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His head jerked up. “What?” He reached her in the next blink, his palm cradling her cheek. “Of course not. I’m—”
She pressed her palm against his mouth. “Don’t...apologize. Don’t...” She leaned into his clasp. “That was a stupid question. But the thing is I don’t want to...shackle you here, Christian, if it’s not where you want to be.” She leaned forward, seeking more of him, and buried her face in the crook of his arm.
“What if I tell you that what you see as a shackle...you and Jayden... You’re my anchors right now, Pree. I want to be here with you both. I’m sorry for making you doubt that.”
“I believe you,” she said softly. “I wish you’d give me the same benefit of the doubt.”
“I’m getting there, Starling.”
Priya nodded, relief warming her limbs. “I’m not expecting some imaginary perfect version of you, Christian. In fact, the reason you sometimes rubbed me the wrong way back then was because you thought you were all that and more.”
He laughed and the weight on her chest lifted. “My point is neither of us is or ever has been perfect. And that’s okay. I’d rather you be real with me.”
His exhale coated her temple. “But you’re the closest thing I’ve known to perfection, Pree. At least that’s how you tasted to me.”
Priya was blushing and groaning and yet the fact that he could joke and tease her like this made her chest expand on a bubble of pure joy. Like she was getting all the good parts of him back again. There was also a part of her that was gobsmacked that he thought her close to perfect. Some truth she didn’t understand lingered in those words, but she didn’t care to examine it just then.
He dipped his forehead to her shoulder. “I don’t want you to treat me as if I’m an invalid you have to take care of. As another bullet point in your long to-do list of everyday tasks.”
Scrambling back from him, Priya turned on the bed lamp. Just the little bit she’d scooted back on the bed made his head clearer. The planes of his face were still in shadow but his blue eyes... She could clearly see the shame and doubt in them, and something else there, too.
“Is that how you thought of me when we met all those years ago? Like an invalid you pitied? Like a girl that was somehow beneath you because I was half-broken?”
The sudden switch in the conversation, the assumption in her question, made Christian jerk back. “I know I was full of myself but God no, I never thought that.”
But she wasn’t listening. He watched as she leaned over and reached for something in the drawer of the nightstand. It was a fat envelope. She’d barely pulled it into her lap when prints of photographs spilled out. She gathered a few more and placed them around her on top of the duvet, a glorious smile he hadn’t seen in so long curving her mouth.
“Do you remember the day we met?” she said, picking one up and handing it to him.
“Pree...” he said, refusing to take it, instinctively resisting the pull of the past, of her. There was enough he couldn’t deal with in the present, without dragging in the past, too. He was beginning to feel more and more like a spider caught in her web. A web that she didn’t even know she was spinning.
She scrunched her nose. “Just indulge me this once?”
“I just did, didn’t I?” he said, raising a wicked brow, suddenly feeling more like himself in this one moment than he had in eight years. He licked his lower lip, searching for her taste again. But she was embedded deep in him already—her taste and her scent—and he was beginning to wonder if that’s what he was running from. “Although I’ll agree that it felt deliciously restorative for me, too.”
Her cheeks reddened but she held his gaze. “I’m still terribly outdated when it comes to certain...etiquette. And I made it worse by falling asleep afterward. Should I thank you?”
He grunted.
She smirked. “So that’s a no. I guess the nice thing to do, then, is to offer you the same in return?” Her gaze flipped to his lap and then back up.
He immediately felt himself harden just at that passing look. “Is that why you’d want to...do it? To be nice to me?”
“I think I’ll let you answer that question for yourself.”
“That mouth... It’s going to get you into all kinds of trouble.”
She bit her lower lip, pure feminine challenge in the movement. His blood roared. “This mouth wants to get into trouble with you.”
They watched each other hungrily but there was laughter in that moment, too. A bridge beginning to be built between them again. Whatever he remembered about their chemistry before his plane had crashed, it was a live thing now. The most real thing.
She glanced down at the photo in her hands. “I think Jai clicked this one. The first time I met you.” Her gaze shadowed as it did every time she mentioned her late fiancé. But a half smile lingered on her lips. “It was the summer after I turned seventeen. He brought me to see you after my last major surgery. He made me wait in the car, so that he could give you the spiel about my history, I think. He was so worried that you might be your usual ‘ruthlessly focused snarly self,’ as he called you, with me.”
Christian smiled. “Making sure his precious princess was treated right.”
Priya stuck her tongue out at him. “I’m sure you don’t remember that day because you were in a foul mood just as he’d guessed and there were those two girls who’d been walking out just as we—”
“You were wearing a sleeveless pink blouse and denim shorts. With legs that went on for miles and that huge camera hanging around your neck...” Christian closed his eyes and the memory was there, as clear as if it had been yesterday. “Your ponytail bounced with every tilt of your head and you kept touching the heart pendant on your gold chain—the one Jai bought you for your birthday. You walked in,” he continued, “and kept casting me surreptitious glances the entire time. As if I were some wild predator. And then you sat down at one of the computer stations and broke my program within two minutes.”
