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He didn’t want her to leave this time.
Nothing happened. She slept through the night or, at least, that was what he assumed was the case. He’d fallen asleep, after all, only to wake with her watching him, one arm under her head and a smile that could mean a thousand things stretching across her beautiful face.
“Good morning,” she said simply.
And he couldn’t help but reach for her. She came willingly, eagerly snuggling against his body, and she felt so good that he couldn’t do anything but wrap his arms around her. What had started out as a bone-deep need to kiss her melted into something else entirely.
She was still here. In his bed. The enormity of it soaked through his body and he tried really hard to push it away, but he couldn’t help the tenderness that filled that moment. They should be celebrating the fact that she’d taken huge steps to overcome difficult emotional landmines. Instead, he was fighting the realization that he’d been missing out on this kind of intimacy for the whole of his life.
He liked her in his bed. He shouldn’t. But there was no going back now. The baby steps they’d been taking in deference to her triggers had worked on him, too, but for a far different reason. She’d slowly seeped into his consciousness until he didn’t know if he’d be able to untangle her from his arms, let alone from his insides.
Thank God they had already decided on a divorce. Once she got her green card, everything would go back to normal. She could move out and he could…what? Go back to being lonely?
That was crap. He had Flying Squirrel. He didn’t need anything else to make his life perfect.
But as they finally dragged themselves from the bed and crossed the finish line by having breakfast together, he couldn’t sell that lie, even to himself. Before Tilda, his life had been something, all right—empty. What else could he call it when the word to describe how it felt now was full?
Fine. He could roll with it for the time being.
They didn’t work at all on Sunday in favor of spending the day together. She’d posed it as a way to practice for the green-card interview but the conversations always veered into something that no one from the immigration department would ever ask because the content was X-rated, at best. It seemed they’d both had a lot of fantasies to work through, which lasted the whole of the week, as it turned out. So far, taking her from behind on his desk in the CEO’s office at Flying Squirrel was his favorite with a capital F.
The campaign for increasing Flying Squirrel’s market share in Australia was going well. He got some numbers from Thomas on Friday that pleased him so much, he immediately invited Tilda to a lavish dinner in celebration. For some reason, the impending dinner put her in a strange mood. She vanished to her office, a rarity, and stayed there for a couple of hours.
Were they still not at a place where she could tell him honestly what was going on with her?
And then she appeared at four o’clock. And knocked. Which she hadn’t done in quite some time.
He did not like the idea that their relationship had seemed to regress. Nor the fact that backing off now was likely a good idea, pending how long the approval took on his petition for her green card application. They might have weeks, but they probably had less.
He didn’t want to think about it. So he told her tersely, “You don’t have to knock.”
“Can I come in?” she asked tentatively.
He sighed. His tone had put her on edge. Because he was an idiot. “Of course.”
Tilda’s hair was coming loose from her bun-like thing and he was pretty sure his fingers had been the cause. Probably from the stolen kiss in the stairwell that he’d initiated as they’d come back from a meeting with the board earlier today. How had they gotten to the point where she was cautious with him all over again in a matter of hours?
“I have a problem,” she said and hesitated, stopping just inside the door. Usually she beelined for the seat near his desk. “I didn’t want to bring it up, but I feel like I should.”
Bracing, he sat back in his chair. “I’m listening.”
“I don’t want to wear a suit to dinner. But I don’t have anything else to wear.”
The laugh of relief that bubbled up made him downright giddy. That’s what had her tied up in knots? “That’s not a problem.”
She scowled. “It is to me. You of all people should understand.”
Screw the distance between them. He skirted the desk and shut the door behind her so they could speak privately, then he leaned on it with his arms crossed. “I do understand. That’s why I know it’s not a problem. You wear those suits so you can pretend you’re a proper consultant to the rest of the world because that makes you feel safe. On the flip side, the kind of clothes you want to wear make you uncomfortable, so you shy away from them. You’re stuck in the middle. How am I doing so far?”
