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“What is this?” I ask, looking around in amazement.
“This is for you,” he says, pulling back a seat for me.
“I don’t understand.”
“This is me telling you I’m sorry.”
He comes over to me, taking the flowers from my hands and placing them on the table, before reaching out and cupping my face, his strong, warm fingers pressed into my cold skin.
“This is me begging you to trust me again,” he says, his voice lower now, his eyes watering with emotion as he stares at me. “This is me telling you that it was your love that made me swim to the surface, Laila, and I will spend the rest of my life trying to prove to you, and to myself, that I am worthy of it.”
I open my mouth to say something, but no words come out.
I don’t know what to say.
I don’t know what to feel.
He runs his thumb over my bottom lip, staring at me in awe, like I’m something he lost that he never expected to find again.
“And maybe,” he says, leaning in closer, “maybe you will find my own love worthy too. Because the truth is, Laila, that I’m in bloody love with you.”
His words light me up inside. It’s instantaneous. I dreamed of what it could feel like if he ever told me he loved me, and I didn’t think it would hit me like this. So sharp, so fast, and so deep. All at once the ice around my heart thaws, the icicles around my ribs shatter, and I feel, really feel, what being loved by this man feels like.
It feels like heaven.
“You are?” I whisper, afraid that maybe I heard him wrong.
He grins at me, that crooked, cocky smile that makes my knees weak. “Yeah. I am. I am fatally, fantastically, and stupidly in love with you, Laila. The ‘stupidly’ part has taken over a lot lately and for that I am sorry.”
I laugh. It’s my loud laugh, and it bounces off the ship and around the walls of the museum, and it just makes him laugh in return, the sweetest sound.
But then my laugh is swallowed up by his lips pressing against mine, pulling me into a kind of kiss that just cements his words, makes me feel them with the gentle slide of his tongue, the way he’s cradling my face, possessive and sure.
He pulls away an inch, presses his forehead against mine.
“I understand if you need more time. If you stopped loving me and I have to earn it back. I have more groveling to do. I have a whole plan.”
“Shhh,” I say, pressing my finger against his lips. “I mean, I won’t say no to more groveling if it leads to nights like this. But I still love you, you know. That didn’t change. I couldn’t stop loving if I tried.”
He gives me a sheepish smile. “And did you try?”
“You bet I did,” I say. Then I give him a quick kiss. “Turns out, you’re impossible to unlove, James Hunter.”
“Well, thank god for that,” he says with a grin before burying his nose in my neck and placing his lips there.
“Now,” he says, his mouth moving against my skin, “we have some time before the first course. I had arranged for there to be an appetizer but, well…perhaps I’d rather eat you instead.”
My brows rise, heat flushing through my body. I’m giddy, joyful, and in seconds, impossibly turned on. I haven’t been with James since the night everything went to shit, and even though I have done my best to keep him out of my heart, out of my head, my body has been calling to him.
“I don’t mind being on the menu,” I tell him, and he pulls back to flash me his wonderfully wicked grin, the one that gets me weak at the knees. He looks over at the table and the waiters, then grabs my hand and leads me into the depths of the museum.
Here, after hours, when the place is mostly dark, empty, and totally silent, save for some sounds coming from behind closed doors, where I assume the kitchen is, it feels like another world. It’s hard to believe it’s the same crowded and chaotic place I took the boys.
And it’s even harder to believe that I’m here with James, that he’s leading me into the polar area dressed in a tuxedo.
He brings me over to the ice caves and ushers me inside and out of view of the waiters, and then quickly presses me up against the wall.
“Ever had sex in an ice cave before?” he asks in a husky voice as he hikes my dress up to my waist, biting and licking my shoulders, my neck.
