Just you.
After she came down, she lay there for a second, eyes closed, trying to catch her breath. April kissed her softly on her thighs and hips, and Daphne giggled, jolting in the chair.
April laughed, then folded her hands on Daphne’s lower belly, her chin resting on her knuckles. She looked up at Daphne with those eyes, all dark and mysterious. Daphne slid her fingers from April’s hair to her face.
“Tell me what you’re thinking,” Daphne said.
April’s expression shifted and she sighed, blinking slowly as though drugged. “I’m thinking you’re the most perfect thing I’ve ever seen.”
Daphne’s already short breath vanished, and she swiped her thumb over April’s soft cheek. April leaned into her, her eyes fluttering closed.
“What are we going to do?” Daphne asked quietly.
She hadn’t really meant for the question to slip out. Six little words, but they held infinite weights of emotion, countless more questions about the future.
April’s brows lowered and her mouth opened, but suddenly Daphne didn’t want the answer. She didn’t want to hearI don’t knoweither, because that just made her feel as though there was something hard and heavy that they couldn’t see, couldn’t figure out, and she didn’t want any of that right now.
She just wanted this.
Just you.
“I know what I want,” Daphne said, sitting up a little and grinning.
April closed her mouth, blinking at Daphne’s change in tone. “Oh yeah?”
Daphne nodded. “Two things. I want to get you back to the cabin and into a bed.”
Their own world, just the two of them, reality and everything Daphne didn’t know hours and hours away.
April smiled. “I think I can handle that.”
Daphne took a deep breath. “But first, I want to see your Devon pieces.”
April’s expression slipped a little, her brows twitching low.
“Not because you’re my competition,” Daphne said.
“Aren’t I?” April asked.
Daphne slid her hand through April’s hair. “You are, I know. And in two days, we’re going to show these pieces to Nicola as just that—competition for something life-changing. But that’s not why I want to see them tonight.”
“Why, then?”
“Because I want to seeyou.”
If art reflected life, if April’s pieces revealed her heart and soul even a fraction of the way Daphne felt her own paintings did, she didn’t want to go another second without seeing what April had created, to see who April really was underneath all her starshine, her deflecting, her doubts that anyone could love her as she was.
“Okay,” April said softly, then kissed the bare skin of Daphne’s belly. “I’ll show you anything you want.”
Chapter
Twenty-Five
Cloverwild’s main lodgewas quiet this late at night.
As they walked through the lobby and toward the art studio, April’s stomach swelled with butterflies. Of course, Daphne had seen her work, but it was mostly tattoos or a few slapdash drawings she had hanging on her walls in Wonderlust. There was her Instagram, and obviously, the piece now healing on Daphne’s arm, but all of that was for other people.
Her pieces for the Devon were different. They didn’t feel like the art she’d made to hang in her shop. They certainly didn’t feel like a tattoo sketch, no matter how much she loved something she created to put on someone’s body.
