Sweet Filthy Boy (Wild Seasons, #1)(75)

My stomach flips. “I’m not sure I believe that I’m—”

“Stay,” he interrupts in a tight whisper. “I’m dreading the day you leave. I’m losing my mind thinking about it.”

I close my eyes. This is half what I’ve wanted him to say, and half what I was most afraid to hear. I pull my lip between my teeth, biting down my smile when I look back at him. “I thought you just told me to go to school to open my own business someday.”

“Maybe I think you should wait until I’m done with this case. Then we can go together. Live together. I work, you study.”

“How could I stay here until the spring? What would I do?” It’s been wonderful, but I can’t imagine another nine months living idly as a tourist.

“You can find work, or you can just research what’s involved in opening a studio. We’ll leave together, and you can defer school for one year.”

If possible, this is even more insane than my coming here in the first place. Staying means there is no end to us—no annulment, no fake marriage—and there is an entirely new trail blazed ahead.

“I don’t think I can stay here and be alone so much of the time . . .”

He winces, dragging a hand through his hair. “If you want to start now, go and I’ll come next spring. I just . . . Is that what you want?”

I shake my head, but I can see in his eyes he correctly reads my gesture to be I don’t know.

My first few weeks here I felt both like I was completely free, and also a bit of a leech. But Ansel didn’t invite me here only to be generous or save me from a summer at home or spent psyching myself up to start school. He did it for those reasons and because he wanted me.

“Mia?”

“Mmm?”

“I like you,” he says in a whisper, and from the slight shake of his voice, I think I know what he’s really saying. I feel the words like a warm breath across my neck, but he hasn’t stepped any closer. He’s not even touching me. His hands are braced on the counter behind him, at his hips. This bare admission is somehow more intimate from a few feet away, without the safety of kisses or faces pressed into necks. “I don’t want you to leave without me. A wife belongs with her husband, and he belongs with her. I’m always selfish with you, asking you to move here, asking you to wait until it’s good for my career before you leave, but there it is.”

There it is.

I tear my eyes from his and look down at my bare feet on the floor, letting the heavy drumming of my heart take over my senses for a beat. I’m relieved, terrified . . . but mostly I’m euphoric. He told me he couldn’t play the other night if I said it out loud, and maybe it’s the same fear again, that we can’t keep it light, can’t let it go in a few weeks if one of us says love.

“Do you think you could ever,” he starts after a few beats of silence, his lips pulled up to one side in a smile, “like me?”

My chest squeezes at the earnest vulnerability in his expression. I nod, swallowing what feels like a bowling ball in my throat before saying, “I’m already in like with you.”

His eyes flame with relief, and the words tumble out in a long, jumbled string. “I’ll get you a new ring. We’ll do it all over again. We can find a new flat with memories that are only ours . . .”

I laugh through an unexpected sob. “I like this flat. I like my gold band. I like my fractured memories of our wedding. I don’t need anything new.”

He tilts his head and smiles at me, dimple flirting shamelessly, and it’s all I can take. Reaching out, I hook a finger through a belt loop on his pants and tug. “Come here.”

Ansel takes the two steps to me, pressing the length of his body so closely to mine I need to tilt my chin to look up at him.

“Done talking, then?” he asks, hands slipping around my waist, bracketing me.

“Yeah.”

“What do you feel like doing now?” His eyes manage to look both amused and ravenous.

I slip a hand between us and palm him through his jeans, wanting to feel him come to life under my touch.

But he’s already hard, and grunts when I press into him, his eyes falling closed. His hands slide up my over my chest, around my shoulders and higher, cupping my neck.

The sweep of his thumb across my bottom lip is like a trigger: a warmth spreads through me and it turns nearly immediately to a hunger so hot, my legs grow weak. I open my mouth, lick the pad of his thumb until he slides it inside and, with dark eyes, watches me suck. In my palm, he lengthens further, twitching.

He steers me to my right, walking me backward out of the kitchen, but stops after only a few steps, cupping my face to kiss me. “Say it again?”

I search his eyes for his meaning before I understand. “That I like you?”

He nods and smiles, eyes closing as he bends to lick the tip of his tongue across my lips. “That you like me.” Ansel looks down at me from under the heavy fall of his hair over his brow, tilting my head back with his hand on my jaw. “Let me see your neck. Show me all of that gorgeous skin.”

I arch my neck and his fingertips skim along my collarbone, strong but gentle.

He undresses me first, in no particular hurry. But once my skin is exposed to the cool air in the flat and the heat of his attention, I pull at his shirt, fumble with his belt. I want my hands on every inch of him at once, but they always gravitate to the smooth expanse of his chest. Everything in the world I find sexy, I find there: The firm, warm skin. The heavy drum of his heart. The sharp spasms of his abdomen when I scratch my short nails over his ribs. The line of soft hair that always tempts my hands lower.