"Barely. It's seen things now."
His laugh rumbles under my cheek, and he wraps both arms around me and pulls me tighter against his chest, damp skin to damp skin, and presses a kiss to the top of my head, unhurried, like we have all the time in the world.
"Next time, I'll try to take you to bed like a gentleman," he says into my hair. "If you want a next time, that is."
"I want it."
"Good. So do I." He strokes my shoulder. "I just need a minute or two to regroup. Unless you've had enough of me for one night?"
"Not even close," I say.
I stay there and listen to his heart slow down. Feeling his fingers trace lazy lines up my spine, a quiet sort of terror arrives, the way it does, right behind the joy. When I finally find my voice, it’s a whisper at most, wrapped around a word I never allow myself to say. "Stay, Finn."
He lifts my chin enough for him to kiss me. "I'm not going anywhere."
I want that to be true so much it hurts. Because I know what this was for me. I don't know what it was for him. He has an empire and an eventual exit plan waiting for him. I have an apartment lease and a homeroom, and my heart is doing the one thing I swore it wouldn't.
It’s falling.
His fingers keep moving on my spine. The essays lie scattered on the floor next to the couch. And my last coherent thought, before I stop thinking at all, is that my stupid idea to get revenge on the man I was supposed to hate has backfired in the worst possible way.
CHAPTER 19
FINN
Iwake up in a bed the size of a small life raft with Darcy asleep on my chest, and my first thought of the day is that I have never woken up anywhere better.
I've had amazing mornings. Sunrise over the Serengeti. First light on a sheer face of granite with a thousand feet of air under me. This beats all of it. Hell, it isn't even close, and I'd say so out loud except the woman responsible for this feeling is drooling slightly on my shoulder and I don't want to wake her.
It should rattle me, how right this feels. Waking up somewhere with no urge to run for the nearest exit. No flight booked to the next adventure. No inkling at all to even flex a muscle if it means disturbing this moment. I keep waiting for the familiar rattle of impatience to show up. It doesn't. That's the part that would scare me, if I could locate anything this morning besides ridiculous, undeserved luck.
We found the bed around one. Slept around two. Her alarm is set for ten minutes to six, she warned me, because teachers don't get snow days in May, and there are three minutes left on it. I spend all nine memorizing the weight of her—one leg thrown over mine, her dark hair under my chin and sticking to my bareshoulder, her hand curled against my ribs like she's holding on to something that's keeping her from drifting away.
I'm hard again, because she's naked and warm and pressed against my hip and I'm a living man, but that's not going anywhere this morning. First bell at the high school waits for no one, and I made my peace with that last night. Mostly.
The alarm goes off, piercing the quiet. Darcy makes a sound like a badger being evicted.
"Morning," I say.
Nothing. She burrows into my chest, pulls the blanket over her head, and goes still, a woman attempting to fake her own disappearance in her own bed.
"Darcy."
One hand emerges from the blanket. It holds up a single finger. Not that finger. An index finger, meaning wait, and I lie there grinning at her ceiling like an idiot while the finger retreats back under the covers.
At two minutes after six she surfaces, resigned, and sits up. The sheet falls to her waist and I stop grinning because the view demands my full attention. Soft, firm breasts bounce slightly with her drowsy movements, those dusky pink nipples just begging me to suck them into my mouth again. If she didn't have to be somewhere, I'd already have her pressed beneath me for another round of the incredible sex we enjoyed last night.
She squints at me. She appears to register that I'm real. Then she leans down, kisses me once, briefly, morning breath and all, and says the first words of her day.
"You're still here."
"I'm still here." I push her hair out of her face. "That a problem?"
"Mm." She considers it with her eyes closed. "No. Shower. School." A pause. "Words later."
She climbs over me to get out of the bed, taking her time about it on purpose. She grabs my shirt off the floor instead of anything she owns, and puts it on, fastening just two buttons.
I have seen that shirt on me in boardrooms and on magazine covers. It has never once done what it's doing right now, hanging open to her sternum with the hem grazing the tops of her thighs, and the want that goes through me is immediate and unambiguous. Fuck it. The day can wait one more minute.
