Page 60 of Based on You

She kept staring, her mouth opening slightly in disbelief.

I leaned in and kissed her hard before she could answer.

She pulled back, breathless. "Is this a blatant attempt to change the subject?"

"Is it working?"

She looked at me, quiet a long, heavy moment. "Yes," she finally whispered.

I kissed her neck. She laughed, a beautiful, surrendered sound, threaded her hands into my hair, and leaned back, pulling us together as we fell onto the bed.

SEVENTEEN

VIOLET

I woke at six o'clock with his heavy arm slung across my stomach.

He was still sound asleep, his face turned toward mine on the white pillow, his strong jaw unshaved and rough. I lay still, just looking at him, careful not to wake him. I'd woken up happy, and I was already bracing for the guilt to arrive.

And it was there. It had been lingering all week, in the stolen kitchen kisses, in the charged elevator rides, in the way he handed me my morning coffee, in the devastating look on his face whenever I walked into a room. The happiness wasn't in question. The problem was what lived directly underneath it.

I'd been lying to him since before I even really knew him. I'd built a whole secret career while cashing his company's salary, all while writing a serialized romance novel about his life. I'd coordinated the corporate search for V.M. Ashby while knowing my own name belonged on that list. I'd let him carry me down a dark hallway, put me in a guest room, and fall asleep across the hall, while I posted intimate chapters about him on a platform with over five million readers.

And now I was waking up beside him, and his feelings had grown into something with weight and direction. Instead of being happy about it, I was lying flat in the thin gray dawn, trying to calculate how much time I had left.

A lie could only last so long. I'd always known that. It was going to come apart, and the only variable left was whether it came apart safely in my hands, or devastatingly in his.

I pressed my eyes shut a long moment.

I got up.

I cleaned myself up in the guest bathroom, moving quietly so I wouldn't wake him, and came back into the bedroom to find he'd shifted toward the empty side of the mattress. I sat on the edge of the bed and put my hand on his bare shoulder.

"Simon." I pressed, waking him. "We have to go to work."

He opened his eyes, still heavy with sleep, and they found my face right away.

"What time is it?" he mumbled.

"Quarter past six."

"Okay."

He reached up, grabbed my arm, and pulled me right back down into the bed. I went willingly. We lay there a long moment, his warm mouth pressed at my temple, his hand resting loose at my waist. I just let the quiet morning be still around us, because I wasn't ready to stop having this beautiful thing yet. He mumbled okay again into my hair, and then he finally got up.

We got ready in our separate bathrooms, moving quietly and finishing fast, and met in the main hallway at seven-twenty with our packed bags and our hot coffee. Manuel was already waiting at the curb. In the backseat, I sat closer to him than I had before the lake house trip, our shoulders touching.

But when he reached across for my hand, I moved it to my lap and looked pointedly toward the rearview mirror. He followed my anxious gaze, understood the risk of Manuel seeing us, and settled his hand back onto his own knee. We didn't touch for the rest of the drive.

At work, we were flawlessly professional. I routed all his incoming calls. I built his afternoon schedule. I sat at my desk holding the composed posture of an assistant whose mind was on her work, an act that took immense, sustained effort.

An urgent email pinged in from the strategy team at ten forty-five. Meeting confirmation. I printed the agenda and walked it down the hall to his office.

I knocked twice.

"Come in."

I pushed the heavy door open. He sat at his desk with his suit jacket still on, freshly off an earlier video call. He looked up the second I came in.