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“I was terrified of him, and I should’ve convinced you to run with me the week I met you.”
“I hated you then. We never said a word. How could you have known what I was thinking?”
He wrapped his hand around the back of her neck, thumb rubbing the tight muscles there. “First time I saw you, everything about you told me you needed to be away from here. It just took me two years to really hear you,” he lowered his voice, “and I’ve had a decade to regret that.”
Just his hand on her neck was enough to make her own regret begin to dissolve. “If you’re lying to me, I fucking swear—”
He shut her up with knee-bending kiss. “Yeah, you have a foul mouth and I love that too.”
He was making it too easy, and nothing worthwhile was ever this easy. Nothing this close to happiness had ever been so within her reach. “You’re really going to split the sale of the Celestia with me?”
He laughed. “You’re greedy and I like that too.”
“But you don’t love it?”
He grinned. “I’d love it more if the subject of your greed was me.”
Too easy, this had to be a scam. The con job of her life. “You want to be with me?”
He stroked a hand over her head. “I want to be with you.” He didn’t roll his eyes. He didn’t trivialize this in any way. It wasn’t a joke to him. It wasn’t a sleight of hand. The only thing she could read in his face was honesty. It took her breath away. “Do you want to be with me, baby?”
Happiness wasn’t something she’d prepared for. It made her feel desperately uneasy. “I—”
His face fell. “Ah, shit. I thought...”
She put her hand to his lips to stop his doubt. “I do. I want to be with you. When you first arrived, I wanted to be you. To have your freedom, to have his attention. I didn’t want to fall in love with you but I did, and it made being me okay. I’ve missed that, I’ve missed you so much. I love you, and if you want me I’ve won the greatest shell game ever.”
“No game, pure and simple. Aria Viola Harp, you hoodwinked my heart.”
And Cleve Jones had set hers free.
“Never apart again.” A constraint she could live with, feel safe with. “But we can’t stay here.” Too many bad memories she’d rather pack away.
“We’re not cut out for Cambridge Square. And I’ve got a feeling we’re going to need to lay low for a while. Can you hand
le that?”
With him she could handle anything.
“How do you feel about retiring, at least from the diamond heist business?”
“What would we do?” She had a few ideas, a number of them revolved around soft beds and hard man and food. She was never not hungry; he might yet have a fat partner in crime.
“Sleep, read, eat, talk, shave each other’s heads.”
Oh she liked where he was going with this. She wrapped herself closer to him, and he whispered the word, “love,” against her lips and she knew to the bottom of her rebellious, bruised heart, she’d stolen the most valuable thing in the world.
And she was never giving it back.
* * * * *
Also available from Ainslie Paton
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