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“Anything you want, baby,” he said.
I laughed. “Now we’re finally getting somewhere with this fake marriage,” I said with a laugh.
He tossed the sheets aside before getting up, the light from the airplane window coming through and shining on his perfect, soft skin. As he walked to the door, I felt that motion in my stomach once more as I thought about how he’d called me baby…again.
I never allowed anyone to use names like honey or baby with me, except for my best friends. Any time one of the guys I hooked up with tried to, I was quick to curb-stomp it. I had a visceral reaction to it, like a combination of wanting to throw up and freeze.
When Spencer used that word, which he’d used several times in the intervening hours, what surprised me wasn’t so much the pet name itself but that I didn’t mind it.
Not at all.
As soon as he’d used that word, I’d wanted to curl up in his voice and embrace him for the foreseeable future. I hadn’t wanted to run away from anything about this; I wasn’t getting the usual feeling I got after more than a few days with the same person, as if my skin was getting too tight for me.
I was perfectly comfortable continuing in his company, and that, more than anything else, was what scared me. I was never a person to get comfortable with someone or to…to fall in like.
“You doing okay?” Spencer said as he took a tray of food from the flight attendant. “You seem a million miles away.”
Shit, I must’ve been a million miles away. I didn’t even remember him calling for that food or dressing presentably enough to receive it from the flight attendant just now.
I need to chill the fuck out with this dreamy, romantic bullshit.
“Yeah,” I said. “Yeah, I’m fine.” I crawled over the sheets toward him and reached toward the tray for an olive. “Just thinking about an email I need to send before this plane lands and business hours close on the West Coast.”
He smiled a little as he picked up an olive and held it out to me. I ate it off his finger, sucking gently at his fingertip before we returned to our former position.
That’s exactly how this needed to stay, sexual and not emotional.
Good God, the cabin pressure must be off in this jet or something. That, combined with the rock on my finger, would naturally throw me off my game a little.
I needed to eat and refocus.
“How much longer do we have?” I thought I’d break the silence by reminding Spencer about how this relationship rolled out—sex, smiles, and no sappiness!
“We’re landing in Italy in eight hours. Plenty of time for emails, showers, and sleep.”
“And other things,” I said, leaning forward to capture his bottom lip.
“Of course,” he said with a smile.
At the sight of his smile, I felt a second wind hit and was ready to take the elevation of this airplane to another altitude.
Chapter Eleven
SPENCER
Flying into Verona always felt much calmer compared to the chaos of LAX, with its approximately twelve lanes of traffic. The mentality of Italy was “Basta e vaffanculo, tutti va bene” (Stop it and fuck you—everything will be fine), which drove my type-A personality up the walls. Even so, there was no place in the world like it, for better or worse.
As much as I wasn’t looking forward to dealing with the dirt that was undoubtedly about to be dug up during the coming week, there was always something about coming back here that immediately calmed me down. From the soft sounds of gentle Italian to the green and gold fields that stretched out into the distance, I felt a sense of serenity as soon as I got there.
Although I wasn’t sure that didn’t also come from the woman at my side, gazing in wonder at the rolling hills toward the walled stone city in the distance. I did my best not to let her see me studying her or how shaken I had been since we woke up that morning.
I still had no idea how it happened, but something changed soon after eating and taking that shower together. We’d passed out in the well-appointed bed with one critical difference from the last time we’d fallen asleep together.
On the previous occasion, we’d crashed back-to-back, utterly dead to the world and replete with the satisfaction that only having sex for twenty-four hours could bring. The next morning, we woke up in that same back-to-back position. When we’d awoken, we turned to each other, drawn as if by a magnetic current, and proceeded as usual in the only way we could communicate that didn’t end with an argument.
This morning, though, as we entered English airspace, I started to stir out of the jet-lagged sleep I’d fallen into with all the weight of a cannonball and was shocked to discover a delicate hand poised on my chest, her fingers draped over me. That beautiful hand—the texture of which I’d gotten to know quite well, particularly when it was gripped firmly around my girth—brought my attention to her face, which was more relaxed than I’d ever seen.
Her eyes, which I ordinarily saw sharpened into a glare or a dry smile given to quick sarcasm, were relaxed into a configuration that made her seem so much younger than usual. It was as if every piece of flame-tempered armor she used to protect herself had fallen away, and all that was left was the real her.
