Page 70 of The Best Thing He Never Wanted

She laughed. “Honestly. At least, nothing bad; I’m enjoying myself.”

“Good.”

“That’s all you’ve got?”

“What else do you want?”

“I don’t know. Perhaps some indication that you are, too.”

His gaze moved over her face. “Bea.”

There it was again. Her name as an entire sentence.

“Yes, all right. Silly question.”

“Very.”

She slapped his chest, but he caught her hand before she could pull it away, and something changed. Not in his expression—if anything, he grew stiller as he held her hand against his chest and looked down at her.

“You sure?”

For a second, she didn’t understand why the words hit her the way they did. It was a simple question. And yet she couldn’t remember Simon ever asking it. Not about this. Perhaps at the very beginning, when they were young. Surely he must have, but she couldn’t remember.

The strange thing was that Simon had asked her opinion on thousands of things over the years. Did she want Italian or French for dinner? Did she like the blue tie or the gray? Did she think they should go to Scotland for Christmas or stay home?

But the big things had somehow been different. Not forced, he’d never forced things. But somehow things had always been settled before she knew it. By the time she understood there had been a decision to make, the decision had generally already been made.

Blane’s thumb moved once over the back of her hand. “Bea?”

She looked up at him. He wasn’t asking because he doubted her; he was asking because the answer belonged to her.

“Yes.”

His gaze stayed on hers.

She smiled. “I’m sure.”

Something in his shoulders eased.

“And just so we’re completely clear, if you ask me again in thirty seconds, I may become quite cross.”

His mouth twitched. “Good to know.”

She slid her hand free and curled it around the back of his neck. “Come here.”

“Yes, ma’am.”

“Don’t you dare start that either.”

His laugh was lost against her mouth. And after that, she stopped trying to think ahead.

Not because she forgot what she looked like, but rather because she stopped caring. She was too busy feeling. Too busy discovering that his stillness everywhere else translated here into attention. That he noticed every response she gave him and seemed to store it away, changing what he was doing without making a performance of it. He was learning her without once making her feel studied.

And she learned him too, and that mattered. It mattered more than she could have explained. She wasn’t simply standing there being loved. She was loving him back, touching him, kissing him, discovering places that made that wonderful control of his slip and feeling absurdly powerful every time it did.

When they finally made it to the bed, there was nothing remotely graceful about it. Blane sat on the edge first and drew her between his knees, and Bea went willingly, smiling as his hands settled at her hips. She stood there for a moment with her hands on his shoulders, looking down at him—this enormous man who had seemed almost immovable since the first time she’d noticed him in London—and she felt another little surge of that new, astonishing power when he tipped his face up to hers and waited.

When she kissed him, his hands slid around her, warm against her bare back, and she moved closer until there was no space left between them. She stopped thinking about being nearly sixty, not because her body had somehow become younger. It hadn’t. Her breasts were softer than they used to be, and her waist was different. There were lines and marks and all the ordinary evidence of a life already lived.