I held her head in my hands and kept her mouth against mine until she tried to straighten up again. Even then, I held her until I was ready to let go.
“Hungry?” She put the biscotti to my mouth.
I took a bite, and then she came in for another kiss. This one lingered.
She licked the chocolate off her finger. “Bad night?”
She gasped when I flipped her over, but her legs came around me, locking me in.
I kissed her hard on the forehead. “A lot of shit on my mind.”
Her eyes studied mine. “I understand.”
“No one else in this world does. No one but you.”
“I can read your mind, too,” she said, a sly look coming over her face.
“That so?” I said slowly. “Tell me,my mind, what thoughts am I having now?”
“Dirty.” She howled with laughter when I stuck my finger in her side. “Cease!” she screamed between bouts of laughter, wiggling to get me to stop. “Cease!”
“That’s not what I was thinking.”
“I knowthat,” she said. “You want me.Bad.”
We both looked down at my dick.
Laughter rumbled in my chest. “That’s like telling me the walls are gold when I’m looking right at them.”
“Okay. Something a little deeper.” She tapped her chin for a second. Then she pointed at me, like she had it. “You want to take me on a bike ride today. Around the property. Around sunset. On two of the Cruisers in the garage. It would besoooromantic to do that with your wife. That’s what you were thinking.”
“How fucking uncanny.” I moved a piece of hair from her eye. “That’s exactly what I was thinking. But you didn’t mention giving me a ride first.” I pulsed my hips up.
She sucked in a breath, hissing it out softly, her palms flattening against my chest.
It became our thing.
For the next two weeks, we took evening bike rides through the citrus groves. Mia always stopped to pick a blood orange for the salad she made with dinner. She’d stick it in her basket, like she’d just picked a winner.
We talked as we rode. We talked about our childhoods. We talked about life in between then and now. We discussed music. Our siblings. Other family issues. Everything and nothing. We talked about the future. Where we wanted to go and things we wanted to see together. Where we were going to stay for the year we’d agreed on.
I was never much of a talker, but the woman got shit out of me that I’d forgotten was there.
“A road trip across America,” I said. “I thought about it once.”
“That would be fun after we chill for the year.”
“This time counts,” I said, the thought occurring to me. We were stationary.
“No.” She shook her head, her bike shimmying a bit when she moved to avoid an overturned crate. “This time is…unsettled.”
As if she said it to the ground beneath our feet, a loud bell rang over the groves. It was a warning sign to me, but not to whoever caused it to go off. They probably figured it was an alert for the workers to leave for the day.
Someone on our side had hit it. That meant someone unfamiliar was at the gates.
I moved so fast that Mia didn’t see it coming. I snatched her off her bike, moving toward the stone wall that separated the property from the world. Crates were placed against the wall in different places. So were ladders. It seemed like they were left there for the workers. Some of the trees were over fifteen feet tall. The wall was eleven.
“Rio,” Mia breathed, when I set her close to a ladder. “What’s going on?”
