Blush(113)
“You are a romantic.”
“I’m not. Never have been. But then I’ve never met anyone like you.”
He relaxed and let her lead, and they came together in a sweet, deep kiss, slow and erotic as hell, as she knelt over him and took him in her small, cool fingers and led him home.
They rose and fell together like the tide. Time stretched as they slowly made love.
When they were both replete, he brushed a kiss to her temple and settled her on top of him, her long legs tangled with his. “Hey,” she complained, eyes closed, as he reached out to snag his pants off the floor where he’d dropped them.
“I’m going to frame it in our bedroom.” He told her, smoothing out a torn piece of yellow notepaper on his chest.
Mia smiled. “You kept my to-do list? You really are a romantic. . . . Wait, some of these are new.” Big blue eyes, rimming with laughter, met his. “FILWEH?”
He closed the few inches between them and kissed her softly, then dropped his head back to the seat cushion. “Fall in love with ex-hitman.”
Touching her tongue to a fingertip, she drew an imaginary line in the air. “Cross that one off the list.”
Cruz stroked his hand down her back. “There’s no way in hell we should ever have met. No way in hell that this should’ve worked. But it just . . . does. Read number forty-three.”
“MEHWLYBR?”
“Marry ex-hitman who loves you beyond reason. Marry me, Mia. I’ll give you beautiful babies, and we can live here in San Francisco. Whatever you want.”
“I want babies with you, but I’m not the stay-at-home-mom type.”
“I think I’d be a damn fine stay-at-home dad. But there’s something I think I should tell you before we start making babies. I have a couple more names to add to our mix.”
“You mean Phoenix, the world-renowned artist?”
Cruz gave her a startled look. “How could you possibly know—”
Mia cupped his face. “Because I was determined and vested. I took every little drop of information—Chicago, construction, your artistic ability—added them together, then gave what I knew to Black Raven. They told me you’d buried it so deep that, without the few crumbs I knew, they would never have put two and two together.”
“My God. Nobody knows who Phoenix is.”
“I know. Not even your New York agent who just mounted your London gallery showing knows who he is. I hate to tell you, but I’d never heard of Phoenix until two days ago. As soon as I knew, I looked you up on the Internet. I was stunned.”
“You hate my work?”
“Phoenix is famous, for God’s sake! That’s so bizarre, it boggles my mind. The most closed, secretive man I’ve ever met has an alter ego that’s wildly exciting, flamboyant, and a romantically shadowy public figure of some repute. You must admit, it’s a bit surreal. I love your work. I don’t know how I could not have heard of you. Everything that you are is on those incredible canvases. Larger-than-life. Brilliant, glorious colors. Humor. Passion.”
Something inside him broke apart at her insightful words. Yes, he’d heard them from critics. But this was the woman he loved. She didn’t just see him, she saw everything he was inside. He’d never had that in his life. It was staggering. “You could tell all that from the images online, could you?”
“Cruz, your work is magnificent, powerful. Quite extraordinary. Which you must know—it’s why your canvases sell for a small fortune.”
“They’re very big canvases with a lot of paint on them.”
She smiled, extending her hand. “Mia Hayward, Amelia Elizabeth Wellington-Wentworth.”
“Oh, boy . . .” He slid his palm against hers. “Cruz Barcelona, Phoenix, Jon Smith, Brian Strong, Pete McCord, Doug Stanford, Dave Bay—” Mia raised a brow at the laundry list of aliases. There were many more, but he cut to the chase, squeezing her hand. “Aiden Cross. Pleased to meet you.”
“It’s going to be pretty hard to come up with a boy’s name, since you’ve apparently used every one in the baby-naming book,” Mia laughed, then sobered, her gaze intent on his face. “I’m going to give more responsibility to Todd; he says he doesn’t want it, but I believe he does, and he’d be a magnificent CEO. That will give me more time for my foundation, and those babies. I’m still going to work sixteen hours a day, six and a half days a week. That’s who I am. Babies will be a bonus. Eventually. I want us to get to know each other first.”
“I might have to become a priest.”
Her eyes widened and she gave a choked laugh. “You want to be celibate? Are you even Catholic?”