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Catching the look on my face, Deb looked over her shoulder.
“Lord, that smile. I’ve never seen him so happy before,” she remarked. I laughed.
“Yeah. He was just really dying to land Knox,” I said, though I knew in my heart that that smile wasn’t for Knox.
It was entirely for me.
“AJ, a word?” Adam said, not breaking his stride as he nodded for me to follow him in.
Excusing myself from Deb, I got up from my desk, trailing Adam with a smile on my face that I had to bite back as soon as I closed the door behind me, because I knew as soon as it clicked shut, I’d feel Adam’s body against mine. And I was right.
The door had barely closed before I was pressed against it, Adam’s hands cupping my face as he sealed his lips against mine, kissing me like he hadn’t just seen me thirty minutes ago. I was breathless, eyes fluttering when he pulled away, still holding my face and searching me so earnestly that I couldn’t help my shy smile.
“What?” I whispered.
“What if we just told her?” he asked.
“Told who what?”
“Holland,” he said, making me still for a moment. The smile was still on my lips, but I eyed Adam with a cross between nerves and amusement, because he didn’t have to answer the rest of my question for me to know what he wanted to tell her.
“Adam.” My lips spoke before I even knew what I was going to say, because I certainly didn’t know exactly what I was feeling. “Why do you want to?” I asked gently. “We’re not…” Dating, I wanted to say. But I rephrased myself. “We don’t know anything for sure right now,” I said softly.
“I do,” he returned swiftly. “I know I can’t live without you,” he said—and with such confidence and ease that the breath had barely the chance to catch in my throat before he was going on. “It’s been the case for years and I’ve always known it, but now I know it differently. I want to be with you. I’m never going to want to be with anyone else. I know that, AJ.”
My heart was pounding. I wasn’t sure when that started, but it was, and it was so loud that I told myself perhaps I’d imagined it. I could barely hear anything besides my own frantic pulse, so what made me think I’d really just heard Adam Maxwell tell me that he wanted to be with me and only me?
Oh, I don’t know.
Just the fact that he said it and this is real and you’re denying this why?
My head spun as I tried to wrap my mind around the rush of shock and excitement and completely paralyzing fear. I had no idea what was going to come out of my mouth when I gathered myself.
But when I finally did, the answer apparently was laughter.
The happy kind.
“You’re crazy,” I said, to which he laughed too.
“Maybe. But if I am, it’s your fault.”
“Adam, I…” I trailed off, a million questions zipping through my brain. Were we together? Was I his girlfriend? How were we going to navigate things at work? Were we going to have secret dates at Gizzy’s till one of us left Engelman for another agency? But neither of us were going to do that. We loved it here. “I don’t know yet, Adam,” I breathed out, overwhelmed. “I know it would make her so happy and I know it would make her feel like we’re this family, but I’m scared too.”
“It’s okay, I understand,” Adam said assuringly, his voice a murmur as he brushed a lock of hair from my face. “You have time to think about it.”
“We only have five hours before dinner,” I laughed.
“Well then you have five hours to think about it,” he smirked. “And you can always say no,” he added. “It wouldn’t change anything.”
“It wouldn’t change the way you feel?” I questioned. His eyebrows furrowed genuinely.
“Why would it?”
My heart quietly soared as I gave a little shrug.
Those fucking dimples. One look at them and my brain short-circuited, telling me to just zip it with the questions and tell him yes.
But I made sure to take the next few hours to think. To weigh my options. To try and come down from my heights and reason with myself, pointing out to myself that we’d just skipped a million steps here.
