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She catches herself on my knees, arching into me as I thrust—her hips, her back, her breasts high in the air, nipples puckered. We grind together, a slow, hard, melding of bodies, and I wrap my arm around her waist, my free hand cupping her breast. My mouth lowers, tongue lapping at her puckered pink nipple. She pants out my name, and I drag her to me again, her lips to my lips, and a frenzy of kissing and swaying follows—slow, fast, hard, fast again. Hard again. Harder now. Faster now. Her arms wrap around my neck, breasts molded to my chest, her body stiffening a moment before she trembles in my arms and quakes around my cock. I shudder into release with her, and I lose time. There is just how she feels. The way she smells of amber and vanilla. The way her taste lingers on my lips.
When I finally come back to the present, I am instantly living that clawing guilt from my lies, remembering my own thoughts from earlier. I need her to know how much she means to me. I need to know when the truth is revealed, she can’t just walk away. Because I can’t lose her.
“Faith.” She leans back, and I rest my hand on her face. “I can’t lose you.”
“Then you won’t,” she says. “Because if there is one thing I know about you, Nick Rogers, it’s that you don’t lose anything you really want.”
She’s right. I don’t, and I want her. “Move in with me.”
She blanches. “What?”
“Move in with me, Faith. We’ll split our time between Sonoma and San Francisco, but wherever we are, we’re together. We’re home.”
“We’ve only known each other a few weeks, Nick.”
“And I want to know more. I want you to know more. Find out who I am, Faith. Find out that my money won’t change us or me. The dynamic we’ve shared this week here won’t change. You don’t have to answer now. Think about it. Decide when you’re ready, but expect me to ask again. Expect me to—”
“I should say no.”
“Why?”
“Because it seems smart.”
“But what feels right, Faith?”
“You. Us.”
“Then move in with me.”
“Yes.”
“Yes?”
“Yes.”
Chapter Twenty-Three
Faith
I said yes.
This is my thought as I fall asleep in Nick’s arms only hours after actually doing so. And I said yes without hesitation, with Sara’s words in my head:What if there is no tomorrow?
I wake Wednesday morning with a smile and those same words in my head:I said yes. I feel lighter in some way with this choice, I realize as Nick kisses me before he heads down the stairs to run while I head to my studio. It’s as if a weight has been lifted from my shoulders. I’m no longer fighting my connection to Nick. No longer letting that fear, which I’d inadvertently let rule me, rule me. And as I step to a fresh canvas, preparing to work on my final show piece, I step back to what I callAn Eye for an Eye. I want to finish it. And I do. I finish what I know to be the most daring piece I’ve ever painted. It’s not my trademark black and white and red. It’s not my trademark landscape.
I love it.
I love Nick.
And when I walk back into the bedroom to shower, I spy the card from my father lying on the nightstand, and I realize now that the reasons I don’t want to open it run deeper than I’ve allowed myself to admit. On some level, even after I left Sonoma to chase my dreams, I still needed his approval. I feared never having it. I really don’t need to open a card that tells me I never had it. But one day, when the winery is running magically again and my art is just as magical, maybe I’ll read it to prove to myself that I never needed his approval.
It’s in that moment that Nick walks into the bedroom, loose hair dangling around his face, obviously having escaped during his run, his snug T-shirt damp, his body hard. He glances at the card in my hand. “It’s calling to you?”
“No,” I say. “Actually, it’s not calling to me at all. Nothing that drags me back to the past is calling to me.” I shove it under the mattress, and like the past, I leave it behind me.
Nick steps to me, his hands settling on my shoulders. “One day, it will feel right.”
In that moment, I think of the shadows I sometimes see in his eyes, the secrets he hasn’t shared, hoping that this new chapter in our relationship will free him to share them with me. I push to my toes and kiss him. “One day,” I say, but I’m not talking about the card.
