Emma gazed up at me, her lips parting slightly. It would have taken nothing but a step forward and a little bend for me to cover those pink lips with my mouth, to ravage her thoroughly.
Before I could act on that impulse, she nodded. “Sure. One more.”
* * *
I hadn’t been drunk in a very long time, and even right now, I wasn’t quite there. I was . . . tipsy, I decided. Happy, or happier, at least. But I knew I wasn’t totally wasted because I didn’t have a case of whiskey dick. The hard-on between my legs wasn’t going away. If anything, it was getting worse, loudly demanding my attention in the way that only a painfully hard dick could do.
Emma, on the other hand, was feeling no pain. She was laying on the sofa across from me now, her skirt bunched up to mid-thigh as she rested her weight on her elbows. Her hair was down, spilling over her shoulders. She’d shrugged off the light cardigan she’d been wearing earlier, so now I was getting intriguing views of her cleavage.
“Hey, buddy. Stop ogling my tits and listen to me.” She was grinning, pointing to her face.
“Sorry.” My tone made it clear I was anything but.
“What is it with you and my boobs, anyway?” She rested her head on one hand. “When you first got back from South America, right after I started working here, you didn’t say much to me—unless you were yelling or telling me I was wrong, dead wrong, no matter what I said—” She rolled her eyes. “But you sure did like to stare at my chest.”
“Yeah,” I sighed happily. “You’re not wrong.”
“Ha! Finally. You admit that I’m right about something.” She tried to raise one finger in victory, but in doing so, she nearly tumbled from the couch.
“Emma, babe, I’ve admitted that you’re right about a lot of things. You just have a selective memory. You only ever point out when we’ve been fighting, not the many, many times we’ve worked together. Successfully, I might add.”
“Maybe,” she allowed. “But anyway, we were talking about . . . these.” She cupped one breast, and I nearly swallowed my tongue. “And your weird obsession with them.”
“It’s not weird, and it’s not an obsession. I just happen to think you’ve got nice tits, okay? A bodacious set of ta-tas.” I grinned. “But they’re not the only part of you that I like. Don’t be jealous of your boobs, babe.”
Emma dropped flat onto the sofa with a groan. “There you go again. Jesus, Deacon, you gotta stop doing that.” Her voice was muffled since her face was buried in the cushion.
“Doing what?” I asked in bewilderment. “What did I do now?”
“You said something sweet. And you called me babe.” She turned her head to look at me. “When you do that, I forget all the reasons we can’t be together. I start to think of all the reasons we could work, instead. And that’s not safe. Not at all.”
My heart was pounding now. “What are the reasons we can’t be together . . .babe?”
“UGH!” Emma moaned this time. “You did it again. Okay.” She flipped onto her back. Now her boobs were practically falling out of her tight camisole top. I wasn’t planning to point that out to her.
“One . . . we work together.”
“We do.” I nodded. “But plenty of doctors and other professionals both work together and have relationships. All you have to do is watch medical dramas on television to know that.”
She shot me a withering glare. “Two . . . you don’t really even like me. We argue all the fucking time.”
“I like you immensely, Emma. You’re one of my favorite people in the entire world. As for the arguing . . .maybe we did once, but not so much anymore,” I argued. “And I have a theory that for us, all that verbal sparring isn’t really a bad thing. It’s foreplay.” I wagged my eyebrows. “I know it getsmehot and bothered.”
Emma made a noise that might have been frustration or defeat. I wasn’t sure. She lifted her hand one more time. “Four . . .”
“You forgot three. Babe.”
“Deacon.” She closed her eyes. “You’re killing me.”
“Wouldn’t want that. Go on, then. You were saying . . . three.”
“Right.” She nodded. “Three is that . . .” She stopped speaking, and I saw that her lips were trembling. Her chest rose as she inhaled. “You left me, Deacon. I trusted you. I was with you—we were together.” She let her head loll to the side so that she was gazing into my eyes. “I loved you. And you walked away from everything. From me. You ran away, and I was here alone, and I . . .” She swallowed. “It hurt, Deacon. It crushed me. I can’t go through that again.”
I let my eyes drift shut, blocking out the raw proof of her pain—pain that I had caused. “I told you the other day, Emma—last week. I’ll tell you again. I’m not going anywhere. I’m not going to leave you again. I promise you, I won’t. You can trust me.” I opened my eyes again. “I’ll tell you that every day, if that’s what it takes for you to believe me. I’ll repeat those words every single fucking day for the rest of our lives until you know that they’re true.”
Emma pushed herself up to a sitting position, swinging her legs to the floor. Her gaze never left my face. I watched as she rose slowly and carefully skirted the coffee table until she stood in front of me. When she dropped to kneel at my feet, I thought my heart was going to thunder out of my body.
“Tell me again.”
