“Louise—”
“The truth. Please.”
“Are you fucking serious? She’s my best friend’s wife,” he growled.
“And I’m asking if you’ve fucked her. Is that why she’s so territorial? Answer me.”
“Louise…”
“Forget it.” His wife shook her head and pulled her feet from the water, every movement tight and sharp, fast and graceless. She scuttled back from the lagoon’s edge and got to her knees, obviously preparing to leave.
He couldn’t do it. He could not let her go again. Everything in him revolted at the idea. It didn’t even feel as if he had control of his own body anymore.
Adam spun and rushed to his knees. He wrapped his arms around her waist, grabbing her from behind before the dubious wisdom of such a move could make its way through his panicked mind.
Louise grunted and her top half pitched forward, unbalanced. She shoved a hand at the ground to hold herself up while the other clawed at his arm. “What are you doing?”
“Don’t go.”
“Adam,” she growled, and squirmed.
“Please.” He shuffled his hand up her chest and pulled her back up against him, her back to his front. “Princess, I fucking hate the thought of you walking away from me again. Honest to the gods, deep down hate it. So…please.”
The rise and fall of her chest against his palm was furious. “You have abandonment issues now?”
“So it would seem. I’m sorry for that too, if it helps.” He coughed out a humorless laugh. Adam fisted his hand in her top and buried his face in her neck. He pressed his mouth against her hot skin. “I swear, it’s just you. Only you.” He was hers and she was his. Or she was supposed to be. He wanted her to be. “I’m sorry she was mean to you. I guess she feels slighted about the tour or something.”
Louise squirmed in his hold. “Do not defend her to me.”
“All right. All right. I’m sorry.”
She said nothing.
“I only want you.”
She scoffed.
“It’s true.”
Rose had never been his—she didn’t compare. He thought highly of her and always would. She was a beautiful, lovely woman. But she wasn’t Louise. The everyday intimacy of being with his wife blew any guilt-ridden daydreams of Rose out into space. She just wasn’t real to him in the way that Louise was. Rose didn’t draw him in the same way at all. When his wife stopped and stared at him, it seemed time stopped as well. What he wouldn’t give to know what went through her mind. Never before had he been so driven to know a woman down to the last detail. Having Louise with him was a revelation. The sense of belonging had been lost to him for a very long time, but Louise, sitting beside him in the bar, sleeping next to him with an arm thrown over his chest… Listening to her quiet breathing in the dark of night. The warmth of her and the scent of her. All those small intimate things fed something inside him that he hadn’t even known existed. He had barely gotten a taste of it and now he was on the verge of losing her.
“Louise?”
Her breath left her on a sigh and she reached back, threading her fingers through his hair. She tugged only once. But she tugged hard. Whether from frustration or affection, no matter, though it did smart. “You’re driving me out of my head, Adam Elliot.”
“Right back at you, Mrs. Elliot.”
“This is insane. It’s only been four days.”
“Imagine what we’ll be like in four years.”
“You really think we’ll last that long?”
“Yes.” He clung to her in the quiet of the garden, bussing the side of her neck ’til her breathing calmed and she leaned back into him. “To answer your question, I think maybe I had a crush on Rose. Before…”
“You and your before.” Slowly, her hand slid down from his hair, pressed against the arm circling around her middle. So long as they were on him, it was all good.
“There’s before you arrived and after. Before shouldn’t count.”
“It doesn’t,” she said firmly. “I agree. But you realize I’m going to do savagery to you and your man bits if you pull any more shit with me.”
His stomach tightened and his cock hardened inside his jeans. It felt a little wrong but a lot sexy when she threatened him. With castration, no less. She could be so fierce, his wife. Adam rubbed his nose against her neck. Gods, she smelt good. It was the lemony, citrusy thing again. “Loving the honesty, princess.”
In a voice so small it sounded lost, she said, “Honesty is important.”
“Yes it is.”