Page 108 of The Love Hypothesis

“Can I—?” Her teeth grazed the underside of the head, and he grunted abruptly. “In your mouth.”

She only had to smile at him, and his pleasure looked nuclear, pounding through him and washing over his entire body. What Olive had felt earlier, white-hot and just shy of painful. She was still sucking gently when he regained control of his limbs and cupped her cheek.

“The t

hings I want to do to you. You have no idea.”

“I think maybe I do.” She licked her lips. “Some, at least.” His eyes were glazed as he stroked the corner of her mouth, and Olive wondered how she could possibly be done with this, with him, in just a few hours.

“I doubt it.”

She leaned forward, hiding a smile into the crease of his thigh. “You can, you know.” She nibbled on the hard plane of his abdomen and then looked up at him. “Do them.”

She was still smiling when he pulled her up to his chest, and for a few minutes they managed to sleep.

* * *

—

IT REALLY WAS a nice hotel room, she supposed. The large windows, mostly. And the view of Boston after dark, the traffic and the clouds and the feeling that something was happening out there, something she didn’t need to be part of because she was here. With Adam.

“What language is that?” it occurred to her to ask. He couldn’t quite look at her face, not with her head nestled under his chin, so he continued to draw patterns on her hip with his fingertips.

“What?”

“The book you’re reading. With the tiger on the cover. German?”

“Dutch.” She felt his voice vibrate, from his chest and through her flesh.

“Is it a manual on taxidermy?”

He pinched her hip, lightly, and she giggled. “Was it hard to learn? Dutch, I mean.”

He inhaled the scent of her hair, thinking for a moment. “I’m not sure. I always knew it.”

“Was it weird? Growing up with two languages?”

“Not really. I mostly thought in Dutch until we moved back here.”

“How old was that?”

“Mmm. Nine?”

It made her smile, the idea of child Adam. “Did you speak Dutch with your parents?”

“No.” He paused. “There were au pairs, mostly. Lots of them.”

Olive pushed herself up to look at him, resting her chin on her hands and her hands on his chest. She watched him watch her, enjoying the play of the streetlights on his strong face. He was always handsome, but now, in the witching hours, he took her breath away.

“Were your parents busy?”

He sighed. “They were very committed to their jobs. Not very good at making time for anything else.”

She hummed softly, conjuring a mental image: five-year-old Adam showing a stick-figure drawing to tall, distracted parents in dark suits surrounded by secret agents speaking into their headsets. She knew nothing about diplomats. “Were you a happy child?”

“It’s . . . complicated. It was a bit of a textbook upbringing. Only child of financially rich but emotionally poor parents. I could do whatever I wanted but had no one to do it with.” It sounded sad. Olive and her mom had always had very little, but she’d never felt alone. Until the cancer.

“Except Holden?”