"Communication protocols. Sounds like someone is jealous."
He pulled me close. The "protocol" conversation dissolved into his mouth on my neck and his hands under my shirt, and I stopped laughing and started making sounds that had nothing to do with humor.
I don't know how we got from the couch to the bedroom. The afternoon light had turned everything gold by the time we stilled, tangled in sheets, legs intertwined. His touch was different now than the first time. More confident. Less careful. He'd learned the language of my body and was getting fluent.
"Anna." His voice held a bit of hesitation. "I would like, if you’re amenable, for us to be…" He stared at me, "I would like to formally, or informally, however you prefer the structure, for us to…"
I propped myself up on my elbow and watched him struggle. His ears were turning pink. His accent was getting thicker with every failed attempt.
"Are you asking me to be your girlfriend?"
"That’s an oversimplification of what I’m proposing but yes. Essentially. If the term is acceptable."
"The term is acceptable."
"Then yes?"
"Yes, Jace. Yes."
He kissed me. The kiss tasted like coffee and relief. He pulled back and looked at me with an expression so openly happy, so completely without walls, that it almost hurt to look at. This man. This impossible, complicated, glove-wearing, cube-solving, barefoot-in-the-mountains man. Mine.
I was in over my head and I didn’t want to come up for air.
We weren’t moving in together. We weren’t there yet.
The storm cleared the next morning.
I woke to blue sky through the bedroom window, sharp and clean, the mountains washed bright by days of rain. The air smelled like wet pine and cold earth and the beginning of something new.
The roads were passable. Reality was waiting. The office, the city, the world where we were boss and assistant and the tabloid photos were barely buried.
Jace was already dressed. Standing at the window, coffee in hand, his eyes on the road that wound down through the valley toward everything we'd left behind. I came up behind him and rested my chin on his shoulder the way he did to me, and he reached back and found my hip and held me there.
"Ready?" I asked.
He didn’t answer right away. He was staring at the mountains and the sky and the road that would take us back to everything we’d left behind.
"No," he said. "But that hasn’t stopped me before."
CHAPTER 20
Jace
The city swallowed us back whole.
Returning to Miami after the cabin felt like putting on a suit that didn’t fit anymore. Same office. Same desk. Same glass walls. Same seventy-one degrees on the thermostat. Everything was exactly where I’d left it. The cube on the desk, the sanitizer in the drawer, the coffee machine untouched because nobody used it but me.
But I wasn’t the same. And the disconnect was disorienting.
Anna was at her desk. She looked like my assistant and nothing more. I hated every second of it because three days ago she was in my bed wearing my shirt with her hair across my pillow and now she was filing expense reports with twelve feet of carpet between us.
The distance was a physical ache I wasn't prepared for. Dr. Adler warned me about this. Our session yesterday, the emergency one I'd called after I returned to my penthouse, had been what he would call productive, which meant he told me things I already knew in a tone that made me feel marginally less insane for feeling them.
"You’re moving fast, Jace."
"I asked her to be my girlfriend. She said yes."
A pause. "And how do you feel about the pace?"
