Page 127 of Experiments in Offline Dating

He grabbed my hand, laced our fingers together, and brought it to his mouth. “He said”—scratching the back of my hand with his beard and a quick kiss—“‘You’re welcome.’”

I laughed at that. And then Tadhg swung down and, to my utter shock, with the two bags already on his shoulder, he picked me up like I was nothing at all and he carried me.

In the rain.

All the way back to our cottage.

Chapter 41 Experiments in Backbreaking

When we got to the door, I punched in the code, and he carried me over the threshold but didn’t put me down. He was walking straight to the bedroom.

“I can’t get into bed, I’m soaking wet.”

“Mmm,” he rumbled.

I laughed. “From the rain, Tadhg.”

“Bath, then?”

“Yes, please.” My arms were around his neck as he changed direction. I ran my nose up his neck and then bit his earlobe teasingly. “But only if you’ll join me, you filthy animal.”

THERE WERE FIVE days when the ferries did not run. Five days of cooking together, five days of curling up by the fire, five days of coffee together in the morning and tea together in the afternoon, five days of reading fantasy side by side on the sofa with our legs entwined under a blanket, of driving rain making a melodic racket on the roof and of thunder crashing overhead as we had passionate, wild sex, and gentle, romantic sex, and even lazy, slow side-by-side sex when we were far too tired and sore for any sex at all but just couldn’t keep our hands off each other.

We watched movies and made popcorn on the stovetop. We read our favorite lines out from the books we were reading. We laughed, and teased, and even had a couple of spats over small things that were almost immediately forgotten and smoothed over with kisses and more sex. We walked Finn in the rain together, all of us soaked and muddy, and we comforted her together when the thunder got too scary.

We finished all of Curse of the Flame Hunter by the fire with a glass of wine, or in bed after a stormy walk, and started Binding of the Spark Mage, and would listen, gasping and biting our nails and discussing wizards’ duels and the politics of the Nightbound Realm until the tension, or the excitement, or my goodness the smut, invariably led us back to bed, or floor, or counter, or tub, moaning out until our throats were dry and scratchy.

We were happy. So utterly happy. I reminded myself that I was on vacation, reading books and getting incredible sex from a gorgeous man. That would easily explain the glow. It would explain the ease in my smile, the warmth in my chest, the fizz in my blood. It was chemicals, science—easy to explain.

When we snatched a rare few bars of phone signal in the storm, I called my parents and lied to them, which I never did, telling them everything was normal and going as planned. I didn’t know why I did it. And when I called Simone, I confessed to her that I couldn’t remember feeling so happy before, maybe ever, and that I was having trouble walking, and then she was insufferable about it.

I didn’t ever sleep in my own room. I didn’t let him walk Finn alone, though he always offered. I didn’t seek out time to myself. Because I just didn’t want any.

Until the end of day five, when our incandescent happiness burst like a soap bubble.

Chapter 42 Shattering

“A chuisle mo chroí.”

He was chopping vegetables in the kitchen, and I’d handed him a gin and tonic I’d made him just the way he liked it, and I’d stretched up to kiss him on the cheek. The sound of Tadhg’s Irish was creeping in more and more, and it made my toes curl.

I rumbled a soft sound. Sometimes his Irish was foreplay. “What does that mean?”

“It means . . .” He stilled but didn’t turn around. His shoulders were tight, and I almost moved instinctively to massage them, to rub his back, but stopped when I heard him swallow. Then he started chopping again very slowly. “It means ‘you are the pulse of my heart.’”

I froze. Ice trickled down my spine.

“It means,” he went on, even though I didn’t want to hear any more, “that I’m falling in love with you.”

He still hadn’t turned around, as if he couldn’t look at me. I knew he’d had to fight to get those words out. I knew what they had cost him.

But he’d spoken them anyway, as if they wouldn’t bring this world crashing down around us while we were trapped here together, wouldn’t irrevocably break the spell that had so happily consumed us.

He was chopping cucumbers for a salad, and the crisp green smell of their broken skins was suddenly painful—the stark contrast between the moment before, when we were happy, and the moment after, when we never could be.

“What did you just say?”

Finally, he put the knife down, took a breath, and turned slowly until our eyes caught with all the sharp pull of a fishhook.