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“How’d you know to bring me here?” he asked.
“You told me once that trains help people remember to enjoy the ride. Something about not having any choice once it gets going, so all you can do is sit back and let it happen. I thought you looked like someone who needed to get out of their head for a little while. I’ve also never had sex on a train.”
He lifted his head slightly, raising his eyebrows. “We’ll have to fix that, won’t we?”
“Yes,” I said.
“Is this just another distraction tactic?”
“Maybe.”
“I approve.”
I smiled and nuzzled myself into his shoulder. “You always smell so good.”
“It’s how I lure in my victims.”
“One of your many tools, then. Because when I look back on how we met, I don’t think you even gave me a choice about falling for you. You decided it was happening and stopped at nothing until it did.”
He slid his arm around me, giving an affectionate squeeze. “I respect consent. Your mistake was never clearly telling me to leave you alone.”
“I’m pretty sure I literally said those words at some point.”
“Hmm. I struggle with listening skills, sometimes. Sorry.”
“You hear what you want to hear, you mean.”
“Thanks. Your hair looks great tonight, too.”
I laughed, swatting at him. “Travis?”
“Yeah?” he asked.
“I love you.”
He sat up suddenly, eyes going wide.
“Sorry,” I blurted. “That was weird, I should—”
He cupped my face and kissed me. “I love you, too. I kinda thought it was obvious by implication by now, but damn. I was planning on saying it first.”
“It’s not a competition,” I said, laughing.
“You’re right. But if it was a competition, I think I’d most likely be the one who loves you more.”
I rolled my eyes, but my chest felt like it was about to explode with a flurry of butterflies. I’d said it. I don’t know if I’d even officially thought it yet, but the words felt right when they came out. I loved him. God, I loved him. And I saw now how true the phrase “I’m crazy for you” was. Because that’s what it felt like to know I loved him. It felt like a controlled kind of insanity. It was a feeling so strong it threatened to override everything else in my brain. Logic, reason, and good sense were twigs in the path of a tank as far as love was concerned. It was why I’d been ready to throw away my career at a moment’s notice if it meant having a slightly better chance of keeping him out of jail.
“What are you thinking?” he asked. Travis was twirling a finger in my hair idly, eyes like blue flames as they drank me in.
“That you are dangerous for me.”
“Yeah,” he said, adding a fake note of gruffness to his voice. “That’s because I am a dangerous man. I don’t know if you’re aware, but the law is after me. Word is I could be doing time in the joint, soon. Hard time.”
I gave him a wry look. “Hard time, huh? Sounds like a bunch of bullshit to me. But something does seem to be hard.” My hand slid up his thigh and rested on the shape of him through his pants.
Travis rolled me over, looming over me in all of his gorgeous glory. “This all may be a distraction technique, but damn. Feel free to try to distract me every day for the rest of our lives.”
The obvious implication in “the rest of our lives” wasn’t lost on me. I swallowed hard, finding it terrifying that no part of me wanted to reject that idea, either. The rest of our lives. Why did the idea of spending every last day of my time in this world tethered to him not scare the daylights out of me? Why did it just fill me with a gooey, pure white warmth?
“For the rest of our lives,” I whispered.
He was about to kiss me when a phone buzzed. We both jerked our heads toward the sound. We had been waiting for a call from Noah, Adrian, or Jordan all day. They were supposed to let us know if anything concrete happened with the case.
Travis reached to grab the phone from the side table by the bed. “It’s Adrian,” he said, locking eyes with me.
“Answer it!”
He swallowed, then picked up, putting the call on speaker phone.
“Jordan just called,” Adrian said. “Caroline Glass asked her lawyers to review all of the evidence this morning—everything. They brought all the physical and digital copies out. Jordan thinks she might’ve bribed someone to break the rules, but one way or another, she destroyed it all. Shredded all the papers and crushed any digital storage devices.”
“That’s super illegal,” I said, still too shocked for what he was telling me to set in.
“Yeah. She destroyed piles of evidence. The firm can’t admit one of their people gave her access to all of that evidence alone, so she said they had a closed door meeting and are planning to blame it on a freak fire. They can’t implicate Mrs. Glass without throwing themselves under the bus, so their only hope is to make it look like an accident if anyone comes asking. But this means Brandon Glass can’t even pick the case back up if he wanted to.”
