“Maybe arch my back more?”
“No—”
“Or spread my knees a little?”
Adrian closed his eyes and put his charcoal pencil against a seemingly random spot on his easel, head tilted back as he muttered about impossible artistic conditions.
A strangled giggle escaped her, and he swiveled to stare at her with growing suspicion.
“You’re fucking with me again, aren’t you?” he said, outrage mixing with hope.
Caroline cackled, rolling to her back and howling with laughter even as she held her arms out to him. He dropped his pencil on the floor and crossed the room to her in two long steps.
“Oh God, it was taking you so long to figure that out,and it’s really cold in here,” Caroline teased. “I was worried you were going to pass out, and then I was going to freeze to death here.”
“Serves you right,” Adrian said, bending his head to press his teeth against the top of her breast in a mock bite. “If you give me a heart attack, youknowthat Tom will make an age crack at my funeral.”
“It’ll basically write itself if we’re both naked when that happens,” Caroline agreed, cupping his jaw.
“Are we both getting naked? You’d be surprised what I can manage with most of my very warm clothing on.”
Caroline made big eyes at him and slid her hands down his chest. “Can I have your sweater? I’mverycold, and it’s only going to get worse if I’m on top.”
His grin spread across his face as he pulled his sweater off.
“Whatever you want, sweetheart. Anything you want.”
For that moment and onward, as far into the future as she could see, she really believed he’d give her anything.
Epilogue
Two months later
“Caroline!”
She heard someone calling her name as she crossed the business quad on the way from the parking lot to the auditorium. There was a guest speaker, the chief investment officer of the nation’s largest charitable foundation, and Caroline was on her way to learn about grantmaking. As her summer internship involved making them, and Adrian’s three-year business plan involved receiving them, she was hauling a lap desk, her laptop, and the speaker’s most recent two books with her in her tennis bag to attend the speech.
Boston was bitterly cold in February. She’d skipped her morning workout in lieu of staying in her warm bed with her even warmer boyfriend to engage in some less-conventional cardio. That alone wouldn’t have put her off schedule, but afterward he’d made coffee using the moka pot they’d brought home from Italyandcrepes using the griddle they’d acquired in France, so now she was late, as usual.
But she halted in the middle of the slushy sidewalk, scanning the area around her. From the other side of the campus, a small figure in bright green wide-leggedtrousers and a long flapping white parka came splashing across the pavement.
“Rima,” Caroline said with surprise. “Hi.”
Rima made her way to Caroline’s side, one hand pressed against her rib cage as she breathed heavily.
“Oh, you walk fast,” she wheezed. “I thought that was you in the pink leggings, but I wasn’t sure.”
Caroline looked down at her neon palm-tree-print running pants with approval. They matched her coatandher socks.
Rima caught her breath and straightened, elegantly shaped eyebrows lifting as she addressed Caroline.
“I was worried about you!” she declared. “I haven’t seen you at all, and you didn’t respond to any of my emails.”
Caroline leaned back in surprise. “I’m sorry. I thought your emails were just about, you know, taking down the set.”
She hadn’t even opened them. After being told off by Sophia, she hadn’t wanted to show her face for the strike, and she’d been reeling from her argument with Adrian in any event. It was three disasters back.
“But you didn’t show up. For that or dinner or anything. I was ready to send out a search party, but Nathan said he saw you on the way to the gym the next day,” Rima said.
