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His mouth tightens. “You do?”
“Yes,” I say. My hair must be a mess, and I’m half-naked, and I feel more like myself than I have in a long, long time. “It’s okay if you’re not there, yet, or if you don’t want to say it. But I want you to know how I feel.”
“Really?” he asks.
“Yes, so much, I don’t know what to do with it all. It’s taken me by surprise… but I love that, too.”
He shifts us, moves so he’s half resting on top of me. His face is close to mine, and his weight is delicious on top of me. “Eden,” he murmurs and kisses me. “Eden, fuck.”
“It’s okay,” I say. “It’s fine. This doesn’t change anything.”
“It’s not that.” He rests his head against my neck. For a long time, he doesn’t move, and I can feel the rapid beat of his heart against my breast.
Then he lifts his head, and his eyes are glazed. “I love you, too. I have for much longer than I realized. It crept up on me, slow at first, and then so fast that I was deep in it before I knew.”
“You do?” I murmur.
He nods once, and his hand comes up to cup my face. “Yes. I don’t think I’ve ever experienced this, or felt this much before.”
“Not like this,” I say.
“Not like this,” he agrees. “I know how bad it can hurt when things fall apart. And now? Feeling like this? I don’t think I could handle it, Eden. If I lost you.”
I wrap my legs around his hips and rest my forehead against his. “You won’t.”
“No?”
“No,” I murmur and dig my fingers into his hair. “Besides, this, with you and me? It’s an adventure. We’ve been on those before.”
“We have,” he agrees, his lips brushing over mine. They’re hot. “But that was hiking in a forest and watching sea turtles hatch.”
“So maybe this is a bigger one,” I say. “I know what it’s like to be hurt, too.”
“I know you do,” he says, and there’s anguish in his voice. He’s told me several times that I have to point Caleb out if we see him around town. Not that I know what he’d do if I did. “Trust me, I won’t ever put you through that. Never.”
“That’s right,” I say and run my fingers through his hair. “I know you won’t.”
He kisses me again. It’s filled with promises of the future, the excitement of the unknown, and all the words we’ve just spoken. I kiss him back. Because the adventure we’re setting off on?
It might just be my favorite one, yet.
Three Years Later
I look at Phillip out of the corner of my eye. He’s flipping through my notebook, filled with the scribbles I made during our plane ride. I’d even brought highlighters, and the notes for each chapter have their own colorful headings.
The taxi driver takes a corner fast, and I grab the headrest in front of me.
“Hold on!” the driver says with a chuckle. “More turns ahead.” The car’s engine protests as we head up the road. To our left is a barren hillside, and to our right, shrubbery. “Okay, now you have to look. When we come up here, on the right.”
As he rounds the corner, the shrubbery gives way to a clear view of the glittering blue Aegean Sea. It stretches as far as the eye can see. And perched below us, on the cliffs, are white houses. Square like sugar cubes and built along the sunbaked slopes, cascading down to the azure waters.
“Oh my God,” I whisper. We’d seen the blue ocean as we flew in, but this view is so much better.
“It’s good,” Phillip says. “I really like the premise, trapping them all together like that.”
I tear my eyes away. “What?”
He holds up the notebook. “The plot? I like it. You have a great story idea here, with them all snowed in at a luxury ski resort.”
