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“No,” Ellie pushed back, shaking her head. “I mean—you don’t do that to someone you truly care about. To someone youlove.” Her tone firmed as her resolve hardened. “I don’t know everything that passed between the two of you, but George Bates gave up the right to live in your head the day he signed those papers and cut you out of his life.”

“You don’t know what I did to push him to it,” Adam countered.

“Be yourself? Make your own choices in life? Refuse to become the person he thought you ought to be instead of who you really are? That’s not pushing, Adam! That’s… that’s what you have to do in order tosurvive!” Ellie raised her other hand to frame his face gently with her palms, forcing him to meet her gaze. “Who would you be right now if you had buttoned up the real Adam Bates and done everything your father asked of you? Not the man who’s saved my life three times over! Who took a chance on me for a medallion and a fairy tale, and stuck by me even when I didn’t deserve it!”

Her voice was raw with feeling. The cool track of a tear slipped from the corner of her eye to glide down her cheek.

“I don’t need to see that other Adam Bates—that one your father would’ve made you into—to know that I would never have chosen him over the one that’s standing right in front of me,” she finished roughly.

Adam was very still. “The other me probably would’ve read more books,” he said quietly.

“So?” Ellie protested.

A warm, firm hand slipped around the small of her back, drawing her a half step closer.

“He wouldn’t have just run off from his job,” he continued. “Probably smell a little better.”

Ellie dashed a hand against the damp that stained her cheeks. “Ilikethe way you smell.”

Adam raised a skeptical eyebrow. “That’s because you haven’t really got me at my worst yet. Lemme tell you, after two weeks in the bush with no—”

Ellie pushed up on her toes to kiss him. Her lips were tender, her hand steady as she slipped it up the nape of his neck to tangle in his hair. He met her with something softer than the fiery heat that had threatened to consume them every time they’d touched before.

She brushed her other hand over his cheek, where a drop of betraying moisture broke against his unshaven jaw.

He carefully pulled back to gaze down at her. For the first time, Ellie could see the fear and vulnerability written plain on his rugged features. “I don’t know if I’m good enough for you,” he confessed roughly.

Ellie gently pushed a lock of hair back from his forehead. “Don’t you dare try to decide that for me,” she declared softly.

He let his head fall forward until it came to rest against her own. His eyes closed. His arms were warm around her back as he held her. “Still don’t know quite where that leaves us.”

“Well, Ihadthought the obvious solution was for us to become colleagues,” Ellie began.

Adam lifted his head, frowning down at her. “Colleagues?”

“Extremely close, deeply committed colleagues!” Ellie protested. “After all, the Latin root of the word strongly suggests…” She trailed off, sensing that now was not the time for etymology. “At any rate, I have realized that solution fails to address all of the key aspects of our relationship… such as the fact that I can’t seem to stop wanting to touch you.”

Adam’s lip quirked into a slightly satisfied smirk. “Find me pretty touchable, huh?”

Ellie gave a wry smile of her own, but resisted entirely succumbing to Adam’s considerable charm until she had finished. “So I have been working on alternate options for addressing our situation. And it has not failed to occur to me that the most obvious of them is for me to… amend my stance on the question of marriage,” she finished awkwardly.

Adam’s expression grew serious once more. The lines of his face were shadowed by the gloom of the veranda. “Don’t, Ellie.”

“Don’t?” Ellie echoed uncertainly.

“I meant what I said,” Adam continued. “I don’t want you to change your mind. Fighting for what’s important to you is who you are. If I tried to shake that out of you for my convenience, I’d be no better than my dad.”

Ellie raised her hands to the beard-roughened sides of his face again as she infused her voice with as much certainty as she could muster. “You arenothinglike your father.”

He gave her a sad smile. “How do you know? You’ve never met him.”

Ellie let her thumb caress the strong line of his cheek, her gaze softening. “I don’t have to.”

Adam moved in a little closer—near enough that she could feel the subtle heat of his body a breath from her own. “See, when you say things like that, it makes me want to lay you out on this patio table.”

The words sparked a vivid image of what it would feel like for Adam to do exactly that. Ellie’s cheeks heated. “Oh?”

“Which is why…” He lowered his head so that his breath tickled warmly against the line of her jaw. “…I’m going to have to insist that you get back to bed.”