Surprise danced across her face. “Our cabin?”
Shit. He’d spoken without thinking. He opened his mouth to backpedal, but after the initial furrowing of her brow, her expression turned dreamy. “Tell me about our cabin. Are we on a yacht?”
Her hand found his, and their fingers tangled on top of the pink comforter.
“No, it’s the log cabin we buy after you graduate from college,” he said. “In a forest somewhere. Just you and me and the trees.”
“That sounds really nice.”
Although she tugged on his hand to pull him down next to her, he stayed firmly upright. But the yearning on her face made him bold.
“Actually, forget that. Let’s go to Vegas right now. Get hitched.” He brought their joined hands to his mouth and pressed a kiss to her knuckles, the blood in his veins singingher, her, her. But her fingers tensed, and her eyes widened.
Shit. Now hehadpushed too far. “Um, I was kidding. Of course,” he said quickly.
She was looking at him in astonishment. “Most guys don’t even, like, joke about that.”
“What, getting married?”
She nodded, her hair slippery against the pillow.
He shrugged. “Most guys aren’t dating you.”
Most, hell.Hewas the guy dating her, and he wanted to be that guy forever. But she was probably going to tell him it was too much, too fast. He held his breath, waiting to be ejected from this pink paradise for wanting her too much. But when she finally spoke, her voice was full of joy.
“Okay. Let’s go to Vegas. Get hitched. Live together in a cabin forever. Just you and me and the trees.”
This time when she tugged on his hand, he didn’t resist stretching out next to her. The door was open, and he could still kiss her with one foot on the floor.
TEN
“Did I ever tell you about the time I got bitten by an iguana?”
“An iguana?” Faith peeked around the stack of binders piled in front of her, nose adorably scrunched. “No. But we haven’t exactly sat down to exchange our post high school life stories.”
Leo nudged the binders over and held out his hand. “Nasty infection.” He held his breath as she traced a finger along one of the pale half-moon scars bracketing the fleshy section under his pinky finger. “I had to leave the job site and head into Iquitos for antibiotics. For a minute there, I was scared I was going to lose the whole hand.”
“Yikes. Did you bleed all over the place?”
Despite her gory question, the overall vibe between the two of them was relaxed. Agreeing to a cease-fire had put them both at ease during their first real workday together.
“Yep.” He wiggled his fingers and ignored the way his hand still tingled from her touch. “Anyway, I bring it up only to say that almost bleeding to death in a jungle surrounded by biting iguanas was preferable to reading one more Beaucoeur BUILD annual report.”
He scowled down at the hundreds of pages of metrics, assessments, and executive summaries dedicated to closing the loop, but Faith just widened her eyes in faux confusion.
“Geez, you’d think someone with a cushy office chair and a view of the city from the eighteenth floor would be used to pushing papers.”
He laughed. “Never.” In fact, BUILD’s water-stained ceiling tiles and muddy orange carpet were much more his speed.
Faith patted his scarred hand. “There’s more where that came from.”
She stood and crossed the room to the battered bookcase running along the wall, stretching onto her tiptoes to reach another binder on the top shelf. And while his mother would scream bloody murder if she witnessed her only son not leaping up to help, Leo just couldn’t make himself. Because today Faith was in a plain white T-shirt and a swingy red skirt that barely hit the tops of her knees. Every time she moved, that fluttery skirt would shift and give him a peek at her thighs, and when she lifted her arms above her head like that? Coño. He stopped breathing entirely.
The Faith he knew in high school had always been so solid in her convictions, so quick to voice her opinions. And her sturdy figure of today suited that no-fucks-given attitude so much better than the almost brittle thinness of her teenage years. Not that he’d say so out loud, of course; he knew better than to offer his opinion about things that weren’t his business. His older sisters had knocked that lesson into his head early. But their not-so-gentle training didn’t stop him from lacing his fingers behind his head and watching the material of the skirt pull against her nice plump ass or from almost falling out of his chair when she turned around and he had to abruptly avert his gaze so he wouldn’t get busted checking her out.
“Can I ask you something?” she said as she resumed her seat.
Leo nodded absently, distracted with thoughts of shoving all the binders off the table to work off his orgasm debt to her.
