“Can you back up?”
She takes two steps backward. Smart ass.
“What did you say after ‘my business’?” I ask, folding my hands behind my head.
She blushes, a soft slow spread of pink, and for a gut-wrenching moment I think it was just a slip of the tongue. An old habit. But then she smiles. Shyly. An adverb that rarely follows any action Devon takes.
“My mom?” she tries.
“No, no. After that,” I say.
I’m working hard to keep my face neutral—not let her see how a simple possessive pronoun and a label have just set fireworks off in my chest.
She walks to the edge of the bed and sits, folding her knees beneath her.
“You mean the part where I called you my boyfriend?” she asks, tilting her head so her hair falls to one side. She’s stunning. And she has no idea.
“Yup. That part.”
She purses her lips to the side, pretends to be thinking.
“Maybe, that was the wrong word. Maybe you’d prefer the term ‘side piece’? Wait no! ‘Fuck-buddy’?”
I reach out and grab her around the hips, toss her back onto the pillows so that she’s beneath me.
“I’ll take boyfriend,” I say, barely able to get the words out from beneath the happiness lumped in my throat. “So you aren’t running away?”
She leans up, kisses me until my tongue tingles from the minty toothpaste.
“Nope. Since you screwed up my Achilles, it’s hard to run. But you might after I ask you about item two on the list,” she says when we break apart to catch our breath.
“Can it wait?”
She wraps her legs around my hips and twists so that she’s on top. Her eyes narrow on my mouth and if I hadn’t woken up hard just from being beside her, that look alone would do it.
“Will you be my chaperone in Milan? Because all of my suitors have been asking to go with me and I just can’t hold them off any longer.”
She pulls her bottom lip into her mouth and two tiny ski marks appear between her brows. Is she honestly worried that I’d say no? I want to tell her she should never worry. That whatever she asks me, the answer is yes. I want to tell her everything. But instead I say, “I’ll agree to that, if you’ll come home with me for a few days before Christmas. I know you’ll want to be back with your mom by Christmas eve?—”
She puts her fingers to my lips, leans over me, her perfect mouth hovering just over mine, her hair falling around myface like a curtain. This isn’t our first holiday, if you consider the hour I spent with her in the on-call room eating leftovers on Thanksgiving night when I got off my shift. On-call room holidays—she’d said it was a tradition her father had started with them when they were little. She’d said it just felt right. Still, her silence is starting to scare me.
“You should know I’m not a great traveler. And last time I went somewhere, I ended up in the ER, spilling my guts to some satanic stranger.”
I bite her finger. She yelps and pulls it away.
“I’ll just keep you away from microphones and we should be good.”
“And stages.”
“Those, too.” I kiss beneath her chin. She rocks her hips the smallest bit and I’m senseless.
“Well, now that that’s all settled, we can handle item three.”
She moves against me and her mouth meets mine, eager and insistent, and I know without a fraction of a doubt that my own items are going to have to wait. Because there’s nothing else in this world beside Devon and item three.
Chapter Thirty-Eight
Devon
