Laughing, I throw my leg over the bike, tugging the hem of my skirt down and holding it until I sit when Makhi looks like he’s having ideas. “I won’t do that to you. Not yet, anyway.”
He places the helmet on my head and puts his on. Once he’s climbed on the bike, we speed away from our villa.
He takes me to a lavender field so beautiful I want to cry.
“Why here?” I ask as he helps me off the bike.
“It was the most beautiful place I could think of taking the woman I love,” he says softly.
My breath hitches.
“And if she doesn’t love you back?” I whisper, my heart pounding against my chest.
The kiss on the corner of my mouth is light but perfect. “Then I will love her anyway.”
We sit on a red-checked blanket he pulls from the basket tied to the back of the bike. He lifts containers of olives, fresh bread still warm from the oven, cold chicken, cheese, and crisp apple slices. We eat with our fingers and sip glasses of ice-cold wine, and he rests his head in my lap as I take in our magical purple haven.
“I don’t hate you,” I tell him quietly, my eyes on our beautiful view. “But love is scary.” I look down at him for this next bit to find him peering up at me. He must have been watching me allthis time. “Love means opening myself up to you when you hurt me so badly before.”
“So, we’ll be friends,” he says.
I raise my eyebrow. “Who have lots of sex?”
He pinned me up against the garage wall a week ago when he asked if I wanted to go for a ride. It was neither the time nor the place, but I let him fuck me against the wall, not knowing or caring that someone could have walked in on us at any moment.
I didn’t regret it.
In fact, I told him I didn’t care about the bike ride, so if he wanted to carry me up to my bedroom for the next hour, I wouldn’t mind. He laughed, postponed the bike ride, and we spent the day in his room, talking and having sex. More sex than friends would have.
A thought suddenly occurs to me.
My eyes widen. “Wait. Did you do the picnic basket last time?”
“Yup,” he admits.
“With all the food and the?—”
“Uh huh.”
“And Nance?—”
“She did.”
I make a face. “And she didn’t kill you after she did all that work, and you didn’t even take me out on the picnic.”
His amusement dims. “She knows I don’t deserve you after what I did to you, but when I went to her begging for help, she realized how much the picnic and doing something nice for you meant to me.”
“And if I’d said no this time?”
“I’d have had a long, painful time of learning how to bake bread,” he says, and I laugh.
As he grins up at me with his head in my lap, a warm feeling grows in my chest. He must see it reflected in my gaze becausehe reaches up to cup my face. “I won’t hurt you again, Byrdie. I thought I was protecting Vonn and Nash from you.”
I know. It’s why it’s so hard to hate him.
“I don’t hate you,” I tell him quietly. “And we have too much sex to be friends. Maybe we could try the love thing.”
“I think we’re already trying it,” he says so seriously that he must know exactly how I feel about him and is hinting at it instead of calling me a liar.
