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He stepped closer to her, his voice softening as he gazed down at her through the twilight. “I told you I didn’t want you to be anybody other than who you are. But… it occurs to me I’ve been pushing exactly the opposite of that on myself.”

He lifted a tentative hand to her face, gently brushing a lock of hair back from her cheek. The gesture ached with a quiet tenderness.

“Maybe I don’t know where all of this is going to go,” he said, the words tight with feeling. “But I know that I’m in love with you. And even though I’m still not sure entirely why, I think you might actually love me too—just as the big, smelly, reckless lout that I am.”

A storm rose inside Ellie’s chest, a tumult like an untamed sea. It was too big for words—too wild, too immense, like trying to stuff a symphony into a music box.

She raised her hand and pressed it gently to the broad plane of Adam’s chest instead, just over his heart. Her palm lay there softly, where she could feel the deep beat of his pulse through his shirt.

“Not reckless,” she finally said when she could speak again, the words rough with feeling. “Quick-thinking. Selfless.Brave.”

“I haven’t been feeling very brave lately,” Adam admitted.

Still ravaged by the emotions swelling through her, Ellie raised her other hand to his beard-roughened face.

“We have been tying ourselves into knots over what our future ought to look like,” she said, meeting his gaze. “But how could we possibly know? I wanttime. Time for us to better understand what each of us wants. What we fear. What we need. But I do know that I want us to have a future together—desperately, with every bone in my body.” Her eyes narrowed, her voice sparking with a new ferocity. “And that I am never going to walk away from this, or you, no matter how hard it gets. Not without a monster of a fight. Because there is no one else in this world that I want like I want you—just you. Exactly as you are.”

His eyes were damp, his face drawn into lines of aching vulnerability.

“Ellie…” he began.

She raised her hand to his lips, stopping his next words with her fingertips.

“Just you,” she repeated forcefully as her own tears slipped down her cheeks. “Exactly as you are. Will you give me that, Adam Bates?”

He caught her hand, the gesture slow and careful. He took it from his lips, wrapping his warm, calloused fingers around it instead.

“Yeah,” he said, the word raw and uneven as it slipped from his throat. “Yes, Ellie.”

She brushed the moisture from her face and raised her chin. “Good,” she declared firmly.

He pulled her closer, slowly and tenderly. His lips brushed her hair, and then his head came to rest against her own.

She felt the uneven hitch of his breath through the circle of her arms.

“It doesn’t matter if we don’t know yet what it will look like,” she added pointedly. “We will figure it out together—in our own way. Not your father’s way or the way the rest of the world tells us.”

Something subtle shifted in Adam’s posture as she held him. It sparked a tingling awareness in her nerves, the first whispering intimations of a new heat.

“Been thinking about that too, as it happens,” Adam said, the words deceptively casual.

“You have?” Ellie pulled back to look at him, though the warmth and pressure of his hands on her waist still sent little shivering butterflies through her skin.

“About touching you,” Adam clarified, the words rich with a dark warmth.

Ellie swallowed thickly. “Oh?”

“Seems to me there’s two ways I could go about looking at that.” His hand began to move, fingertips tracing delicately up the line of her back. “There’s my father’s way—which says it’s a load of selfish impulse with no thought to the consequences.”

“I’ve told you—” Ellie began.

Adam stopped her with a finger to her lips. He traced it slowly down, catching the sensitive tissue along the rough surface of his skin.

“And there’s the other way,” he continued, softly relentless, gazing down at her with a cobalt heat. “The way that says I’m not taking advantage of you or lining you up for hurt—but giving you the kind of worship you deserve without demanding you change yourself in order to get it.”

The word—worship—shivered over her like another kind of touch, and Ellie’s breath grew a little shorter.

“Because that’s really what it comes down to, isn’t it?” Adam went on, moving his hand to the line of her jaw, then gliding it back to slide into the thick waves of her hair. “It’s that, or I’m just waiting for you to come around on this whole marriage thing—or settling for that goddamned ‘colleagues’ nonsense you tossed at me back in Luxor.”