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“What? What’s happening?—”
I hit the button on the side of my phone that would end the call and shoved it into my pocket. Fuck hiding, fuck watching him from the corner, fuckallof this—I’d spent an entire day’s work finding potential matches for him, spent my time and my energy on something that emotionally hurt me, and he was just going tosend her away?
I stepped out from the corner that hugged Essex Street, putting myself fully in view of him. “Adrian!”
His head whipped in my direction, and for a second, it felt like time slowed—like the people around me were walking at half speed, like sounds of the cars were filtering in through cotton wool, like I couldn’tbreathe.
Bright blue eyes met mine, and he froze.
“Ava?”
I didn’t want to imagine how jarring it must have been for him for me to pop out of nowhere. Not when I couldn’t fucking wrap my head around this. But he moved toward me, and I didn’t know what to do, didn’t know how toreact. I watched him, watched as he grew larger in my vision, watched as he tookup parts of me I didn’t want to give up. Two steps before he reached me, his eyes glanced down to my mouth, and I finally got words out. “What the fuck was that…”
Warm hands cupped either side of my face, and before I could finish what I wanted to say, his lips met mine.
He kissed me, and everything just…stopped.
Chapter 20
Adrian
This. This was what felt right.
And maybe it was a mistake—maybe I’d acted too quickly, too irrationally, the moment she’d appeared out of what seemed to be thin air on the corner of Essex and Delancey. Maybe I should have taken longer than half a second to register that she was here as if by some miraculous answer to a prayer, maybe I should have considered the harm I could cause to not only myself but her and Lucas by proxy.
Maybe I should have done a lot of things differently.
But I just couldn’t bring myself to fucking care, because it just feltright.
I tucked her up against my chest with an arm around her waist. Her mouth tasted of strawberries and sin, and in the glow of the streetlights with the occasional passerby hurling abuse at us for taking up too much space on the sidewalk, I didn’t care that her lipstick was staining my teeth or that she was grabbing for the buttons on my shirt.
Scratch that. I cared a little bit once I realized she’d managed to get half of them undone.
“Car,” I rasped, coming up for a breath of freezing cold air just an inch from her mouth. “Now.”
Eyes half-lidded and mouth parted, she nodded, her nose brushing against my chin. “Okay.”
My heart hammered in my chest as I forced myself to pull back enough to look at the sea of traffic. It had been maybe ten minutes total since I’d left the car, and considering traffic was moving at a snail’s pace, my driver couldn’t be that far.
I pulled my phone from my pocket with shaking fingertips. Adrenaline was dumping into my system—none of this felt real, not really. Why the fuck was shehere? To tempt me? To get me to finally break and give in to what I’d wanted from her for weeks?
If that’s what her motivation was, she’d won. I didn’t have it in me to fight it.
My driver’s voice filtered down the line after a single ring. “Mr. Stone?”
“Where are you? Change of plans.” I kept Ava pressed against me, the warmth of her body enough to dull the sting of cold air against the slit of visible bare skin between the two sides of my shirt. Part of me worried she’d run the moment things became too real, and I wasn’t about to let her go anywhere.
A laugh came through the phone. “I’ve barely moved. I can see you,” Oliver said.
Roughly six cars back from the traffic light, a black car flashed its headlights.
“You see me?”
“Yes.” The crosswalk light turned green, and in a moment of haste, I pulled her with me toward it, braving the bitter wind. I didn’t care what I looked like as we crossed the street together, didn’t care that I likely had lipstick on my face or that my shirt was half undone. “Get the privacy screen up.”
“Good God, Adrian,” Oliver huffed. “I’ll put in my headphones while I’m at it.”
“Pretty sure that’s illegal.”
