Chapter Twenty-Five

Annabel

I’ve lost all track of time and space. I don’t care if I ever get it back. All I care about is how it feels to be in Beau’s arms with nothing between us, not even the sheets.

I’ve been falling in and out of sleep because it’s late. It’s late, or it’s early. I don’t know. Does it matter? Does it ever matter, when everything feels so good?

He’s been holding out on me.

“You’ve been holding out on me,” I murmur out loud, and he runs his fingertips down the ridges of my ribs. It makes me shiver. It’s the nicest shiver I’ve ever felt.

“Mmm?” He says, shifting toward me and pressing his palm flat against my stomach before he guides it around to my hips. He settles back in. There’s another pause. Did I fall asleep again? It’s getting hard to tell.

“Why are you so careful?” I open my eyes and force my tired head to turn toward the window. It’s very dark outside. As dark as it gets in New York City, with the orange glow of light pollution blanketing everything. It’s night. That’s all that matters. If it was sunrise, I’d be heartbroken. Sunrise means going back to work at the Pearl. Sunrise means disentangling myself from Beau’s sculpted body and spending all day pretending I’m not aching for him.

“Careful?” He echoes me after a pause.

My heart picks up speed. “You were so . . . thoughtful about all of this. You never want to be spontaneous.” My tongue feels heavy and slow, like I’m drunk on the scent of him, the taste of him.

“Being spontaneous gets people hurt.”

The tone of his voice shakes me out of my lazy sleep. In the dark of his bedroom, Beau is completely at ease. His body is utterly relaxed, except for the hand that’s stroking languidly over my skin. He sounds candid, unguarded, and it’s so natural and easy that it makes the hair on the back of my neck stand up. A sharp awareness washes over me, but I don’t make any sudden moves. Not a chance. “Hurt? How? I mean, aside from the obvious.” I keep my voice low and smooth.

He takes in a long breath and lets it out, circling my belly button with two fingertips in a slow rhythm. Up, then down. Up, then down. “My mother didn’t want to move to the US.”

What does this have to do with what he was saying before? “No?”

“No,” he says, and then he’s silent for a long time. Maybe he’s fallen asleep. I close my eyes, but he speaks again. “They always planned. It was always very regimented in our household. Routines, all that. Never going overboard. That’s not what I’m saying. I had time to play after school.”

“It sounds nice,” I say.

“It was a fine childhood.” His fingertips go up and down, up and down. “And they never fought. They were good parents, Annabel. I don’t want you to think they weren’t.”

“I don’t.”

He swallows. “I heard them fighting once. I’d come home from school—the first grade is what you’d call it here—and I was sitting down for tea at the kitchen table. There was a shouting match. I know now that people . . . there are worse things that happen when people are young. But at the time it was a terrible departure from how things were.”

“They made up, though, didn’t they?” My heart is almost torn in two at the image of a young Beau trying to eat his tea and crumpet—biscuit?—and trying not to hear the fighting. It’s impossible to avoid that kind of thing.

“Honestly,” he says with a sigh, “it was never quite the same after that. My father used to dance with her in the kitchen in the evenings sometimes. I never saw them do that once we moved. My mother was heartbroken by the whole thing. Not that she’d ever want to admit it out loud. It was in the air around her all the time.” Beau shakes his head against the pillow, his breath in my hair. “After that fight, she came downstairs and asked me how I was, and then she went and stood in front of the sink, looking out over the garden. Do you know what she said?”

“What did she say?”

“She said, ‘Be careful with other people’s hearts, Beau.’ I didn’t know what she meant. Later I heard my father on the phone to his uncle talking about a snap decision. ‘My wife is a bit put-out.’ Those were his exact words.” He stops moving his fingers. “A snap decision,” he says quietly, almost to himself.

“I like a good snap decision every once in a while,” I say. It’s more than an understatement, but now doesn’t seem like the time. Especially because I’m not sure I’m going to want to leave once I hit the sweet spot with Beau. Not after . . .

He took me, again and again, and remembering makes heat gather between my legs. Beau is in his element in the bedroom. He doesn’t hesitate. He claims. And now he’s claimed me.

I’m ruined for anyone else.

No. That’s not true. I could pick up and carry on . . . if I had to. If I had to.

Oh God. I’m in it now, if leaving is a distant plan B and not inevitable.

It’s too late to be agonizing over this.

I wriggle under Beau’s touch. The heat has turned into a gush of juices. His fingertips are tracing their path again.

He lets out a laugh under his breath, and the sound is electric. I know what it means. I know, because in response to the movement of my hips, he traces downward. Down a few inches, then a few more. My nipples go hard in an instant. It doesn’t matter that we’ve done this many times already. It won’t ever matter.

Beau reaches between my legs, and I’m done thinking.