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His minty exhale tickles my nose before I let the silence settle over us.

“I love you,” he says a while later, sleep thick in his voice. “That’s enough for me.” His fingertips dance along my nape before grazing my scalp, sending the best kind of goosebumps erupting all over my skin.

I’ve had to make peace with needing his hands on me to fall asleep. Night after night, I close my eyes touching him and wake up the same way. It’s a necessity sneakily stitched into the fiber of my being.

I went from despising Adonis to really, reallyneeding him.

And every time he says he loves me, I get the people-pleasing urge to recite it back to him.

Except I don’t know if this is love.

I wasn’t lying when I told Indigo I could love him. But I’ve never been in love before. I don’t want those words to be hollow when I finally say them. I want them weighed down with the same surety and devotion they have when he says it to me.

“Does it bother you that I don’t say it back?” I ask him softly.

Adonis’ eyes are barely open, but his firm touch conveys his message. “No.”

He kisses me, sighing against my lips.

“I don’t say it because I want you to say it back. I say it because you need to hear it from somebody who means it.” His forehead is on mine. “Someone who will always mean it.”

“How do you know you’ll always love me?”

“What I feel for you isn’t something that can just go away, Delilah. Even if you walked out on me tomorrow, I’d love you ‘til the day I died.”

He fell asleep after that, but I stayed awake, replaying his words.

Even now, it’s on my mind as I shuffle through the papers on his desk. Adonis is usually meticulous about putting things away, but the past week has been proof that even the most controlled people slip up.

It’s working in my favor though because the file I’m looking for isn’t hard to find.

I’m about to jostle his mouse to wake up his computer when my phone rings.

I don’t remember turning the sound on and damn near jump out of the seat at the combination of the default ringer and rattling vibration.

Adonis.

“Hello?” I sound nonchalant enough to my own ears.

“What are you doing in my office, Delilah?”

“Victor snitched?” No wonder he hadn’t stopped me from walking in here.

“No.” My stomach flutters at how easily his laughter spills onto the line. “I have sensors all over the house. You should know that by now.”

I huff noncommittally.

“What are you looking for?”

My gaze jumps from the folder to the desktop I never got out of sleep mode. “Nothing, where are you?”

“You can’t lie for shit,” he tells me, sounding distracted. “I’m about to get on a plane.”

My face falls at the same time my heart takes a nosedive to the pit of my stomach. “What? Where are you going?”

“Quick trip.”

The cryptic answer draws my brows in tight. He didn’t tell me he was leaving and that sinking feeling steadily expanding in the pit of my stomach tells me I actually care.