Page 23

23

MILLER

Y ou’re getting ahead of yourself.

No matter how many times I say it, I still find myself planning for a future that might not exist, not when Kit still believes we can’t be together and continues to carry another guy’s ashes in her purse. It’s crazy, as pointed out earlier in the day by my closest friend.

“Let me get this straight,” Gray said, quietly mocking, “you’ve barely been sleeping with her for a week, she says you can never be together, and you’re already thinking about transitioning the company over so you can move away with her when she goes to med school, which she might not even do.”

I couldn’t even defend myself. He was right. And yet with her face down in bed beside me once again, after all the times she’s told me this can’t happen...maybe there’s more hope than Gray thinks.

“So what are you going to do?” she asks, as if she’s somehow read my thoughts. She folds her arms beneath her and turns to gaze at me.

I grin, letting my palm glide over her perfect, bare ass.

“When you ask me that question completely naked, it’s very difficult for my mind not to go in one particular direction.”

She laughs. “You’ve already come twice since I got here and you’re incredibly old. Surely you’ve got nothing left.”

I press a kiss to the center of her spine. “I’m only five years older than you, Kitten. And don’t bait me or I’ll show you exactly what’s left .”

I know this feeling of obsession will pass eventually, but at present I seem to have two modes—wanting to be inside Kit Fischer and recovering from it. I’m already shifting from one phase to the next as we speak.

I’d like to stay in this bed with her forever either way.

“Seriously, though,” she continues. “What are you going to do? If you’re not in love with running the company anymore, you need a project.”

I flop back to the space beside her. The business has kept me just preoccupied enough that I didn’t spend a lot of time ruminating about whether or not I was fulfilled, or happy. But I’ve been wondering about it a lot since she asked me that question in Turks and Caicos.

“I’m not sure. To be honest, it’s felt as if we were still in lift off and wobbling for a while. It’s only been in the past year that everything’s stabilized. But I guess...maybe I’d like to develop something entirely different.”

“Health related?”

I shake my head. “I like finding these holes in the universe and plugging them.” She raises a brow and I laugh. Jesus, I just came five minutes ago and now I’m thinking about it again. “Not that kind of hole. Well, yes, that kind of hole, repeatedly, but also holes of the non-sexual variety.”

She rolls onto her forearm and runs her free hand over my chest. “So, what holes do you see? And maybe we should use a word other than holes because this entire conversation sounds like a double entendre and that wasn’t my intent. Let’s call them...needs. Vacancies.”

The damage is done. They all sound sexual to me now—I’ve fully shifted back into wanting to be inside Kit mode—but for her sake I’ll attempt to have an adult conversation while she’s naked. It might be possible.

“Ever since Kili, I’ve been thinking about adventure travel. I’m not the only person out there who’s looking to challenge himself, and the problem is you have to do a lot of research to find unusual trips and when you find them, you still have no idea how to prepare. You want to kayak in Antarctica, for instance, but you don’t have a fucking clue where you’d stay and who’d take you out there and what kind of gear that would require. So, picture a globe that’s lit up with hundreds of unusual, difficult challenges, and then you click on one of those challenges and find out exactly what’s required.”

Her hand stills. “That’s incredible. You came up with all that since we left Kili ? And here I was, thinking you were just a pretty face.”

I grin at her. “I think I started coming up with it on the bus from the airport, when I realized this ridiculous little princess in the seat across from me was about to ascend to eighteen thousand feet without a fucking clue what she was doing.”

“How dare you?” she demands, pulling away with mock indignation. “I was completely fine, aside from being exhausted, and doing no training, and thinking I could turn it into a diet.”

I yank her back to me and press my mouth to hers. I love the way she yields when I kiss her, how she goes from smart ass to soft and pliant in the space of a single gasp. “You were perfect.”

“Because I had you,” she says with a soft smile, and I light up inside like a kid on Christmas. I want this to work out with her in a way I can’t even describe. I want to follow her across the world, and I’d give up every fucking thing I have to make it happen.

I’m getting ahead of myself, but in moments like this...I can’t help but think it all might work out anyway.