Simon didn’t get up. Instead he shifted onto his back and lay, spread eagle, on the bed. The grin on his face should have made her want to hit him. But instead, it was all Maya could do to keep from giggling.
“Babe, we’re not good at sex. We’re freaking fantastic.” He opened his beautiful green eyes and gave her a long look. “And you wanna know why we’re freaking fantastic?”
Her daddy hadn’t raised no fools, so Maya knew perfectly well the question was a trap. And yet, she couldn’t resist asking, “Why?”
“Because we’re in love.”
She almost fell to the floor. Her eyes rounded in shock, she shook her head. He didn’t couldn’t love her. And even if he did, she couldn’t let it matter.
Because he was just like her father.
Charming, clever and way too good at lying and keeping secrets. How could she trust that?
“Admit it,” he said, jackknifing upright with an admirable show of those sexy ab muscles. “We’re great together. And when two people are this great, they owe it to themselves to be together as much as possible.”
The mellow glow from hot sex faded. Maya had spent most of her life living in one big question mark, not sure what new trick her father would get up to, whether he’d be arrested or hurt. She’d spent the past few years of her life hiding from her own past and pretending she didn’t have her father’s blood running through her veins.
But now? Now she knew better. She was big enough to take care of herself, and to let her father take care of himself, too. And she was tired of running and hiding.
From her past.
From her life.
And from herself.
And if she let Simon go, she’d be doing all of that again.
Why? For revenge? To protect herself?
No.
It’d be because she was scared.
And she’d be damned if she’d let go of the man of her dreams because she was too afraid of her own emotions.
“What do you want to do, Maya?” he asked quietly.
“I’m staying here,” she decided. As soon as the words were out, she knew they were right. Relief poured through her so fast she almost sagged with the intensity. “This is the right place for me. I’ve missed it. I don’t know that I’ll stay for good, but for the next little while I’m going to hang out. Figure out what I want to do next.”
“And protect your dad under the guise of reconnecting with your family?”
Maya gave a sheepish little shrug. “Yeah, pretty much. I can use Caleb’s wedding as reason enough for now. They’ve set a date for Valentine’s Day. That’s just over a month away.”
“You know there’s someone in town, probably more than one someone, with some really bad plans, right?” he cautioned. Maya frowned, but before she could ask, he shook his head. “I don’t know what they are. But this has the makings of something huge coming together. And probably soon. Hunter’s pretty tense. He knows a lot more than he’s sharing.”
“Are you telling me not to stay?” she asked quietly.
“Would you listen if I did?”
“No,” she said, her tone apologetic. “I can’t run anymore.”
“I didn’t think so.” He didn’t sound upset, though. But he did suddenly look really nervous. Maya’s stomach tightened in response as she waited. What was he going to do? Where would he be? What about them?
But Simon didn’t say anything. Instead he kept looking at her with an intense, almost scary sort of look on his face.
“What are you going to do now?” she asked, needing to know.
“I have a couple of choices. I can be officially assigned to this case and in Black Oak for the next little while.”
Joy raced fear in Maya’s belly, both flying at speeds that were only adding to her nervous nausea. But she had to ask. “Or?”
“Or I can go back to San Francisco. Get assigned to an office there and make it my new home base.”
The ringing in her ears drowned out all sounds except his voice. Her eyes feasted on his face, trying to read every nuance. “And what will you decide?”
“Actually, it’s what will
you
decide,” he said, stepping forward to take both of her hands in his. “I want to be with you. Wherever you are. Here, San Francisco, Timbuktu. You choose, I’ll follow.”
“I thought your career was your whole life,” she protested. “Even when you were pretending it was investments, the rest was true. I could tell. It’s been everything, shaped everything, that’s made you who you are.”
He nodded. Then he lifted one of her hands to his lips and brushed a soft kiss over her knuckle.
“That’s true. It was my whole life. But that was before.”
“Before?”
“Before you. Before us.” He lifted the other hand, kissing it, then held them both to his chest. “I’ve finally found something worth living for, Maya. Something worth coming home to, worth hoping for and planning a future around.”
She couldn’t breathe. Was he saying what it sounded like? A part of her wanted to jump up and down. Another part of her wanted to run from the room before he could finish.
Refusing to look like a chicken, barely able to hear through the blood roaring in her ears, Maya waited.
“Us,” he said.
Oh, wow.
He’d said the magic word. Everything in her life just took on a shiny glow; the word
us
had sprinkled a glitter of joy over her entire existence.
And oh, God, she was turning into a sap. Maya pressed her lips together, trying to stop the tears that had filled her eyes from spilling over. No way she was going to blubber through something this important.
“Us? Like us for play? Or us for keeps?” She watched his face carefully, looking for signs of desperation or fear. Or even hesitation. But he looked happy. Thrilled, even. Like this was something he really, really wanted.
Like
she
was someone he really, really wanted.
Forever.
“I want to give us a chance at forever,” he said quietly, his mouth brushing over the knuckles of one hand, then the other. “I want to see what it’s like when we’re both on the same page. Both of us being ourselves, you know.”
“Ourselves?”
“I’m in love with you, Maya. But I know you. If we don’t spend some time as ourselves, being totally honest and not pretending, you might start doubting this. Thinking we’re not solid. I think we need to give it time. I want you to be sure of me. Of us.”
He cleared his throat.
“But before you decide anything, you need to know that I’m sorry. I can give you a million excuses as to why I lied, why I used you. But they don’t matter. What matters is that I hurt you. And no excuse in the world justifies that.”
Maya pulled back a little, her eyes rounding in shock. He really did know her. That last, tiny bit of worry that’d been lurking in the back of her head disappeared.
She wrapped her hands tighter around the back of his neck and pulled Simon’s head down for a kiss.
“I’m in love with you, too,” she said softly, smiling up at the most beautiful eyes she’d ever seen. “And I think time is a great idea. That way I have longer to prove to you how I feel.”
“To say nothing of time to have plenty of hot, wild sex,” he said with a grin.
“Oh, yeah,” she breathed with a huge sigh, more content and happy than she’d ever thought possible. “We should get started on that right now.”
* * * * *
ISBN: 9781459219182
Copyright © 2012 by Tawny Weber
All rights reserved. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the non-exclusive, non-transferable right to access and read the text of this e-book on-screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, down-loaded, decompiled, reverse engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of publisher, Harlequin Enterprises Limited, 225 Duncan Mill Road, Don Mills, Ontario, Canada M3B 3K9.
This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places and incidents are either the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, business establishments, events or locales is entirely coincidental. This edition published by arrangement with Harlequin Books S.A.
® and ™ are trademarks of the publisher. Trademarks indicated with ® are registered in the United States Patent and Trademark Office, the Canadian Trade Marks Office and in other countries.