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The green of her eyes was dulled in the artificial light of the kitchen, but they captivated me nonetheless. Rain pelted like bullets against the glass sliding doors, and in that brief flicker of the time we had alone, all I wanted to do was take her outside with me. I wanted to feel the rain on my skin, wanted to live in the moment for a minute and think about nothing but her and the way it coated me like the never-ending downpour. I wanted to let it try to wash it all away and be okay with the realization that no amount of scrubbing would get her out of my skin.
I wanted to fucking kiss her.
“You’re doing it again,” she breathed.
“Doing what?”
“Looking at me like that.” She swallowed, the sound almost audible. “One of them will be back any minute, Adrian.”
The longer I watched, the more obvious it was that she was disappointed. I should have done it.
I shouldn’t have backed down.
————
The rain didn’t let up for a second for the rest of the day, and as Ava and I sat beside each other on the floor by the fireplace, the heat of it felt like a heaviness that I couldn’t quite shake. She looked up at me, her hair a mess, covered in a thin, satin pajama set that I waspositivedidn’t include a bra. My will was fucking breaking—I had no one to hide from with everyone in bed, nothing to hold me back except the glass of wine in my hand.
“The ideal first date you told Emily about,” she said, breaking the beat of silence as she looked back down at her open binder. She sipped at her third glass of wine. It was the same wine I’d served her last night, and the same one I’d served her on the boat. “Do you want me to book your dates for that kind of thing? Art museum first, and then you can decide where it goes from there?”
“Fuck, no,” I scoffed. It wasn’t a lie—I didn’t want that with someone else, and I’d been unable to avoid that realization all day. “Dinners are fine.”
“But that’s what you?—”
“I know what I answered before, Ava.”
She looked at me, her gaze bouncing between my lips and my eyes, and temptation flared again.
“I don’t want to do that with someone else,” I said.
Okay,she mouthed. She wrote something beside my original answer, but her hand obscured it from sight. “If you could do anything else for work, what would you choose?”
“Travel photographer,” I answered.
She hesitated again, but marked it down. “I know you said you don’t care what profession she has,” she said slowly, tapping her pen against the paper. “But in an ideal world, if you could choose…?”
I swallowed another hefty sip of wine. My inhibitions were on the fucking floor, and I wasn’t going to try to hide that fromher right now. I didn’twantto. “I don’t know, Ava. Aspiring art teacher. Matchmaker.”
I set my glass down on the coffee table in front of us as she watched me, her mouth parted just a hair, her gaze locked on me. “You can’t just say things like that to me.”
“I can,” I insisted. “I did.”
The red on her cheeks spread, little blotches of pink sprouting across her neck, her jaw. “Please?—”
She stopped herself the moment my hand pressed into her cheek, the intense warmth of it heating my palm. I tucked a hanging lock of auburn hair behind her ear and her breathing quickened, her body frozen despite the heat of the fire that I could feel behind her.
Her eyes flicked back and forth between mine rapidly.
“Ask me who I’m looking for,” I rasped, dragging my thumb across her bottom lip. So fucking soft. “Ask me what I want. The answer is the same.”
She swallowed, and I could feel her throat move against my pink finger. God, I wanted to wrap my hand around it. “Who?—”
“You.”
I leaned in closer, bridging the gap, giving myself the one thing I’d so desperately craved for days, forweeks.
But the heavy padding sound of footsteps stopped me just before I could reach her lips.
“Mr. Stone?”
