese were first dating, they used to pick them at their favorite overlook and make promises to each other. Silly promises, like I promise never to shrink your favorite shirts, or, I promise to make sure you never run out of azul-blue paint.
All he’d wanted was to be with Reese again. But what he hadn’t realized was that it would be a hundred times better the second time around, simply because they were finally starting to communicate. If only Trent had realized that they weren’t communicating ten years ago. Now he saw it all so clearly, and it made him want that clarity in all aspects of their relationship, which included talking with Reese’s parents as soon as possible. They needed to know that he not only had never stopped loving their daughter, but also that he was going to keep loving Reese every second of every day for the rest of his life.
He picked up the paperwork for the deed transfer and headed up to Chandler’s office for their meeting, thinking about how he was feeling more and more like the man he wanted to be. A man he and Reese could both be proud of.
Chandler’s thin lips curved into a smile as Trent entered his office. He smiled so rarely that Trent was taken by surprise.
The smile tugged at a memory he’d long ago forgotten, from back when Chandler still lived in the home he and Caroline, Trent’s grandmother, had shared. Chandler had been watching Trent and Caroline playing a board game beneath an umbrella at a table on the deck. And as his grandfather gazed at his grandmother, his eyes had warmed, and he’d smiled in the same way he was now. Trent couldn’t have been older than eight or nine, but he still remembered being struck by that undeniable look of love on his grandfather’s face.